Edward Lhuyd became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1708. He was a Welsh naturalist, antiquary and philologist whose work studied Celtic languages and ancient remains. His scholarship joined field observation with the recovery of languages often treated as peripheral.

Lhuyd's work supported later interest in Welsh, Cornish, Irish and other Celtic traditions. For poetry history, he helped create the scholarly conditions in which oral song, bardic remains and minority languages could be taken seriously.