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This is not a stuffy anthology of poetry. It offers a new way of viewing the Welsh past, showing how some aspects of it are best accessed through the words of its renowned poets.

A History of Money looks at how money as we know it developed through time. Starting with the barter system, the basic function of exchanging goods evolved into a monetary system based on coins made up of precious metals and, from the 1500s onwards, financial systems were established through which money became intertwined with commerce and trade, to settle by the mid-1800s into a stable system based upon Gold. This book presents its closing argument that, since the collapse of the Gold Standard, the global monetary system has undergone constant crisis and evolution continuing into the present day.

Having worked on projects around the world, strengthening and restoring historically significant structures from Windsor Castle to the parliament buildings in Canada, Peter James brings insight to the structural engineering of ancient Egypt. After fourteen years working on the historic buildings and temples of Egypt, and most recently the world's oldest pyramid, he now presents some of the more common theories surrounding the 'collapsing' pyramid - along with new and innovative projections on the construction of the pyramids and the restoration of some of Cairo's most monumental structures from the brink of ruin. The decoding of historic construction from a builder's perspective is examined and explained - at times against many existing theories - and the book provides a new outlook on long-held assumptions, to embrace modern theories in a bid to preserve the past.

In this novel, Peredur defies both his mother's hostility and his brothers' lack of concern to seek out the truth of his father's death and to take part in a protest against the 1969 Investiture that goes violently wrong. Only at the end when Amy Parry faces death can reconciliation be achieved.

The elemental pull of water is irresistible, whether it's to bathe, swim, shower, splash about, sail or simply paddle. We are drawn to it not just for pleasure but for its healing and wellbeing benefits. Destinations, from holy wells to mysterious lakes and enchanted rivers, also have spiritual meaning and are shrouded in myths and folklore. In The Water Remedy, Clare Gogerty offers a guide to some of the best places in Wales and the UK to enjoy being with water, inspiring us to see beyond its day-to-day domestic use so that we can benefit from its spiritual and restorative powers. Discover the difference that our rivers and seas, lakes and springs, wells and waterways can all make to our wellbeing

Ar drothwy trichanmlwyddiant ei enedigaeth, mae'r gyfrol hon yn cyflwyno'r astudiaeth lawn gyntaf o Thomas Pennant, y naturiaethwr a'r teithiwr o Sir y Fflint, ar gyfer cynulleidfa Gymraeg ei hiaith. Er gwaethaf ei fri rhyngwladol yn ei ddydd, esgeuluswyd Pennant yn ddiweddarach gan ei gydwladwyr mewn cof niwlog fel 'teithiwr'. Cynigir yma ddarlun mwy cymhleth sy'n cydnabod ei le fel un o feddylwyr polymathig yr Oleuedigaeth, â'i ddiddordebau'n rhychwantu byd natur, celf a hynafiaethau. Edrychir ar y Cymry allweddol a ddylanwadodd ar ei waith - o Forrisiaid Môn, sylfaenwyr Cymdeithas y Cymmrodorion, hyd at John Lloyd, rheithor rhadlon Caerwys, a'r artist Moses Griffith o Ben Llyn. Wrth bendroni sut y ciliodd Pennant o olwg ei gyd-Gymry, ystyrir argyfwng adroddiad y Llyfrau Gleision a'r wleidyddiaeth ieithyddol a ddaeth yn ei sgil, cyn ymddangosiad cyfieithiad llawn yn y Gymraeg o'r Teithiau yng Nghymru, ganrif wedi marwolaeth yr awdur.

Beyond the Lesbian Vampire is a groundbreaking dive into the pervasive cinematic archetype of the violent lesbian, examining this historically problematic figure within cultural and cinematic imagination - from witch to vampire to murderer - and identifying her resurgence in seven popular and critically acclaimed films of the late 2010s. Each case study depicts unpunished multidimensional lesbian characters trending toward more justifiable narrative reasons for violence; additionally, they reference past iterations of this archetype's 'innate' desire for violence, particularly so for the lesbian vampire. The combination of excessive citation alongside narrative shift gestures towards a reclamation of the lesbian vampire within queer horror, as the author weaves textual analysis and scholarly debate around lesbianism's queerness and homonormativity to reveal the cultural salience of the violent lesbian, and of the queer fears and pleasures she evokes. Beyond the Lesbian Vampire is a vital contribution to lesbian studies, horror studies, queer studies and feminist studies.

This is an in depth exploration of how the Gothic literature boom of the late-eighteenth century was a response and reaction to the expansion of the British empire, and to the continued periods of war in the second half of the century. The Gothic has often been discussed in relation to the French Revolution as a literature of terror, but The Gothic at War demonstrates how the works of Gothic writers such as Horace Walpole, Charlotte Smith and Ann Radcliffe were also a literature of conflict. This study places a particular focus on masculinity and national identity, analysing how the representations of war and the figure of the soldier in the Gothic of the era allowed women writers in particular to explore anxieties about manliness and nationality.

Written in honour of Professor Huw Pryce, this volume brings together exciting new research on writing and performing the history of Wales, from the Middle Ages to the modern period. Each chapter offers a different perspective on the theme of historical writing and remembrance. The first section (Texts and their Histories) focuses on the creation and function of medieval historical texts; a wide range of texts are investigated here, including chronicles and narrative histories, charters, and the Welsh triads. The second section (History and Identity) concerns the relationship between writing history and identity construction; chapters consider different aspects of this theme, including the role of bishops in writing history and the use of names to construct ethnic identities. The third and final section (Memory and Nation) widens the lens to investigate strategies of remembrance and the performance of history; this includes essays on the Eisteddfod, tattoos of historical individuals and the role of historical pageants in twentieth-century nation building. Taken together, the contributions to the volume offer new insights into Welsh historical writing and perceptions of the past throughout the ages.

Un o brif seiliau hunaniaeth genedlaethol y Cymry yn ystod y cyfnod modern cynnar oedd eu hanes - roedd eu dealltwriaeth o'u gorffennol yn cynnig iddynt amlinelliad o'r hyn a oedd yn eu diffinio. Mae'r gyfrol hon yn archwilio naratifau hanes yn ôl damcaniaeth cof diwylliannol. Wrth ystyried testunau sy'n trafod hanes y Cymry fel cof diwylliannol cenedlaethol (hynny yw, dealltwriaeth o'r gorffennol a oedd yn diffinio'r genedl Gymreig), teflir goleuni o'r newydd ar hunaniaeth Gymreig. Mewn cyfnod o newidiadau crefyddol, gwleidyddol a deallusol arwyddocaol, felly, cafodd y gorffennol Cymreig ei ail-ddyfeisio yn ôl daliadau'r awduron; ac, o graffu ar sut yr aethpwyd ati i ddiffinio'r genedl trwy gofnodi'r gorffennol, amlygir inni arwyddocâd cofio'r gorffennol.

Discover the power of our relationship with Y Môr (the sea) along the Wales Coast Path. Matthew Yeomans takes us on journeys along the official walking trail, which in its entirety covers 870 miles (1400 km) of the Welsh coastline. He uncovers how the sea has shaped our lives through history; how Wales's rich mythology, literature and culture has been influenced by this fluid force, and the growing role that the sea plays in our lives.  Along the way, Seascape challenges us to face the realities of climate change and how we will need to adapt where and how we live. Only by recovering a healthy relationship with the sea can we meet our future challenges and unlock opportunities for better ways of living.

This volume covers aspects of Ludwig Wittgenstein's time in Swansea between 1942 and 1947. It considers his interaction with Rush Rhees, his stimulus for the Swansea School, and his broader influence on students, academics and a plethora of writers from a range of disciplines and interests. The contributors view Wittgenstein's philosophy and legacy from different perspectives, which include explanations and assessments of Wittgenstein's time and work at Swansea; historical and cultural scene setting; analyses of the Swansea School; literary comparisons; ideological evaluations; and a range of intimate reflections and commentaries. The volume editor additionally offers some psychogeographical observations in consideration of Wittgenstein's present-day significance to Swansea.

Intersectional analysis of the issue of migration in Wales. A Welcoming Nation? addresses current debates around migration in, from, and through Wales. It includes a range of migratory perspectives to better understand the diverse lived experiences of migrants, and the policies, measures, and approaches at work across various scales and sectors in Wales that shape their everyday lives. The volume adopts an intersectional approach to explore these experiences, which is central to understanding the multiple and complex ways in which exclusion and marginalization take place. To this end, the volume is not just a book about migration, but a way in which migratory experiences and statuses can intersect with other factors such as age, gender, race, and sexuality. This volume draws on new and emerging work to understand migration in Wales, including contributors from various career stages and different disciplines.

The first comprehensive architectural history of the work of Sir Percy Thomas and the significant British architecture firm that sustained his legacy into the twenty-first century. Sir Percy Thomas was the most important twentieth-century architect in Wales, renowned for interwar civic buildings such as Swansea Guildhall and the Temple of Peace in Cardiff. His architectural practice, Sir Percy Thomas & Son, designed much of the post-1945 welfare state and industry in Wales and beyond. In the late twentieth century, the Percy Thomas Partnership specialized in complex healthcare, industrial, and public buildings, becoming an international practice. This comprehensive, meticulously researched history examines the architecture of Percy Thomas in depth for the first time and explores its wider social and political significance. Arguing that the practice sustained an ethical approach to architecture as a national service for the benefit of society, this book gives new insights into the role of the architect and the changing relationships between the built environment and the state throughout the century. Its unique perspective from Wales promises to reshape our understanding of modern architecture.

What did medieval people call the animals they lived and worked with? Why did they give them the names they did? This book sets out to answer these questions. Drawing evidence from literary, documentary and material sources, it surveys the surviving evidence of pet-naming from the period, as well as examining the labels given to livestock and working animals, and the folk-names given to wild birds and beasts. Alongside building up a corpus of names, the conventions that directed animal naming in the Middle Ages are considered, as well as how proper nouns behaved when given to non-human organisms. Through its inquiry, the book lays bare the period's larger attitudes towards animals, their functions and identities, and at the same time sheds light on how the Middle Ages conceived the natural world as a whole and its relationship with human beings and their culture.

This is a historical and structural study of the Stalker Film. As a subcategory of the more general Slasher Film, the Stalker Film is often characterised by an off-screen presence that dominates the visual field, and by a recuring combination of character and plot functions. The Stalker Film responds to an ongoing cultural conflict narrativised as the fight to protect self and community, and does so within a specific 1978-81 historical period. As a postmodern work, the surface material of the Stalker Film alludes to past and ongoing cultural forms, to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, for example, to the theories of Sigmund Freud, or even to Laura Mulvey on the male gaze. These forms are not used to enlighten but are exploited to maximum visceral effect. Positioned at the rise of the Reagan era, the Stalker Film questions the Horror Film genre and engages a mass audience response.

This book is the first extended study of the importance of Gothic for an appreciation of the Brontës' writing. It resituates Gothic from the mode that gives the pleasing sensation of terror to being the source of the Brontës' deepest preoccupations - it is the mode they use to register anxieties and fears. This monograph, through a consideration of Gothic states and places, explores the Brontës' creative work with the genre. The author argues that to read the Brontës as Gothic poets and novelists is also to read them as post-Romantics, as they respond to the Gothic imaginations of such Romantic poets as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley. Gothic in the Brontës, then, is not merely a collection of tropes or even an aesthetic, but a way in which they read the world.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Factory Girl (1863) was a cheap serial intended for working-class readers. The sprawling plot centres on Laura Leslie and her daughter, Dora, who are the targets of a diverse cast of villains. After Laura's tragic death, Dora and her adoptive mother start a new life working in a cotton mill, but Dora's beauty attracts unwelcome attention, putting them in danger. Dora is the classic factory girl, a nineteenth-century revision of the Gothic heroine. Republished in the US in both newspapers and as a book, and translated into French, the novel has been out of print since the 1860s. This edition reproduces the original Halfpenny Journal text and illustrations, and adds a scholarly introduction placing the novel in numerous cultural contexts, including the rise of sensation fiction; nineteenth-century popular theatre; the transformation of the genre of the Gothic; and the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution.

This is the first monographic study of the Semanario Erudito, one of the most important of the erudite periodicals published in late eighteenth-century Spain. The goal of its editor, Antonio Valladares de Sotomayor (1737-1820), was to recover the history of Spain and make it available to his readers for them to learn, and learn from. The book begins with a discussion of Valladares's life and works, before presenting the history of his periodical - specifically, the process of requesting permission to publish it, who printed it, who sold it, and who read it. Documents from Spain's Archivo Histórico Nacional illuminate the censorship process undertaken by each work he wished to publish. The documents also show that the censors' concerns were often not ideological, and that they worked to facilitate the publication of documents they considered valuable but problematic. The second half of the book examines what Valladares published, and his reasons for doing so.

The work of the map-maker and historian Humphrey Llwyd (1527-68) were a crucial contribution to a new vision of Britain in the early modern period. It lies close to the roots of the emerging ideology of British Empire, and Llwyd's influence is to be found in the works of major English poets such as Edmund Spenser and Michael Drayton. His history of medieval Wales, Cronica Walliae, shaped Welsh historical traditions for centuries to come. Llwyd is also the earliest extant source for the legend of Prince Madoc, whose twelfth-century voyage to America shaped British fantasies of the New World from the reign of Elizabeth to the nineteenth century. This is the first book-length study of Llwyd's works, influence and intellectual milieu, and contributions from scholars in the fields of history, geography and literary studies cover the range of Llwyd's achievement as a cartographer, historian and chorographer of Wales and Britain.

This book draws on data gathered during eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Chubut Province of Patagonia, Argentina. It focuses on the formation of Welsh subjectivity through sight and sound, seeking to unpack the multiple and multisensory ways in which identity is constructed in this context. The chapters analyse a series of encounters, in choir rehearsals, the Eisteddfod and in film nights, to consider the usefulness and limitations of theoretical concepts that have been developed and used to theorise the self. This is a book about power, music, tourism and the self. It argues that the creation of Welshness in Y Wladfa was not only explicitly foregrounded in performances for tourists under an imagined Welsh gaze, but also for a Welsh ear, with subjectivities created and re-created through musical encounters. It is the first anthropological monograph of its kind that provides an insight into the significance of music in the Welsh Patagonian context.

Which Welsh woman led a double life as a pirate and smuggler? Which harpist and wrestler threw a man into a lake? Who led the first society in Wales to campaign for women to vote? Discover 366 surprising and intriguing entries about women from Wales and connected to Wales, from the daring to the dastardly, from the ingenious to inspiring. This essential daily reference offers an eclectic mix of biographies and notable achievements of women who have made a significant contribution to Wales, including women from the worlds of history, entertainment, sports, politics, racial awareness, LGBTQ+, disability awareness, music, television and much more. Full of surprising stories, quirky facts and notorious individuals, this collection from the authors of Wales on This Day: 366 Facts You Probably Didn't Know is an informative and entertaining testament to women who have shaped Wales and the world.

Grief faces all of us in the end. This collection explores how poets have expressed and attempted to come to some kind of understanding of this universal but often under-discussed emotion.   M. Wynn Thomas explores how each poet gives full, unbridled expression of their pain, before moving towards a resolution that places the experience of grief in a consolingly meaningful context.  Covering subjects from the loss of a loved one to the death of a language, from the medieval period to the present day, this powerful collection sheds light on the pain of loss and the search for meaning and even hope in it. To those of us walking through grief and loss, these poems offer a guiding hand.

An annotated edition of Leon Modena's Hebrew Musar book Tsema? Tsaddik ('Pious Plant'), originally published in Venice in 1600. Tsema? Tsaddik follows the format of a medieval Physiologus, where each chapter corresponds to a specific animal and addresses various human behaviors, traits, vices or virtues. Additionally, each chapter features an explanation of its theme, evidenced by quotes from the Old Testament, Greek and Roman philosophers, Rabbinic Sages and fathers of the Church - along with at least one folktale. The translation is accompanied by a thorough and comprehensive introduction to describe the world of Musar pre-modern books, and offers insights into Modena's cultural context.

The four writers of this study - Norah Lange, Silvina Ocampo, Estela Canto and Silvina Bullrich - are rarely considered together. Each, however, made their literary start within the close-knit circles dominated by Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires in the mid-twentieth century. The title of the book plays with the double meaning of the word 'against' - signifying 'opposed' or 'resistant', but also 'touching' or 'supported by'. In each case, the four writers benefited from early support from Borges, before eventually finding their own voices different from his as well as from each other's. These writers struggled as much as their nineteenth-century counterparts to find ways to represent in fiction a particularly feminine subjectivity, and this study recognises their similarities as well as their originality. Most importantly, it seeks to undo misperceptions about these writers that have persisted to the present day, particularly regarding their individual paths through the fraught politics of Argentina's twentieth century.

This study presents a cultural rather than the usual history of the French invasion of Pembrokeshire in 1797, using primary sources both in English and Welsh to debate of how the invasion was remembered and assess its historical and cultural imprint. What is now known as 'the last invasion of Britain' terrorised the people in and around Fishguard - but the French surrendered, more as a result of their own indiscipline and the fury of local people than any French military shortcomings. Almost immediately, stories of women in red livery appeared in propaganda and travel accounts, and subsequently acts of individual heroism would be associated above all with Jemima Nicholas. The telling and retelling of this story peaked at times of fear of invasion and war - be it against Napoleon, the Kaiser or Hitler - and, resilient to public doubt and professional scorn, the 'legend' of the women survived into popular memory.