This chapter focuses on changes in language policy in Wales between the 1960s and the present. The discussion illustrates how drawing on the concept of state tradition can help to explain why it has been possible for a general policy trajectory that has been increasingly supportive of the Welsh language to emerge during this period. However, the chapter argues that the concept of state tradition seems somewhat constrained in explaining more specific and detailed episodes in the development of language policy in Wales over recent decades. In particular, it is less able to explain why specific policies were adopted at particular junctures. Building on this, the chapter contributes to the volume by demonstrating how the insights of the state traditions and language regimes framework could be deepened if supplemented with a more explicit focus on how institutional factors across multiple levels of government can shape language policy choices, particularly in relation to regional or minority languages such as Welsh.

This chapter provides an overview of the early history of the Celtic languages. The first part offers a tour of Britain and Ireland, pausing at key points, both historical and geographical, from which we may consider the development of the Celtic languages. The second part of the chapter then goes on to examine a number of features of the Celtic languages in greater detail: the stress accent, lenition and mutations, the loss of final syllables, and the verbal system.

Walter Map’s De nugis curialium is a strange work, comprising a series of humorous anecdotes, with some serious satire, particularly of the monastic orders. Despite the attention it has drawn in modern times, it seems not to have been widely known and is preserved only in Bodleian MS Bodl. 851.

This essay addresses three fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century women writers who composed erotic and satiric verse: the Welsh poet Gwerful Mechain, and the Scottish Gaelic poets, Iseabal Campbell, Countess of Argyll, and her daughter, Iseabal Ní Mheic Cailéan. Adopting an archipelagic feminist approach, Charnell-White locates these figures within the broader context of late medieval bardic culture in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, emphasising their high social status and family connections. While the poetry of Gwerful Mechain was highly regarded in her own time and a significant body of her work remains, far fewer poems by Iseabal Campbell and Iseabal Ni Mheic Cailéan survive; like Mechainߣs, however, they were written to be performed before specific audiences. The essay reads the poetry of all three as playfully reappropriating and subverting the formulaic misogynism typical of the male-authored verse in their bardic or coterie groups. In responding to the kind of anti-feminist motifs characteristic of the European tradition of the querelle des femmes, these poets challenge courtly ideals of women as chaste, silent, and obedient and present female sexuality in empowering terms.

In 1600, even as English was slowly becoming established as the dominant language in several parts of the world which were very remote from the island where it had first come into being, back in Britain there were still several regions which were not yet at all English-speaking. This was true even of parts of Herefordshire and Shropshire in England. But the major continuing story in the British Isles from 1600 onwards is the familiar one of the retreat of all the other languages English came into contact with.

While Ruskin was in Italy, writing home to his father, his future mentor, Thomas Carlyle, was corresponding with individuals about their Cromwell letters and asking for information on the English Civil Wars of the seventeenth century. He was also keeping friends and family informed by letter about the agonies of editing and writing, as he wrestled with the difficulty of making Oliver Cromwell ‘legible’ to a modern audience. Meanwhile he seemed to be oblivious to the fact that his infatuation with a wealthy aristocratic woman was driving his wife Jane towards nervous collapse. In a letter of 17 April 1845, Jane Welsh Carlyle, famed for her wit and kindliness as an informal literary hostess and for her brilliance as a letter-writer, shared her agony with her own family in Scotland. She told John Forster that her husband was ‘too much occupied with the Dead just now to bestow a moment on the Living’. The emotional crisis Jane experienced that month proved to be the turning point in a protracted drama within her marriage, which played out between 1844 and 1846. At the heart of that drama lay conflicting ideas relating to life and death, both in reality and symbolically.

This chapter provides an overview of the main distinguishing features of the Celtic branch of Indo-European. It furthermore discussses the internal relationship between the branches of Celtic, specifically the position of Brittonic. The main arguments in favour of Gallo-Brittonic and Insular Celtic are evaluated.

The discussion of occult feminism in Chapter 5 shifts the foundations of Decadent Ecology to a reality beyond the veil. The last chapter of this study returns to the turf from which it began with my ruminations on Holywell Cemetery. Chapter 6 examines works by George Egerton, Arthur Machen, and William Sharp, each of whom introduces a different form of paganism to their earthy decadent ecologies. The authors find in paganism scalar distortions and other forms of eco-excess that problematize distinctions between the spiritual, secular, and scientific. At the same time, while all are, today, recognized as part of the urbane, fin-de-siècle culture of Wilde and Beardsley, each, in fact, turns to the local and the rural as the site of their decadent intimacies. We hear in their often conflicted renderings of the pagan landscape voices for sexual, eco-spiritual, and regionalist politics.

This chapter suggests tools and skills that a language revitalizer might need when incorporating new technology into language revitalization. It emphasizes that skills can be acquired gradually on the basis of current needs. Technology should be integrated appropriately into language teaching, with an iterative process for evaluating which tools are the right ones for the job. Issues around privacy and safety (particularly important when working with children) and ownership (which has historically affected Indigenous and minority communities disproportionately) are addressed. Appropriate use of technology in revitalization contexts is discussed, with examples of apps that may be useful for particular purposes and domains. Much of what can be accomplished with technology is best seen as an extension of learning, and one should always choose the resource to match the need, rather than being driven by the technology. The capsules describe the applications of video documentation in Passamaquoddy to new language revival projects; lessons learned from the development of online resources in Welsh; and the digital inclusion initiative Rising Voices.

A Welshman striving to make it in the English world, Jones’ path toward leadership in the international psychoanalytical movement was long and strenuous. Although not as innovative compared to others included in this volume, he made unique contributions in bringing psychoanalysis to the English-speaking world. On the brink of WWII, he risked his life to go to Vienna, already occupied by the Nazis, where he managed to convince the dying Freud to leave Austria for London. Personally responsible for bringing both Melanie Klein and Anna Freud to England, he was caught in the middle of vicious fights between these two powerful women and their followers, and barely survived a near-fatal heart attack. From age seventy to his death at seventy-nine, Jones labored at completing the 1500-page, three-volume Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, which remains the only officially authorized biography of Freud.

This chapter argues that the general right to conscientious exemption should not be understood as a privilege of persons who object on the basis of religious beliefs. Three arguments are advanced for the right also being available on the basis of non-religious conscientious beliefs. The first argument, principally relying on the precedential force of Welsh, is to interpret the reference to ‘religion’ in the statutory grounds of the general right to include conscientious non-religious beliefs. The second, the Establishment Clause Argument, shows that the USSC has consistently held that exemptions that are reserved only to religious objectors violate the Establishment Clause which prohibits government from favouring religion over irreligion. The third argument, the Equal Protection Argument, shows that exemptions that are reserved only for religious objectors violate the Equal Protection Clause (including its application to the federal government through the Due Process Clause) which prohibits government from drawing arbitrary distinctions between persons. The chapter concludes by showing that under the constitutional doctrine of Church Autonomy, religious institutions enjoy exemptions which non-religious associations can also benefit from under the freedom of expressive association. All grounds of the general right are therefore shown to be available to non-religious objectors.

This chapter carries out a critical survey of early modern attitudes to English accents and dialects in order to show how effectively Shakespeare and his contemporaries activated their connotations in performance and how marked voices lent local resonance and social specificity to their characters and to the fictive world of their plays. Despite their lower prestige, English accents and dialects other than the emerging standard known as the ‘King’s English’, or ‘usual speech’, had wider and more varied dramaturgical functions than merely serving as comic caricature of specific social types. In fact, closer attention to a selection of plays – some of which are discussed at greater length in mini case-studies embedded in the central section of this chapter – produces radically new readings of well-known characters and plays, including Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor or Edgar in King Lear. This chapter also reconsiders how early modern anti-theatricalists were particularly concerned about the actor’s voice and its ability to reproduce high- and low-rank accents and phonetic registers.