Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales

Without written accounts of an authentic Welsh past-particularly in the form of the vernacular British Bible and the ancient account of British history vetustissimus liber-"the Welsh past would remain irrecoverable" (84) and the "nostalgic longing constitutive of nationalism" (84) would persist According to Schwyzer, the lost books "facilitated the English appropriation of British antiquity" (84), as men such as Prise and Davies provided the "raw materials" (84) for the construction of a Britishness "hostile to a separate sense of Welshness" (84). According to Schwyzer, Bale's sense of British history most resembles modern forms of national nostalgia. According to Schwyzer, "the move from Henry V to Lear is the move from a community united by longing for what has been lost to a communion within the moment of loss itself" (169).