Inventor of Britain

The Work and Legacies of Humphrey Llwyd

Editor(s) Philip Schwyzer

Language: English

Genre(s): Literary Criticism, History

  • April 2025 · 280 pages ·216x138mm

  • · Paperback - 9781837722228
  • · eBook - pdf - 9781837722235
  • · eBook - epub - 9781837722242

About The Book

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.

Contents

Introduction
Humphrey Llwyd: First Historian of Wales?
Huw Pryce
The Description of Britain and Urban Chorography on the March of Wales
Helen Fulton
‘Set forth in all poynctes’—navigating the maps and mappings of Humphrey Llwyd
Keith Lilley, Rebecca Milligan, and Catherine Porter
Matthew Parker, Sacred Geography, and the British Past
Alexandra Walsham
The ‘hodgepodge trash of Lud’: George Buchanan on Humphrey Llwyd’s Vision of Britain
Roger Mason
Visions of Britain in Llwyd, Spenser, and Drayton
Philip Schwyzer
British Warrior Women in Cymbeline, Bonduca and the Court of James VI & I
Tristan Marshall
Painted People: Race-Making in the Invention of Britain
Lorna Hutson
Appendix: ‘In praise of Humphrey Llwyd: Poems by Gruffudd Hiraethog, Lewis ab Edward, and Wiliam Cynwal’, with translations by Mary Burdett-Jones

About the Editor(s)

Author(s): Philip Schwyzer

Philip Schwyzer is Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Exeter, and the author of studies including Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III (2013) and Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (2004).

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