Thomas Stephens was one of the most significant and controversial nineteenth-century Welsh scholars. His Literature of the Kymry (1849) was the first work to apply modern critical scholarship to medieval Welsh literature. Throughout his career, he was an outspoken critic of unscrupulous interpretations of the Welsh and Celtic past. His scholarly ability brought him into correspondence with notable writers from not only Wales, but across the world. Indeed, writing the year after his death, B. T. Williams noted that the publication of his correspondence ‘would be welcomed by all Celtic scholars’, as it includes comments by many of the most noted historians, literary critics and Celticists of his day on a wide range of subjects. More than this, however, Stephens’s correspondence shows the complex networks of knowledge exchange which stretched across the nineteenth-century scholarly world and, within those networks, the development of modern Welsh and Celtic studies.

This volume includes "Fabricating Celts: How Iron Age Iberians Became Indo-Europeanized during the Franco Regime," by Aaron Alzola Romero and Eduardo Sanchez-Moreno; "Nations in Tune: The Influence of Irish Music on the Breton Musical Revival in the 1960s and 1970s," by Yann Bevant; "Ethnicity, Geography, and the Passage of Dominion in the Mabinogi and Brut y Brenhinedd," by Christina Chance; "Rejecting Mother's Blessing: The Absence of the Fairy in the Welsh Search for Identity," by Adam Coward; "Gwalarn: An Attempt to Renew Breton Literature," by Gwendal Denez and Erwan Hupel; "At the Crossroads: World War One and the Shifting Roles of Men and Women in Breton Ballad Song Practice," by Natalie Anne Franz; "Apocryphal Sanctity in the Lives of Irish Saints," by Maire Johnson; "An Dialog etre Arzur Roe d'an Bretounet ha Guynglaff and Its Connections with Arthurian Tradition," by Herve Le Bihan; "A Walk on the Wild Side: Women, Men, and Madness," by Edyta Lehmann; "The Early Establishment of Celtic Studies in North American Universities," by Michael Linkletter; "'In t-indellchro bodba fer talman': A Reading of Cu Chulainn's First Recension riastrad," by Elizabeth Moore; "Dream and Vision in Late-Medieval Scotland: The Epic Case of William Wallace," by Kylie Murray; "'Some of you will curse her': Women's Writing during the Irish-Language Revival," by Riona Nic Congail; "Dating Peredur: New Light on Old Problems," by Natalia I. Petrovskaia; "'From the shame you have done': Comparing the Stories of Blodeuedd and Blathnait," by Sarah L. Pfannenschmidt; and "'And there was a fourth son': Narrative Variation in Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys," by Kelly Ann Randell.