Welsh Journals

Ond nid oes neb yn disgwyl gwerthu 45,000 copi y mis fel y 'Sorfa Fach'. Ddim eto, beth bynnag. [Reviewed here is Volume XI of Cof Cenedl, edited by Professor Geraint H. Jenkins, with its highly readable collection of essays on a wide range of Welsh historical topics: the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, the work of the sixteenth-century Elis Gruffydd, the literary soldier of Calais, the activities of the eighteenth-century London Welsh, the work of Thomas Levi, the most successful of Welsh periodical editors of the later nineteenth century, the struggle to prevent deaths of mothers from childbirth or abortion in south Wales valleys between the wars, and, lastly, the transformation of the Welsh economy from 1945 to 1995. The index of the previous ten volumes, hereto appended, shows a list of fifty-five authors.] PRYS MORGAN Swansea Religion AND Political CULTURE IN BRITAIN AND IRELAND, FROM THE Glorious Revolution TO THE Decline OF EMPIRE. By David Hempton. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996. Pp. xii, 191. Hardback, £ 30.00 (US$49.95); paperback, £ 10.95 (US$16.95). In this masterly survey, which arises from the Cadbury Lectures he delivered at the University of Birmingham in 1993, Professor Hempton deals with development of diverse religious identities throughout the British Isles from 1688 to about 1945. Hempton describes his chosen period, in accordance with occasional current usage, as 'the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries'. The drawback of this is that the eighteenth century is seen as commencing in 1688 and the nineteenth century as finishing as late as 1945, while the twentieth century has practically disappeared. This reviewer does not consider himself unduly conservative in preferring a straightforward chronological system which respects the traditional boundaries of centuries. Apart from this Salvador Dali-like propensity to dissolve time, I have little quarrel with Hempton's clear, vigorous and comprehensive study, His aim, as he states, is to investigate the elite and popular Anglicanism at the peak of the Church of England's influence in the long eighteenth century; the spectacular rise of evangelical nonconformity, particularly Methodism, in the period of the French and industrial revolutions; the rise of evangelical nonconformity in Wales and its relationship to Welsh identity