“May God place a bridge over the River Tywi”: Interrogating flood perceptions and memories in Welsh medieval poetry

This chapter interrogates the historical flood memories recorded in a particular expression of Welsh medieval culture, that of a praise poem – the dominant genre in medieval Welsh poetry based on a system of formal patronage in which the poet praised his host or patron – by one of the foremost poets of the fifteenth century, Lewys's Glyn Cothi. A new edition and discussion of this poem are presented, and in taking an ecocritical approach and a detailed examination of the context, genre and style of the poem, the chapter investigates the ways in which a single flood event is recorded, described, imagined and remembered. It analyses the potential for integrating such artistic expressions with scientific data in order to inform environmental management and community flood resilience. Overall, the poem records and transmits not only a memory of flooding, but also the geomorphology of the medieval floodplain including observations of climatically and anthropogenically driven changes.