William Salesbury, a prolific humanist writer in English and Welsh, was the main translator of the Welsh New Testament of 1567. He has a place in the history of rhetoric because of his composition in 1552 of the unpublished "Llyfr Rhetoreg" (Book of Rhetoric). The earliest humanist treatise on rhetoric in the Welsh language, it is an item in the sixteenth-century conflict between the traditional learning of the bards and the new learning of university-trained writers such as Salesbury. Salesbury addresses the bards in the preface, telling them that Welsh poetry is in decline and that the study of rhetoric will revive it. Although Salesbury was correct on the first point, his remedy was inappropriate: he failed to see that the decline of Welsh poetry was mainly caused by the Anglicization of its principal patrons, the native gentry. Thus, although many manuscript copies of the treatise survive, his account of...