The first Welsh Renaissance man? Gutun Owain and the scholarly culture of north-east Wales in the later Middle Ages

The literary culture of north-east Wales in the later Middle Ages had a lasting legacy. This was a region where poets and scholars flourished, and where some of Wales’s most important manuscripts were produced. It would go on to make a significant contribution to the Renaissance scholarship that laid the foundation for the form of written Welsh for centuries to come, and helped ensure the language’s survival. What remains to be established, is how and why this distinctive culture developed. To what extent was it a product of the region’s complex history and the interplay of Welsh, English and European influences? And did it in some sense prefigure Renaissance scholarship before the effects of the Italian Renaissance were felt in Wales? Recent research has highlighted the importance of scholarship in late-medieval Wales in relation to genealogy, historical writing and bardic grammars, and recognises the contribution of one man, the poet and polymath Gutun Owain, in all three fields. Born into a gentry family from the Oswestry region, he was certainly a ‘Renaissance man’ in terms of his wide range of interests, and was at the centre of a network of other learned men. His poetry, however, has received relatively little attention, the full corpus having been last edited in a mid-twentieth century French-language edition which, though excellent for its time, is now outdated, incomplete and out of print. This gap in our knowledge and appreciation of Gutun Owain as a poet has begun to be filled by the PL’s recent work on his poetry addressed to abbots of Valle Crucis. Building upon this, the proposed project will edit and translate Gutun’s poems addressed to other, mostly secular patrons, making these important primary sources freely available to a wide audience for the first time. In tandem with this we will publish a new and wide-ranging analysis of Gutun Owain’s scholarship and scholarly connections. Like Gutun himself, the project will develop scholarly and social networks, engaging in discussions with academic and lay stakeholders throughout its duration. There will be a programme of public events, and the project will make its findings, and the poems themselves, available in a variety of formats aimed at different audiences. Its outputs and activities will contribute to the modern-day cultural life of the north-east, helping to foster a broader and deeper appreciation of the Welsh language and heritage, especially in relation to education, lifelong learning and tourism. For academic beneficiaries, the contextualised primary sources will allow Gutun’s works to be readily appreciated alongside those of well-studied English and Scots poets such as John Skelton and William Dunbar. Moreover, the project’s findings will allow Gutun’s contribution and legacy to be evaluated in the wider context of the development of the Renaissance in Britain. They will provide a Welsh perspective on the recent scholarly trends that recognise no hard-and-fast boundary between late-medieval and Renaissance literature, and will lay the foundation for a larger project on the role of the north-east during that crucial time of transition.