About the Seintiau projects

The ‘Cult of Saints in Wales’ project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council from 2013 until 2017 to produce new bilingual editions of medieval Welsh-language poems, prose Lives and genealogies. A second project, ‘Vitae Sanctorum Cambriae’, was also funded by the AHRC to produce new editions of the Latin Lives of Welsh saints. All the texts will be presented with full introductions, notes and English translations: transcriptions of variant versions will be published in full, and there will be high quality digital images of many of the manuscripts.

In 2021, a further AHRC grant is funding the online provision of two additional collections of material that will provide new perspectives on saints’ cults in Wales. ‘Visualizing the Saints of Wales’ will augment the texts with information about place-names, church-dedications, holy wells and other landscape features connected with saints, as well as a database of the imagery of saints found across Wales.

  • Welsh Saints from Welsh Churches
    The imagery of saints was once commonplace in all churches in Wales, and by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries painted and carved images of…
  • The Latin Lives of Winefride
    Now published: the Latin Lives of Winefride, edited by David Callander Winefride is said to have been a nun and martyr who lived in…
  • Seintiau Cymru, Sancti Cambrenses
    A volume of essays containing a wealth of new research on different aspects of literature concerning saints in Wales, hagiography, poetry and genealogy. Seintiau…
  • Visualizing the Saints of Wales
    We are delighted to announce a new year-long project bringing the work of the ‘Cult of Saints in Wales’ and the ‘Vitae Sanctorum Cambriae’…
  • Revealed: the Yale manuscript scribe
    The Yale manuscript, Beinecke Library Osborn fb229 came to prominence in 2018 with its rich range of texts, including a unique version of the…
  • Depicting St David
    A new book, Depicting St David, seeks to foster a better understanding of the images of St David in all their colour and variety….
  • Summer Conferences 2019
    Past and present members of the project team were busy presenting papers at several international conferences this summer. The project organised three full sessions…
  • New Life of St Cybi Discovered
    The Vitae Sanctorum Cambriae project is very excited to announce the discovery of a new medieval Life of St Cybi. David Callander (research associate…
  • Poems in praise of St David
    Two poems to St David now published Iolo Goch, Mawl i Ddewi Sant  This long cywydd by one of the foremost poets of the…
  • Gloucester Abbey and the Lives of the Welsh Saints
    The project arranged an afternoon of talks in the Chapter House at Gloucester Cathedral on 3 November 2018. The importance of Gloucester as the…
  • Our first text is published online!
    This is ‘Canu i Gadfan’ (a song for Cadfan), an extensive poem (178 lines) sung by Llywelyn Fardd about 1150. It is the earliest…
  • Ninth Bangor Colloquium on Medieval Wales
    At the colloquium on 20 October 2018 Martin Crampin will give a paper on ‘The Imaging of Saints in Medieval Wales’, and Ann Parry…