Cardiganshire County History Volume 2 is published by the University of Wales Press on behalf of the Ceredigion Historical Society, in association with the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. This volume provides a comprehensive and authoritative account, written by distinguished authors in fifteen chapters, of the wide range of social, economic, political, religious and cultural forces that shaped the ethos and character of the county of Cardiganshire over a period of 600 years. This was a period of great turbulence and change. It witnessed conquest and castle-building, the impact of the Glyndŵr rebellion, the coming of the Protestant Reformation, and the turmoil of civil war. Over time, the inhabitants of the county developed a sense of themselves as a distinctive people who dwelt in a recognisable entity. From very early on, literate people took pride in their native patch; in the eyes of the learned Sulien (d. 1091) and his sons, the land of Ceredig was a sacred patria. Poets and scribes burnished the reputation of the county, and a vibrant poem by Siôn Morys in 1577 maintained that it was the best of shires and ‘the fold of the generous ones’.

This is a general textbook organised around ideas of identity and nationhood rather than the usual high political narrative. It incorporates cutting-edge scholarship and new evidential sources to provide novel perspectives. Early Modern Wales considers neglected topics such as gender and women's experiences and examines history beyond the ruling elite.

This is the first book-length treatment of the ‘turncoat’ John Poyer, the man who initiated the Second Civil War through his rebellion in south Wales in 1648. The volume charts Poyer’s rise from a humble glover in Pembroke to become parliament’s most significant supporter in Wales during the First Civil War (1642–6), and argues that he was a more complex and significant individual than most commentators have realised. Poyer’s involvement in the poisonous factional politics of the post-war period (1646–8) is examined, and newly discovered material demonstrates how his career offers fresh insights into the relationship between national and local politics in the 1640s, the use of print and publicity by provincial interest groups, and the importance of local factionalism in understanding the course of the civil war in south Wales. The volume also offers a substantial analysis of Poyer’s posthumous reputation after his execution by firing squad in April 1649.

Nineteenth-century highland Madagascar was a place inhabited by the dead as much as the living. Ghosts, ancestors and the possessed were important historical actors alongside local kings and queens, soldiers, traders and missionaries. This book considers the challenges that such actors pose for historical accounts of the past and for thinking about questions of presence and representation. How were the dead made present, and how were they recognized or not? In attending to these multifarious encounters of the nineteenth century, how might we reflect on the ways in which our own history-writing makes the dead present? To tackle these questions, Zoë Crossland tells an anthropological history of highland Madagascar from a perspective rooted in archaeology and Peircean semiotics, as well as in landscape study, oral history and textual sources.

This well illustrated new Corpus provides fresh new studies of these aspects, new interpreations of stones, and many previously unpublished newly discovered examples.

This work is primarily meant to be a record of the locations, age, pronunciation and explanation of place-names in the county of Cardiganshire in Wales. Each headword is followed by a location by grid-reference and when possible by a notation of pronunciation in phonetic script, by historical forms, and often by a discussion of etymologies.