My friend Robin Chapman Stacey, professor emerita at the University of Washington, is giving an online lecture at 17:00 GMT (= 12 noon ET, 9 am PT), sponsored by the Welsh Department at Aberystwyth, on ‘Thinking in pairs: law and language in medieval Wales’.
Today in Labor History November 4, 1839: The Newport Rising began. It was the last large-scale armed rebellion against authority in mainland Britain. It began when approximately 4,000 Chartists, led by John Frost, marched on the town of Newport. When several were arrested, other Chartists, including coal miners, many armed with homemade weapons, marched on the Westgate Hotel (where they were held) to liberate them. Up to 24 were killed when soldiers were ordered to open fire on them. The Chartists were fighting for the adoption of the People’s Charter, which called for universal suffrage, the secret ballot, and the right of regular working people to serve in the House of Commons. Three leaders of the uprising were sentenced to death, but popular protests got their sentences commuted to Transportation for Life, probably to Australia or Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania). America’s first cop, Allan Pinkerton, supposedly participated in this rebellion. He was a known Chartist in those days, a physical force man who loved to battle cops and Tory thugs. Because of his history of street violence and vandalism, he had to flee Britain in the dark of the night, ultimately settling in Illinois, where he eventually set up the private detective agency that would go on to murder numerous union organizers, and set up hundreds more for long prison stints through the use of agents provocateur and perjured testimonies.
The riots were depicted in the following novels: “Sir Cosmo Digby,” by James Augustus St John (1843), “Rape of the Fair Country,” by Alexander Cordell (1959) and “Children of Rebecca,” by Vivien Annis Bailey (1995).
Look at what arrived in today's post: the latest issue of the North American Journal of Celtic Studies. Articles by Jessica Hemming, Patrick Wadden, Lenore Fischer, Marissa Mills, and Charlene Eska, plus book reviews, filling nearly 300 pages. Article topics range from folklore to history to law during the Middle Ages in Ireland and Wales. Another exemplary issue!
What's this? What's this?! A new page on the #Bywgraffiadur website presenting our growing list of names and some info on the #Diversity project?
If you fancy writing a short biographical article about any of the people included in the list, or would like to suggest new additions, please get in touch!
When a strange light is seen at night in the Welsh wilderness, often it's a pwca's candle. These black-furred goblins love to play tricks. Sometimes they turn into animals, other times they use their candles to lead lost travelers off cliffs and into bogs.
🎨 Huw Aaron #FolkloreSunday#OfDarkandMacabre#mythology#folklore#Celtic#Wales#fairy
The possibly by far most unexpected find in my search for new names to add to our list of new articles for the #Bywgraffiadur is probably the Reverend Peter Jones, or by his birth name KahkewAquonaby. He was born in 1831 to a Mississauga Ojibwe woman and a Welsh father. Following his conversion to Methodism, he became a missionary, preaching in Ojibwe and English.
We're collecting names of historical Black, Asian and Minority-Ethnic individuals and groups of all sorts who have a significant link with #Wales for potential future inclusion in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography as part of our Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan project.
I'm currently compiling a list of suitable candidates, one of which are the many Italian Welsh families who have left a massive culinary imprint on Welsh cuisine and coffee culture.
If you have a name you'd like added -- or want to write about yourself, please get in touch!
Meet this red jasper #intaglio from #Wales depicting the Roman god #Mars standing in the nude, wearing only a crested helmet and the folds of a cloak over one arm. He cradles a long spear and holds a sheathed sword with its belt.
🏛️ Mars, Roman intaglio, Amgueddfa #Cymru - National Museum Wales
The pwca is the black-furred Welsh version of the pooka - a forest goblin trickster. Sometimes the pwca uses a magic candle to lead travelers off the path, and other times it turns into a black animal, such a horse, and entices travelers to try to catch them.
🎨 Tony DiTerlizzi #FolkloreThursday#folklore#mythology#fairy#Wales#Celtic
"Romantic Pursuits? Rethinking Courtship in Georgian Wales" by Angela Joy Muir.
Abstract
Existing histories of #courtship in the long eighteenth century typically focus on it as a step on the road to marriage [rarely] consider the immediate risks for unmarried women associated with courtship customs that allow or encourage premarital sex. Historians of sexual violence have identified these risks, but they rarely feature in histories of courtship. Using records from the Court of Great Sessions, this article explores the limited but tangible evidence of conjugal courtship customs in #Georgian#Wales, often referred to as ‘bundling’ or ‘courtship at night’. It then interrogates records of #murder and sexual #assault associated with courtship to examine the blurred lines between rape and seduction, which in Wales were further complicated by courtship practices that created additional vulnerabilities for women.
In some Welsh folklore, the fairies treat corgis as their version of horses - riding them, having them pull carts, putting them to work on the fairy farms. The greatest corgis are the ones who carry the fairy knights into battle.
🎨 Sandara #FolkloreSunday#Superstitiology#mythology#folklore#fairy#Celtic#Wales
Re-sharing for the weekend crowd. The official link to our lovely #OpenAccess collection, 'Minoritised Languages and Travel' in the Modern Languages Open journal.
This is a collection of 5 essays + introduction that explore frictions between traveller and travelee as well as the inherent instability of social, cultural and language hierarchies.
At last, it's publication day for the 'Minoritised Languages and Travel' special collection in the Modern Languages Open journal edited with an intro by yours truly -- and all available Open Access.
Allow me to share each paper in this thread as they get published one by one.
First up,
“Everything Remains the Same”: Julio Camba Travelling Spain
by David Miranda-Barreiro
Abstract
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the Madrid-based Galician journalist Julio Camba (1882–1962) acquired long-lasting fame as a travel writer thanks to his foreign chronicles published in the Spanish press and subsequently compiled in a series of volumes. [...] Drawing on studies on state nationalism (Billig 1995) and Spanish nationalism (Taibo 2014, Delgado 2014) this article examines not only Camba’s own views but the response from contemporary scholarship to his texts.
The third article is
A “Devolved Minority”: Contemporary German and French Guidebook Perspectives of Wales
by Anna-Lou Dijkstra
Abstract
Guidebooks play an important role in increasing the visibility of a nation, as they introduce the country to potential visitors and create images prior to travelling. However, they also tend to reinforce stereotypes and create “romantic fictions” (Mahn 2008). This article examines the representation of Wales in French and German guidebooks and consequently elucidates the cultural and political recognition of Wales in these continental texts. The depiction of Wales as a distinct entity on an administrative, or rather on a cultural and linguistic level will be discussed, as well as the commonalities and differences between French and German views.
The fourth article is
“A language of wet stones and mists”: The Caribbean Poet as a Traveller in Wales and England
by Marija Bergam Pellicani
Abstract
This article examines Derek Walcott’s “travel poems” about Wales and England from the collections The Fortunate Traveller (1981) and Midsummer (1984) through the prism of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of littérature mineure. [...] In their engagement with the Welsh and English “Elsewhere” these poems ultimately participate in transvaluation of the relationship between centre and periphery, a dynamics that marked the most significant Anglophone literary currents in the second part of the twentieth century.
This leaves me with just my own #introduction to the whole special issue.
Abstract
This introduction to the MLO special issue “Minoritised Languages and Travel” provides an overview of the pieces in this collection in context with historical travel accounts in German about nineteenth-century Wales.
Happy reading, y'alls. (For convenience, I will later post the link to the complete bundle.)