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Structuring Particularist Publics: Logistics, Language, and Early Modern Wales

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2017

Lloyd Bowen
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Abstract

This article examines how early modern publics were shaped partly by dynamics of linguistic difference and physical distance. Taking Wales as its focus, it argues that barriers to communication have yet to be considered sufficiently in a literature which presents English language metropolitan discourses as normative. Particularist publics that drew upon different cultural heritages and employed different communicative practices to those prevailing in and around London deserve greater attention. This is illustrated principally by the vernacularizing impulses of Protestant reform in sixteenth-century Wales and the responses these elicited from Catholic interests, and also the attempts to construct political publics in Wales during the 1640s and 1650s. Early modern Welsh public culture was characterized by a degree of isolation from the genres and sites of critical opinion (such as newsbooks and coffeehouses); print production was underdeveloped; and there were logistical barriers to the spread of news. Conceptualizing early modern Wales as a “particularist public” can help enrich our understanding of center-locality relationships in other parts of the English (and subsequently British) realm.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , October 2017 , pp. 754 - 772
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2017 

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