Cultural Changes and Exchanges: Brittany and Wales

Wales-Brittany workshops

Over the years a relationship has developed between researchers at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies and the Centre de recherche bretonne et celtique. 2009 saw the opening of a new chapter in the collaboration between them: during 2009–2010 a series of four workshops was held alternately in Aberystwyth and Brest which will laid the foundations for collaboration at an institutional level. These workshops were funded by the British Council’s ‘Alliance’ programme which promotes Franco-British Partnerships. The first workshop ‘Approaching the Middle Ages: Wales and Brittany’ was held at the Centre on 24 January 2009. The second workshop ‘Paysage et patrimoine’ / ‘Heritage and Landscape’ was held at the Manoir de Kernault, Mellac, on 6 June 2009. The third workshop on linguistics was held in Aberystwyth in March 2010, and another in Brittany on the theme ‘War and peace’ later in the year.

A selection of essays based on these workshops has now been published.

Wales and Brittany Project Archive

In 2022 a grant was awarded by the CollEx-Persée fund for a joint project between the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies and the Centre de recherche bretonne et celtique (CRBC) at the University of Brest, to work on the important archive of material relating to Brittany and Breton culture held by the National Library of Wales, and on Welsh archives held in Brittany. 

Over a period of two years several research trips and two workshops were held, one in Brest (February 2024) the other in Aberystwyth (June 2024). Two team members from Wales made research trips to the archives in Brittany (Brest University and Archives départementales in Quimper) in 2023, and groups from Brest University came to work on the Breton archive in the reading room of the National Library in Aberystwyth in February 2023 and again in June 2023. In addition a PhD student from Brest University was hosted for three months at CAWCS to allow her also to work on the archives in NLW in the context of this project. In 2024 three researchers from Wales travelled to Brest to take part in a study-day that was open to the public and online, and seven members of the Celtic Research Centre at Brest University visited Aberystwyth in June to share their research findings in an open day-conference. An exhibition of archival items in NLW was curated to complement the study day. Recordings of selected papers from the study day at NLW in June 2024 are available on the CAWCS YouTube channel.

Catrin Mackie, a student at the University of Oxford, was awarded the project’s bursary to enable an early career reseracher to take part in this research. She has spent time working in the archives at Brest University and Quimper in summer 2023. She was mentored to produce her first conference paper, which is availble on Youtube, as well as a blog post. The project piloted cooperation with the NLW volunteers department on transcription and translation talks that aided the Breton researches in preparing their papers.

The project aims to enrich, digitise, and widen access to some of the documents held in the Breton archives in Wales. In addition researchers will link these key documents to those held in archives in Brittany and in France, and so allow a fuller picture of how Wales and Brittany have interacted over the last two centuries. It is also be an excellent opportunity to strengthen the ties that already connect CAWCS and the CRBC. The work has attracted considerable media attention, with 3 BBC Radio Cymru interviews around the June 2024 study-day, and 2 earlier in the life of the project, and a substantial article on connections between Wales and Brittany published in the BBC website on the day of the conference: O Gymru i Lydaw ac yn ôl: Hanes cysylltiad y ‘cefndryd Celtaidd’. We also offered a lecture to the inaugural Wales-Brittany festival organized by Cymdeithas Cymru Llydaw in May 2024, and articles drawing on research findings are forthcoming in the cultural magazine O’r Pedwar Gwynt.

We share project news and research findings on the project’s blog.