Welsh Journals

of official business meant that the discourse of the common people was its primary domain. A certain amount of material can be gleaned from letters and dialogues in literature, but it is ironic that some of the best evidence for the spoken Welsh of the early modern period is provided, quite accidentally, by the very legal system which gave the language no official recognition. Records of slander and defamation cases contain the exact wording of the offending utterance, in Welsh with English translation, and they provide us with some juicy morsels of the spoken language at its most informal and aggressive, all the more valuable to the historian for being tied to a particular individual, place and time. The word 'stimulating' may be a reviewer's cliche, but nevertheless that is the very word which came to my mind after reading this book, for not only did it make me revise some received opinions about the history of the language, but more importantly it left me with a vivid sense of the vitality and resilience of the Welsh language, and of its central importance in forming the identity of the Welsh people. To use another cliche which has never been more appropriately applied, this is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Wales. DAFYDD JOHNSTON Swansea QUEEN OF THE METHODISTS: THE COUNTESS OF HUNTINGDON AND THE Eighteenth-Century CRISIS OF FAITH AND SOCIETY. By Boyd S. Schlenther. Durham Academic Press, 1997. Pp. xi, 208. £ 22.95. This is the second volume within two years to grapple with the life and works of Selina Hastings, countess of Huntingdon, and the cynic might enquire whether this Lady Bountiful whom Horace Walpole dubbed 'Queen of the Methodists' deserves such extensive posthumous fame. The answer must surely be affirmative. Even by the exacting standards of eighteenth-century evangelicalism, Lady Huntingdon was an extra- ordinarily pious woman who, rather like Margaret Thatcher, attracted fawning adulation and bitter criticism in equal measure. The previous volume, Spiritual Pilgrim: A Reassessment of the Life of the Countess of Huntingdon (1995) by Edwin Welch (reviewed ante, 18, no.l, 1996, pp. 164-5), was a painstaking chronicle of a solid and sometimes spectacular life rather than a critical examination of her significance within the Methodist movement. Welch's narrative lacked a sense of context, a defect which Schlenther at least partly remedies by providing a fuller exegesis of