Welsh Journals

Book Reviews Alan P. F. Sell and Anthony Cross (eds), Protestant Nonconformity in the Twentieth Century (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2003), ISBN 1- 84227-221-7, pp. x + 398 illustrated. £ 24.99 At first sight, it may appear strange that a volume examining Protestant Nonconformity in the twentieth century should appear so early in the twenty first century! However, Alan Sell, one of the book's editors, considers it to be a stock-taking exercise which will be of interest to present-day Nonconformists and others, while providing a marker to scholars fifty or a hundred years hence. The volume should certainly interest present-day Nonconformists, but it will also do much more for careful readers it will challenge them to consider the many lessons of the past hundred years. The book contains twelve essays which were originally presented as papers in the second conference of the Association of Denominational Historical Societies and Cognate Libraries, held in Birmingham in the summer of 2000. Edited by Alan P. F. Sell, a former tutor in the United Theological Colleges, Aberystwyth, and Visiting Professor of Theology, Acadia University College of Divinity, Nova Scotia, and Anthony R. Cross, Fellow of the Centre for Baptist History and Heritage, Regent's Park College, Oxford, the book is an eclectic collection of reflections on English Free Church life and witness during the twentieth century, with the occasional brief excursus into Welsh and Scottish Dissent, one essay by Hugh R. Boudin dealing with 'Some aspects of the History of French-speaking Protestantism in the United Kingdom.' The subjects of other studies vary greatly and include Nonconformist scholarship, architecture, theology, history, worship, ecumenism, and so forth. The only essay dealing specifically with Welsh Dissent is Densil Morgan's 'Twentieth-Century Historians of Welsh Protestant Nonconformity' in which he evaluates the contribution of denominational historians to our understanding of the past. As one reads his scholarly appraisal of the work of Thomas Richards, R. T. Jenkins, Pennar Davies and R. Tudur Jones among a host of other familiar names it is difficult to disagree with his conclusion that the twentieth century was the golden age of Welsh Nonconformist historiography. David Comick's approach to 'Twentieth-Century Historians of English