1994
72pp p/b
0-7083-1235-7
William Salesbury is a seminal figure in the religious and literary history of Wales. Born in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, he was a remarkable Renaissance scholar whose broad interests included language, law, theology, history, science, literature and medicine. To him we owe the first printed Welsh-English dictionary and the major part of the Welsh New Testament of 1567.
At Oxford he had embraced humanist learning and Protestantism; he returned to Wales imbued with a desire to see the learning of the Renaissance within the grasp of his fellow countrymen and to provide a Welsh version of the Scriptures to enable them to turn to Protestantism. His remarkable achievements formed the basis for further translation and ultimately for the survival and renewal of the Welsh language and its literature.