IMC 2014: Sessions

How have the Welsh travelled beyond their borders? What have they taken with them in their baggage, and what have they brought back? These sessions seek to explore how the Welsh have made their mark on the world through their expertise, creativity, and enterprise. The historical and the imaginary worlds are considered: how 'Welshness' and Welsh culture has been shaped, re-interpreted outside Wales, how Welsh culture has been enriched by returning travellers, and how 'travel' might include exchanges of letters or other cultural artefacts rather than the movement of people.

One of the speakers, Janet Kay, has unfortunately withdrawn, but a synopsis of her paper 'Wales in the World of the Fifth Century' will be presented. The abstract is as follows:

Research on Wales in the early Middle Ages has often looked at the region not only as a completely separate entity from the rest of Britain, but also as a comparable model against which to compare 'Anglo-Saxon' or 'Irish' religious, cultural, and political reactions to the fifth century. Though recent research has begun to efface this approach, further integration of the evidence will allow us to better understand how the people of Wales lived their lives in the fifth century. The story of Wales in the fifth century should not be 'what it adopted from Ireland', 'what it kept from Rome', or 'how the early church functioned here as compared to later Anglo-Saxon England', or even 'can we see the roots of modern Wales in this time period', but rather 'what happened in western Britain that caused its inhabitants to respond in such ways to the economic and administrative changes of the fifth century?' Particularly, this paper looks at the questions of how people in western Britain interacted with the much larger and international world around them during the fifth century - including contacts outside the British Isles - and how they reorganized their own communities in response to the problems of the fifth century. Looking at adoptions, adaptations, and eschewals of particular practices from both within and outside of Wales as personal and social choices, rather than passive accidents of history, we can better understand what 'Wales' was like in the fifth century, and read from their choices in practice which issues were important to them.