Religious History of Wales
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An essential reference guide, this volume draws together an impressive collection of academics and religious practitioners to map out for the first time the religious multiplicity and diversity of Wales. For the first fifteen hundred years or so of its existence, the Christian Church in Wales was a unified entity. The Welsh Church, initially Celtic, but then Roman Catholic, held a virtual monopoly over religious life and belief in the country. The sixteenth century Reformation ended the notion of a monolithic Christendom; the proliferation of Protestant sects guaranteed that competition and variety would be the norm. By charting the gradual proliferation of religious communities in Wales from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, this volume seeks to dispel many of the myths of a monochrome Christian, Protestant or even Nonconformist Wales. Each chapter also uniquely examines the persistence of faith, often in surprising places, in post-Christian Wales.
Dr. Richard C. Allen is a Reader in Early Modern Cultural History and Deputy Director of the South Wales Centre for Historical and Interdisciplinary Research (SWCHIR). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Dr David Ceri Jones is a historian of religion in the early modern British Atlantic World at Aberystwyth University and an Associate Curate in the Church in Wales.