The essays collected in this volume explore the crowded, multifaceted world of the Welsh naturalist, antiquarian and traveller Thomas Pennant (1726– 1798). The tribute is long overdue: despite Pennant's indisputable contribution to eighteenth- century intellectual life and his subsequent influence on writers of the following century, no previous volume has ever been exclusively devoted to him. Born into a Welsh gentry family from Downing in Flintshire, Pennant was educated at Wrexham Grammar School and Oxford, and in the 1750s and 1760s toured Europe, Cornwall, Ireland and Wales in search of mineral and ornithological specimens. At the time of his Scottish tours he was thus already known as a naturalist and author of British Zoology (1761– 66) and Synopsis of Quadrupeds (1771). From his estate at Downing, where he lived the life of an ‘improving’ landlord until his death, Pennant established a national and international correspondence network, which included Joseph Banks, Richard Gough, Gilbert White of Selborne, Simon Pallas, the Dutch naturalist Gronovius, and the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. Part of the reason for his comparative neglect, one suspects, is the very scattered nature of his archive, with letters (so often the key to understanding the composition of the tours) to be found in libraries, archives and private collections the length and breadth of Britain and beyond. But since Pennant was also a passionate antiquarian and a competent historian, with a keen interest in art, agriculture and industrial experimentation, it may also be the case that his rather overwhelming interdisciplinarity has deterred individual scholars from getting to grips with his life and works: though frequently cited as witness or authority in other studies, especially on the natural and social history of Scotland and Wales, his texts have rarely been addressed in their own right. One obvious response to the dilemma of Pennant's ‘plurality’, then, was to bring together scholars from a range of disciplines to focus on particular texts. The contributions to this volume, though far from exhausting the interpretive possibilities of his work, demonstrate just how fruitful that multiple approach can be.