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Pastoralism and the British Problem

Dr Stewart Mottram, IMEMS Research Lecturer in English, has just been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to undertake research at the Department of English, Aberystwyth on his latest book-length project, Pastoral: Writing Reformation England and Wales.

This ground-breaking project investigates the influence of Gildas – the sixth-century British historian – on key pastoral texts by Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, and William Browne. While Gildas is an acknowledged influence on early modern English and Welsh Protestant writing, his influence on Renaissance pastoral literature has been almost entirely overlooked. This project reads Gildas into pastoral literature alongside Protestant writing, catapulting Gildas into the Renaissance cultural limelight. Gildas is a key figure linking English with Welsh Protestantism. Acknowledging the full extent of his influence on the English and Welsh Renaissance promises to have wide-ranging, interdisciplinary implications for British studies, challenging recent colonial approaches to early modern England’s relations with the rest of Britain.

Stewart is co-organiser of the forthcoming conference Writing Wales:  1500-1800 (National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, 3-4 July 2008). His first book – Empire and Nation in Early English Renaissance Literature (out October 2008) – moves beyond recent studies of how England’s colonial agenda within Britain helped shape texts by Spenser, Shakespeare, and contemporaries. It uncovers the other side of English ‘imperialism’, exploring the ambitions and anxieties of a culture that set itself apart from the rest of Britain in the period from Skelton to Shakespeare’s King John.

Stewart would like to hear from anyone interested in his latest project and can be contacted on sfm@aber.ac.uk.