Guide to Welsh Literature c.1280 - c.1550

This volume of the very successful Guide to Welsh Literature series, examines the period from the end of the thirteenth century to the beginning of the sixteenth century. Apart from the first and last chapters, the book is exclusively concerned with poetry and the practice of the bardic craft. This was the period of the predominance of the cywydd metre, and separate chapters are devoted to seven of its most notable practitioners. The most outstanding of them being Dafydd Gwilym. The importance of understanding the historical background of medieval Welsh literature is again stressed in this volume, and the final chapter emphasizes the links between Welsh prose-writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the broad intellectual movements of the age.