{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.016736401673640166, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.0, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Lewis, Barry J. (ed. & trans.): Medieval Welsh poems to saints and shrines

The latest volume in the Medieval and Modern Welsh Series produced by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies makes a significant contribution to the study of late medieval hagiography and provides scholarly editions and translations of twenty-five Welsh poems associated with saints and their shrines. All of the poems were composed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the cywydd metre, the most popular metrical form in Wales in this period, and a useful discussion of the metre and cynghanedd is provided, as well as an analysis of some of the linguistic and stylistic features that occur in the poems, copious notes on the individual poems and a glossary. Lewis has planned the volume with great precision and provided all of the apparatus needed to guide students of Middle Welsh through the poems. Reliable English translations of the poems ensure that this body of late medieval devotional poetry is accessible to an international audience interested in hagiography and saints’ cults and the introduction is full of insightful and perceptive observations on the genre and its wider literary and historical context. Lewis’s rather self-effacing introduction notes that one of the criteria he employed when selecting his poems was the fact that ‘the poems had to be ones which could be edited within a reasonably short time. For this reason I have had to exclude some poems which survive in very many copies’ (p. viii). Whilst this is surprisingly honest, I also personally found it refreshing that the volume has omitted some of the more popular and better-known poems (many of which are available elsewhere even in translation) in favour of some of the cywyddau to lesser-known saints, such as Mechyll, Mordeyrn and Cathen. The selection emphasizes the importance of local saints in Welsh hagiography and the fact that many of these saints may have had only one church dedicated to them, but were nevertheless clearly revered within their specific communities. Rather than choose Dafydd ap Gwilym’s well-known cywydd to Dwynwen, patron saint of lovers, Lewis provides an edition and translation of a poem by Hywel Rheinallt that provides a rare glimpse of pilgrimage practice on Llanddwyn in Anglesey and the rich offerings left at Dwynwen’s shrine. Instead of Tudur Aled’s polished popular poetic narrative on the life of Gwenfrewi (St Winefride), Lewis makes available an edition and translation of her martyrdom and decollation at Holywell by an anonymous poet who may not have been fully trained. Both Hywel Rheinallt’s cywydd and the anonymous poem have only appeared previously in unpublished theses and this is true of several poems in the collection. Prior to this publication one had to turn to disparate sources including editions of the poetry attributed to particular individuals, unpublished theses and analyses that quoted only sections of the poems. Some poems in the collection include fascinating accounts of the miracles and traditions associated with particular native Welsh saints and the poems