Structuring particularist publics: logistics, language and early modern Wales

Bowen, Lloyd ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3458-4740 2017. Structuring particularist publics: logistics, language and early modern Wales. Journal of British Studies 56 (4) , pp. 754-772. 10.1017/jbr.2017.118

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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. It is argued that greater attention needs to be given to particularist publics which drew upon different cultural heritages and employed different communicative practices to those prevailing in and around London. 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. Early modern Wales is presented here as a ‘particularist public’ and it is suggested that this conceptualization may help enrich our understanding of center-locality relationships in other parts of the English (and subsequently British) realm.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	History, Archaeology and Religion
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain
Additional Information:	Released with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives License (CC BY-NC-ND)
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press / Cambridge University Press (CUP)
ISSN:	0021-9371
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	8 May 2017
Date of Acceptance:	3 May 2017
Last Modified:	29 Nov 2024 11:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/100411

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