[.ca] Medieval Wales (ISBN 0521311535)

Good book for Medieval Scholars:
This is a very good book for those people who wish to learn more about Medieval Wales. Dr. Walker goes through the history of Wales chronologically, and at the same time also does a great job of dividing the chapters. By doing this, the reader can go either straight to a certain time frame, or a certain topic, without having to read all the other stuff. For example, I wrote a term paper about King Edward's conquest of Wales and invasion of Scotland for a Medieval History term paper in college. Instead of having to read through the book until I got to the part I needed, I just went straight to the topics of use to me. I skipped reading what I didn't need, and hence saved a great deal of time. For only being a couple of hundred pages long, there is a great deal of detail about many facets of medieval Wales. I strongly recommend this book to anybody who's interested in the topic.

Exhaustive and a little exhausting:
This book reads a lot like a master's or doctoral thesis. As such, it would be excellent. As a history book for general consumption, it's rather lacking in warmth. In addition to other books on Wales, I recommend it, but you probably don't want to start with this one. This is a very conscientious account of medieval Wales that tends to get bogged down in the meticulous recitation of names and dates. Walker deserves credit for being so thorough, but he spends little time trying to convey a sense of what Wales was like - daily life at different periods, culture, etc. Walker does a good job of tracking certain prominent figures in connection with the prince-ships or the bishoprics, but in the end it feels like being fed a lot of data without enough meat or color. I would like to see this wealth of dry detail used as the basis for a broader book that gave the reader a more vivid impression of Welsh life and the effects of all those historical events on the inhabitants of what we now call Wales.