Celtic Studies Association Newsletter

This book appears in a very distinguished series steered by a “who's who in Celtic studies” editorial board, and the authors are highly respected specialists in their respective fields (Insular Latin and early medieval art). In the light of recent scholarly orthodoxies, however, this work definitely has heretical leanings and will doubtless be anathematized in some learned circles. Herren and Brown propose that the fifth-century Briton (or Irishman?) Pelagius and his writings were much more influential among the early medieval churchmen of Britain and Ireland than is currently thought, and that, pace contemporary pooh-poohing of such supposedly monolithic notions, there really was such a thing as Celtic Christianity, definable to a great extent in terms of its use and modification of, as well as reaction to, the heresy of Pelagianism. As “defining theological features” of Celtic Christianity, the authors offer the following: “The assertion of the natural goodness of human nature, the possibility of a sinless life, the denial of transmitted original sin, categorical denial of predestination, a marked tendency to discount the miraculous, and the reliance on the scriptures as the sole source of religious authority. Salvation could be achieved by all through strict obedience to God's law as revealed by the scriptures. The ability to obey God's law in all respects was fostered by askesis [ascetic practice]” (p. 5). These features, the authors continue, “are, for the most part, central doctrines of Pelagius and his followers” (p. 6). Building on these conclusions, the authors interpret the history, literary tradition, and artistic production of the early insular churches accordingly, viewing for example the struggle between the Hibernenses and Romani factions in the early Irish church as a matter of more-or-less Pelagians versus anti-Pelagians, who, however, may have been more Pelagian than they thought.

Of course, Pelagianism like most early Christian heresies had much to do with Christology, but, given the overwhelming emphasis of the book, it could just as well have been titled Pelagius in Celtic Christianity. Herren and Brown are refreshingly frank about the difficulties in arguing their thesis: it is not easy to judge what concepts or writings are echt-Pelagian (hence the authors’ devising of the term “semi-Pelagian”); there is relatively little in the way of writing left from the fifth to mid-seventh century on which to base the case for rampant Pelagianism in Britain and Ireland, and much of what there is from this period can only be used at best as negative evidence (Patrick, for examples, appears in general to be anti-Pelagian); and some of the purported key textual witnesses for Pelagian influence postdate the triumph of the Romani in the seventh century. Despite these difficulties, the authors determinedly soldier on, painting their sometimes simplistic Pelagian picture, and devote the second half of the work to images of Christ in Celtic Christianity, with separate chapters on “Christ Revealed in Texts” (tracking a shift from a Pelagian Christ as paradigm to an anti- or post-Pelagian Christ as salvific hero), “Non-Representational Images of Christ” (Pelagian), and “Representational Images” (non- or less Pelagian).

Christ in Celtic Christianity is likely to cause a lively row in insular studies, comparable to the controversy over whether Hiberno-Latin is a figment of the scholarly imagination. For the CSANA reader who is not particularly enthralled by theological controversies but is interested in medieval

insular literary traditions, there is much food for thought here, including Herren and Brown's deft broadening of their topic to include the concepts of natural law and “good pagans” as they operate in vernacular literature, the motivations behind various remarkable literary projects launched by the Irish and the British (such as Gildas's grumpy De excidio Britanniae, the monomaniacal pseudo-Augustine's De mirabilibus sacrae scripturae, and the Old-Irish “Alphabet of Piety”), as well as the reasons why hagiography featuring wonder-working saints seemingly takes wing only with the triumph of the Romani. The writing is consistently engaging and renders the arcana of late-antique/early medieval religious thought eminently accessible and even compelling. And who could not look with affection on a work that includes formulations such as: “The common Celtic Church was xenophobic and ostracising”?

Joseph Falaky Nagy

University of California, Los Angeles

St Petroc (6^th century) is undoubtedly Cornwall’s most famous saint; his cult in the Middle Ages spread into Wales and Brittany, and his church in Cornwall, as can be seen in Domesday accounts, was the wealthiest in the region - as well as the most influential. St Petroc is notable among insular Celtic saints for the magnitude of his dossier, a wealth of hagiographical sources including a document most unusual in Celtic hagiography, the account of the theft and restoration of his relics in the twelfth century, De reliquiarum furto. Karen Jankulak examines the documentary evidence of St Petroc’s cult from its beginnings to the mid-twelfth century, both historically and geographically; with thoroughness and acumen, she offers a detailed portrayal of the formation and transmission of his cult over time and place. This is a model of hagiographical investigation, and in the process, Jankulak sheds considerable light on the history of the early Cornish church and the political and ecclesiastical relations between Cornwall and Brittany in the Middle Ages.

In the first chapter, Jankulak looks at the hagiographical traditions of St Petroc, most of which appear to stem from Bodmin priory, the centre of Petroc’s cult in the eleventh century. The texts include two vitae, genealogies, and a Miracula, as well as the aforementioned text of a furta sacra, a rarity in Celtic tradition. While I would have liked more examination of the composition of the two extant vitae, this is admittedly a personal bias (Jankulak considers them “unexceptional in their use of motifs common to Celtic hagiography,” p. 6). Jankulak focuses instead on the topographical and onomastic concerns of the texts, which she explores in greater detail in later chapters. The chapter continues with an overview of St Petroc’s appearance in Welsh and Irish traditions and of the Miracula, and concludes with a look at the De reliquiarum furto which she takes up further in chapters five and six.

Chapter two examines St Petroc’s cult in Cornwall, with a focus on toponymy, the foundation of Padstow (the primary cult site) and the church at Bodmin and their possession of St Petroc’s relics. Jankulak draws a picture of a widespread and wealthy ecclesiastical network, centred first at Padstow, then at Bodmin where St Petroc’s relics lay. Chapter three then moves to Brittany and the spread of St Petroc’s cult in that region. Again, the focus is on toponymy, and Jankulak demonstrates the dissemination of the cult in the toponymic evidence; she explores also the liturgical evidence and the appearance of St Petroc in popular tales, as well as St Petroc’s hagiographical association with Breton saints such as Wethinoc and Gwenolé and, to a much lesser extent, Samson. Such associations, she argues, began in Cornwall and posits that Breton exiles in Cornwall, escaping Viking raids and then assisted by the Wessex king Athelstan, were largely responsible for the transmission of St Petroc’s cult into Brittany in the tenth century. But it is St Petroc’s association with St Wethinoc, and thereby to other Breton saints, that allowed the cult of Petroc, of all the Cornish saints, to travel into Britanny. Jankulak makes a cogent argument for the importance of place, as well as familial connections, in the spread of this cult into the strongholds of local Breton saints.

In chapter four, Jankulak widens her geographical sphere to discuss the cult of St Petroc in England, almost as prelude to her discussion the De reliquiarum furto in chapters five and six. While theft of relics in the Middle Ages was not in itself unusual, the involvement of secular authorities in their restitution makes the theft of St Petroc’s relics from Bodmin to the abbey of Saint-Méen a noteworthy event, quite apart from the fact that it occurs in connection with a Celtic saint. Jankulak carefully excavates the historical background, and the secular and ecclesiastical politics, of Cornwall, Britanny and England under Henry II in the twelfth century to demonstrate the importance of the text to the cult and church of St Petroc. In so doing, she also reveals the importance of relics to both secular and ecclesiastical authorities, how each party made use of saints’ relics to promote their own agendas, and in the case of St Petroc, what those agendas meant in the historical and hagiographical context of the church in Cornwall. These last chapters alone would make this book outstanding; as a whole, it is a landmark study in the growth and transmission of a saint’s cult, and the uses and importance of relics in promoting a cult. The book provides copious notes and documentary evidence, and an excellent bibliography. Jankulak not only makes an exceptional contribution to the study of Cornish saints and the early Cornish church, she raises the bar for students of hagiography in general.

Dorothy Ann Bray,

McGill University

(Samhain 2002)

John Davies’ 1994 monograph History of Wales has been until now the only readily available one-volume comprehensive history of that country in English. Now Tempus and the National Library of Wales offer an alternative—a collaborative history of a type that will be familiar to readers of Moody and Martin’s The Course of Irish History or R.F. Foster’s Oxford History of Ireland.

The Tempus History of Wales has all of the advantages and drawbacks of those Irish counterparts. Its outstanding attraction is its impressive list of contributors, all of them associated with the University of Wales or the National Library. K.L. Maund, an outstanding historian of eleventh-century Wales, is the author of the chapter on “Dark Age” Wales, covering the period from the Roman withdrawal to the eve of the Norman Invasion. Huw Pryce, author of Native Law and the Church in Medieval Wales, contributes the chapter on the period from the Norman incursion to the end of Welsh independence in 1282. The other contributors are Ralph Griffiths on late medieval Wales, Geraint Jenkins on Wales “from Reformation to Methodism, 1536 – c. 1750", Prys Morgan—who has also edited the volume—on the Industrial Revolution, and J. Graham Jones on the twentieth century. The opening chapter, “Wales’ Hidden History c. 25,000 BC – c. AD 383”, is a special case, a collaborative history within a collaborative history, as it were, with contributions by Stephen Aldhouse-Green on the Paleolithic and Mesolithic, Joshua Pollard on the Neolithic, Mike Hamilton on the Bronze Age, Miranda Green on the Iron Age, and Ray Howell on Roman Wales, all under the editorship of Stephen Aldhouse-Green of the University of Wales at Newport.

The title of that first chapter points to one of the book’s frustrations: while a single-volume history of manageable size is a very convenient thing to have on hand, it’s no easy matter to cover the 27,000 years announced by the title in 179 pages of text (subtracting the illustrations and front and back matter). That’s more than 150 years per page, on average! The truth is that we’ve reached the Act of Union (1536) by p. 140—98% of the timeline covered is encompassed within a mere 100 pages of text. Another inevitable problem for a collaborative history, especially such a compact one, is the establishment of harmony among its voices as each writer seeks an organizing principle or set of principles for his or her chapter. Kari Maund places the rise of the House of Merfyn Frych and the careers of its greatest dynasts, Rhodri Mawr and Hywel Dda, at the center of her chapter, and this leads her quite smoothly into a discussion of Wales’s relations with the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings. Huw Pryce focuses on the idea of borders as a structuring device, discussing not only the political relationships among Welsh princes and between Welsh princes and Norman lords in the Marches and elsewhere, but also the ways in which conservative resistance and innovative adaptation operated at the borders of Welsh, Norman, and English culture during the period. These devices give coherence to the treatment of a variety of topics—political history, economy, ecclesiastical organization, etc.—that need to be covered for enormous swaths of time in these chapters, 700 years in the case of Maund’s. With Chapter 4, the pace slows a bit, and Ralph Griffiths achieves a very successful narrative flow in his chapter. Geraint Jenkins’ tone is more that of a very lively and engaging lecturer, but it too is quite effective.

The highlight of the volume, though, is its illustrations. Morgan has made very good use of the materials collected for Peter Lord’s Visual Culture of Wales and of the resources of the National Library to develop a program of more than 150 illustrations that work exceptionally well with the text. This is a real innovation; as Morgan writes in his foreword, “During the last twenty years it has become possible to think the unthinkable because so many books have appeared which set forth the richness of Welsh visual material.”

The Tempus History of Wales is best suited to an audience of interested lay readers, and it is very well suited indeed to that audience, as enthusiastic reviews in The Western Mail and other Welsh media attest. It may be of less use to most CSANA members, however. Too condensed for the purposes of a scholar—even one seeking an overview of a period other than his or her own—it is also, at least in its first three chapters, so compact that it is likely to baffle a student. I should say, though, that the nicely chosen bibliography, organized by period and limited to roughly a dozen items per chapter, is an excellent starting place for undergraduate student research into any aspect of Welsh history.

Catherine McKenna

City University of New York

(Beltaine 2003)

Dáithí Ó hÓgáin's study of pagan Irish religion is a difficult work to classify. The cover image of the Corleck Head from the National Museum of Ireland shows a Janus head facing left and right; presumably this is supposed to suggest the position of Celtic mythology (the head itself) looking toward both its past (the religion of the pre-Celtic peoples of Ireland) and its future (Christianity). Ó hÓgáin brings together the archaeology of Ireland from its earliest inhabitants, the mythology preserved in medieval, Christian-produced manuscripts, and folklore collected throughout the modern era in an attempt to describe the practice and theology of Iron Age Irish religion. In many ways, the book follows the paradigm set by Ann Ross's Pagan Celtic Britain (1968) in its agenda of correlating archaeological with literary remains, and many of the criticisms made over the years of the speculative nature of Ross's work can be applied to Ó hÓgáin's. Ultimately, readers must decide for themselves whether they find the arguments persuasive, since the only way to determine their literal accuracy would be to follow in the footsteps of Senchán Torpéist and fast against the grave of some Iron Age hero in hopes of getting an eye-witness account of reality.

The book has seven chapters--"The Pre-Celtic Cultures," "Basic Tenets in the Iron Age," "The Druids and Their Practices," "The Teachings of the Druids," "The Society of the Gods," "The Rites of Sovereignty," and "The Triumph of Christianity"—end notes, and a bibliography. (Oddly, there is no index, a serious lack in a scholarly work.) The first chapter theorizes about the Celtic people's possible religious inheritance from their predecessors, in particular the types of rituals that may have been carried out at sites such as Newgrange and the many other court cairns and passage graves that dot the Irish landscape. This analysis perforce concentrates on the burial practices of the Mesolithic and Neolithic inhabitants of Ireland and the beliefs about the afterlife that may be derived from them, which may give a skewed view of these cultures' religious beliefs that Ó hÓgáin tends to gloss over. The second chapter outlines the archaeological evidence for Celtic Iron Age religion, focusing on the Irish material but making connections to Continental and especially British Celtic analogs as well. The third and fourth chapters focus on the druids as the priests of the pre-Christian Irish religion. These chapters must draw on Classical writings about the Continental Celts for the early, ethnographic point of view and then skip to the medieval, Christian literary representations of Irish druids; the fact that these are both "outsider" and more or less hostile points of view is just one of the problems of understanding druidry that modern scholars must learn to live with. (Ó hÓgáin's statement that there must have been some "shamanic" element in druidism seems a merely pro forma bow to the enthusiasms of popular culture, since, having made the statement, he ignores the arguably shamanic resonances in the literature when they arise in the course of his discussion.) The fifth and sixth chapters use literary sources--primarily the mythological cycle in the former, the Ulster cycle and the king sagas in the latter--to draw out underlying themes and patterns in the literature that may correlate with the religious practices deduced from the archaeological evidence presented in the earlier chapters. Finally, Ó hÓgáin reviews the process by which the Celtic belief system was usurped and then adapted by Christian beliefs and practices. In particular, he shows how outright antagonism between Patrick and the dominant, pagan druids depicted in the hagiographies evolves so that a later saint, such as Columcille, can unite the functions and attitudes formerly ascribed to druids (acerbity, control of the weather, poetic composition) with a Christian, saintly existence.

Ó hÓgáin makes a good case for an underlying system of sun worship persisting from Mesolithic to Christian times, symbolized by images such as horses and horsemen who draw the sun across the sky and down into the underworld, the prevalence of fire as both an apparent focus of ritual and a name element revealing mythological connections, and the overwhelming imagery of red, white, and black in religious contexts. He also brings together convincingly both archaeological and literary evidence of a notion of supernatural power and wisdom located in water and, by extension, other liquids. His chapter on sovereignty surprisingly plays down the focus on the so-called Sovereignty Goddess that overwhelms many works on Celtic mythology and instead analyses the actual representation of kingship and its functions in the literature. This section makes the transition from the theoretical reconstruction of pagan society derived from "fictional" sources to the "historical" politics of early medieval Ireland. Ó hÓgáin shows the ways in which these myths of kingship may reflect the passing of political power from one family, tribe, or kingdom to another.

There are a few peculiarities to this work that make its intended audience difficult to determine. The lack of an index seems to suggest a nonacademic readership, but the analyses presented would be difficult to follow without a fairly deep previous knowledge of the narratives under consideration. Furthermore, although Ó hÓgáin gives extended plot summaries and analyses of narratives such as Tochmarc Étaine, Togail Bruidne Da Derga, Cath Magh Tuired, and Táin Bó Cuailnge and its various remscéla, none of these narratives is ever named. They are simply referred to as "a story," "the plot," "a common folktale," or "the tradition." For better or worse, this tactic seriously undermines the understanding of this material as textual, at least as it has survived into the present, and would be seriously confusing to a neophyte reader and is seriously annoying to a specialist.

Most of the themes and conclusions presented will be familiar to anyone who has done graduate work in Celtic Studies (although nearly all attributions to the conclusions of others is relegated to end notes); Ó hÓgáin's originality lies in juxtaposing literary analysis with the evidence of comparative anthropology and material culture in a way that illuminates consistencies in the admittedly fragmented and Christianity-filtered narrative corpus. Even this approach has been, as previously mentioned, pioneered by Ann Ross and in many ways carried on by Miranda Green, but Ó hÓgáin's focus on purely Irish archaeology and literature makes this a useful, if occasionally exasperating, contribution to the understanding of pagan Irish religion as a belief system held and practiced by living human beings in a specific historic and geographic context.

Leslie Ellen Jones

Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA

(Beltaine 2003)

This interesting and lively work is intended to provide an introduction to ‘mythic Britain’ for non-specialists and students. The work is written in an accessible style with no footnotes to hinder the flow. The theoretical approach is that of cultural archetypes as known through the work of Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade, and the thesis seems to be that a British way of articulating the human condition (a ‘British mythology) emerged through a Celtic, Roman, Germanic and Christian synthesis of universal themes (such as the hero quest). This is a popular approach, although hardly the ‘latest research’ as promised on the dust jacket. It also means that the authors make little use of more subtly nuanced analyses of this material as presented by other, more modern, authors included in the bibliography, in particular Barry Cunliffe, Miranda Green and Joseph Nagy. In addition, the lack of footnotes makes it difficult to distinguish the authors’ opinions from those of other scholars listed in the bibliography. As a result some statements acquire an air of authority which is not always justified. For example, the intro-duction puts forth that hoary chestnut of the probable use of stone circles in Celtic druidic rites (p. 4). No source is given, and it is not clear if the authors are referring to modern neo-druidic rites, which do take place at stone circles, or ancient druidic rites for which there is no evidence, or at least none that is supplied here. They refer to the ‘Celtic tradition of the Green Man’ (p. 199) with no references to source and certainly none to the considerable body of scholarship debunking this particular myth about Celtic myth.

The authors indicate clearly that this book is a worked up version of an undergraduate survey course on various mythologies which are relevant to ‘mythic Britain’. Such survey courses are very popular, and I am sure that I am not the only reader or reviewer who has taught one. The categories are under-standable as pegs on which to hang undergraduate courses (and the authors are up front that this is the source of the work) but the implicit assumptions do raise some problems. A fundamental problem with the study, and a rather important one, is the way in which this book defines the parameters of British. The authors use the phrases ‘the islands of Britain’ or ‘British Isles’ to encompass the geographical extent of their British mythology. But Ireland is never really accommodated (although references to Irish material dominate whenever the topic involves ‘Celtic’), except by the bald statement that the history (p. 8) of the early Christian church in Britain is largely the story of the Irish church. Surely this simplifies the problem to the point of meaninglessness. Such statements cannot hope to encompass the Patrician mission to Ireland or the Columban mission to Scotland or whether Celtic and Latin Christianity are fundamentally different in the first place? Other chapters, for example the one on deity types, have all the hallmarks of a series of lecture notes which the authors have not quite managed to turn into a balanced study.

While this is a well-written and even thoughtful book, it repeats and reinforces many old stereotypes and outright mistakes. One might hope for a book which would have challenged rather than reinforced this.

For all practical purposes, Britain means the main island and that aspect of the culture which came to be called English. Rather ill-defined concepts such as British-Celts, Romano-Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and the Irish church jostle one another around this notion, and, crucially, the authors buy into the stereotyped view that Irish medieval sources are part of a British heritage. While they admit that the stories of the Ulster Cycle are Irish and those in the Mabinogi are Welsh, in practice they ignore this distinction. The focus here is on culture with a Germanic underlay, and there is very little about the autonomous identities of Scotland, Wales and, most crucially, Ireland. As a result the book has an old-fashioned and rather imperial feel to it in which Celtic is seen à la Matthew Arnold as making an imaginative contribution to an essentially English world. Not surprisingly, the most coherent passages are on the sagas, Old English poetry, Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer. This is not intended as a criticism of the authors’ politics, merely that for them, the essence of mythology is a series of pre-existing archetypes that are given new faces every time culture changes. In archetypal terms, different deities represent difference manifestations of the same human thirst for divine expression (p. 220), and any specific cultural context is subordinae to this. Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell would no doubt agree and, to be fair, so might W. B. Yeats and David Jones, but one wonders what Bede might have said, or St David, or St Columba or St Patrick?

Juliette Wood

Cardiff University

(Samhain 2003)

This volume is the second in the Antiquity Papers series, which reprints classic essays on selected topics that originally appeared in the archaeological journal Antiquity. This particular volume includes twenty-six contributions on the Celts that were published between 1929 and 1998. Although the editors had a wide variety of articles from which to choose, they limited their selections to four main topics: Celticity (five articles), Continental Europe (seven articles), the Southern British Iron Age (ten articles), and the Scottish Iron Age (four articles). Each of these topics forms a separate section of the book and is prefaced by an editorial introduction that places the individual selections within their broader scholarly context. In addition, essays by the editors introduce and conclude the volume as a whole.

The first section of this book will be of particular interest to members of CSANA, since four of the five selections pertain to the current debate over the validity of traditional notions of Celticity. The first of these articles is an inflammatory piece by Vincent & Ruth Megaw (1996) that begins as a clarification of their views on ethnic identity and ends as an attack on the English archaeologists who deigned to question their orthodox views on Celtic prehistory. In not so subtle terms, the Megaws accuse these revisionist scholars of propagating a kind of retrospective genocide on the Celts, one sparked by fears of growing European unity and diminishing English sovereignty. These unsettling accusations do not go un-challenged but provoke heated responses

from John Collis (1997) and Simon James (1998), both of which are reprinted here.

While James addresses the Megaws’ charges of racism among English archaeologists, Collis takes his response as an opportunity to review the very issues that first led to the present reassessment of Celtic identity. The result is an important article that no Celticist should overlook. Although there is much in his discussion that is open to debate, Collis provides the clearest statement yet of the problems that must be addressed before a new, more accurate model of Celtic identity can be articulated. (These problems are reiterated in a numbered list at the end of the article.) Nevertheless, the Megaws get the last word. Their “partial response” (1998) to Collis and James concludes the section on Celticity, although their thesis – “Is nothing sacred?” (48) – leaves something to be desired.

The next section of the book includes seven articles on Continental Europe, four of which are reports on historic excavations or landmark finds. These include J. Biel’s (1981) description of a late Hallstatt burial at Hochdorf, Gerhard Bersu’s (1946) summary of his German monograph on the Wittnauer Horn, and Werner Krämer’s (1960) discussion of the oppidum at Manching. These last two studies are noteworthy for downplaying the defensive aspects of the sites and focusing attention on their overall character. Worthy of special attention is Hartwig Zürn’s (1964) original announcement of the discovery of the now famous Hirschlanden stele, without a picture of which no coffee-table book on the Celts would be complete. According to Zürn, this 1.5m sandstone sculpture once surmounted the Hallstatt barrow next to which it was found and served as “a representation of a dead warrior buried there” (80). The remaining articles in this section are reassessments ongoing problems in Continental archaeology. Vincent Megaw (1966) revisits the contents and context of the famed Vix burial, and Ian Ralston (1988) surveys the inherent difficulties of applying Caesar’s settlement vocabulary (oppidum, castellum, etc.) to archaeological sites. Both articles are difficult to follow without prior knowledge of the topics under consideration. This is not the case, however, with the fine article by Anders Bergquist & Timothy Taylor (1987) on the provenance and date of the Gundestrup Cauldron. After a careful assessment of the problem, the authors conclude that the cauldron has its origins in the Thracio-Celtic milieu of “northern Bulgaria and southern Romania between c. 150 and 118 BC” (108). This well researched article is one of the highlights of the collection and is a must read for anyone interested in this fascinating artifact.

The fourth and largest section of the book focuses on the Southern British Iron Age. Some of the more influential contributions include Leslie Alcock’s (1972) report on the excavations at Cadbury-Camelot, Ian Stead’s (1991) discussion of the Snettisham hoards, John Dent’s (1985) description of three cart burials from Yorkshire, and Rosalind Niblett’s (1992) account of a cremation from St. Albans. Niblett’s work is notable for its plausible reconstruction of the events that culminated in the final deposition of the remains. It is a fascinating look at the funerary practices of one Iron Age community. Most of the other contributions in this section deal with the rich archaeological heritage of Salisbury Plain. Christopher Evans (1989) reviews the “background and impact” of the Little Woodbury excavations conducted by Gerhard Bersu in late 1930s. It was Bersu’s recognition of the post-hole structures as houses that effectively put an end to the archaeological fiction of pit-dwellers and inaugurated a new era in British archaeology. These excavations are also discussed by Geoffrey Wainwright & Mansel Spratling (1973) in light of the neighboring settlement of Gussage All Saints, which was excavated in its entirety in 1972. This site consists of a three-acre enclosure surrounding a number of habit-ations, refuse pits, and the remains of a once-productive bronze foundry. Inform-ation gleaned from this dig has allowed archaeologists to reassess the nature of Little Woodbury-type settlements. In the final selection on Salisbury Plain, David McOmish (1996) discusses the East Chisenbury Midden, which consists of “deliberately curated accumulations of feasting debris” rather than general domestic rubbish (215). Based on this and other evidence, McOmish concludes that the construction of the midden was connected to the conspicuous consumption of food, likely as part of some seasonal rituals. His findings have prompted the reassessment of known middens at other locations.

The final section deals with the Scottish Iron Age and focuses exclusively on brochs, the remnants of some five hundred of which survive. These structures make their appearance in the first millenium B.C. and consist of circular dry-stone towers with hollow walls that enclose the domestic space of Iron Age farmsteads. Readers unfamiliar with this aspect of Scottish archaeology might well begin with the last of the four studies included in this section, an article by Mike Pearson, Niall Sharples and Jacqui Mulville (1996). This article provides a précis of broch scholarship as of its original publication date together with the authors’ stance on particular controversies. It is well organized, exhaustively researched, and generally accessible. The other three contributions, however, are much more specialized. They include two preliminary reports on landmark excavations -- Dun Mor Vaul, Tiree by Euan MacKie (1965) and Bu Broch, Stromness by John Hedges & Bernard Bell (1980) -- as well as Sally Foster’s (1989) application of “the theory and technique of access analysis” to study of the Orkney brochs. Unfortunately, like many theorists in literary studies, Foster employs needlessly complex jargon to explore a simple, even common-sensical, idea: that the demarcation of physical space through the construction of walls and doorways affects how people interact within that space. While her conclusions are not without merit, the application of access analysis to incomplete archaeological data is open to criticism on a number of levels, as Foster herself acknowledges. Even so, hers is the most thought-provoking piece in this section.

Celts from Antiquity is primarily designed for Celticists and archaeologists of different specialties who wish to add greater depth to their knowledge of the topics covered, and it serves that audience well. With few exceptions, the studies in this collection are accessible to anyone who has read one or more of the standard syntheses of Celtic prehistory, though it is unsuited for use in the undergraduate classroom. It is the sincere hope of this reviewer that the efforts of Carr & Stoddart will not go unnoticed, but will set a precedent in the field leading to the publication of similar collections drawn from the pages of other journals.

Dan M. Wiley

Department of English

Hastings College

(Samhain 2003)

Five years after its initial publication, R. R. Davies’ The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093-1343 remains fresh, rewarding reading for scholars of medieval and early modern studies interested in sorting through “the problem that is the British Isles” (3). In seven chapters (all but one part of the Ford Lecture series delivered at Oxford in 1998), Davies focuses on the 250-year period that shaped the relationship between England and the British Isles, and throughout the book he explores why that relationship was not ultimately an integrative one. An equally salient theme exposes the “essential Englishness of English political culture,” and Davies calls our attention to the enduring tradition of an “English-trained”

approach to the polities of the western British Isles (111; 65). Along with Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales 1130-1300 and his multi-part series addressed to the Royal Historical Society on “The Peoples of Britain and Ireland,” this book reaffirms that objective and thorough examination of the question of medieval Britain is Davies’ domain.

The distinction of Englishness rather than its fusion with a larger sense of Britishness preoccupies each of Davies’ chapters. In his analysis (chapter 1), English overlordship and its eventual triumph as undisputed central power of the British Isles depended in large part on exclusivity, on a fierce and separate sense of English superiority. From the 1090s, the period of Norman advancement into outer Britain, English kings—against both the ideological precedent set by tenth-century Wessex and the ecclesiastical politics of an “all-Britain”—opted not to style or title themselves rulers of Britain (8-10). No dream of a unitary and integrated Britain directed England’s earliest relations with its “outer zones” (18). The British Isles formed instead “the zone of Anglicization” into which “self-consciously and aggressively English” settler communities “exported” Englishness (19). The closest possibility for “a single British political nation” was in effect Edward I’s “English take-over of the British Isles” (25, 30).

Superior strength made Englishness as such possible. Charting the far from predetermined course by which England became the sole “orbit of power” in the British Isles, chapter 3 credits as England’s greatest success “the illusion that [the concepts of ‘England’ and ‘the English’] were inevitable, even immemorial realities” (61). Before lines of power and loyalty had “settled into a four-countries mode”—before any local vision of Scotland, Wales, or Ireland as unitary nation-states—England had already become “more than a geographical expression” (74). Its brand of single and direct kingship, its “military gusto,” and its “insatiably acquisitive aristocracy” differentiated England.

The political contraction of Britain into England was mirrored on an ideological front. In “Island Mythologies” (chapter 2), Davies recounts the battle for “Britain” as an English defeat-turned-victory: when efforts to appropriate “Britain” and to include England in a “pan-British ideology” failed (44-48), the solution was to eliminate British terminology altogether, to replace it with terms of state and ecclesiastical power that were indisputably English—Engla-lond, Anglia, ecclesia anglicana. The “triumph” was to define English identity as separate and to fix an irremediable “disjunction” between England and the idea of Britain (52).

Combative rhetoric pitting “heartland” against “backwater” and civility against barbarity is the focus of chapters 4 and 5, and the “Anglicization” of the British Isles (“the triumph of the fashionable, the innovative, the exciting, the technologically more advanced, the wealth-creating, the transformative,” 170) occupies chapter 6. Each lays bare the “profound fissures” of a seismic “fault-line”—the metaphor of core instability with which Davies emphasizes economic, sociopolitical, cultural, and ethnic “incompatibilities” (140, 141-2, 189). A central, reiterated lesson of the book, and the focus of chapter 7, is not one of inevitable but of constructed disjunction, a disjunction created largely by “an English identity and power which had defined itself in such an exclusive fashion” (210).

Kristine Over

North Eastern Illinois University

(Samhain 2005)

In this masterful study of Cork and south Munster during the years 1630-1830, David Dickson weaves an intricate tapestry of a colorful region with a fascinating history. Dickson integrates analysis of significant economic issues with a discussion of crucial historical events to create a captivating and informative study. In one chapter, the reader may discover a detailed and illustrative treatment of potato cultivation as well as of the spade utilized by the potato farmer—all set within the context of a discussion of socio-economic motives leading to civil agitation and even religious strife. In other chapters, the reader may encounter compelling portraits of such characters as Richard Boyle, the Englishman who as a pioneer of the plantation system astutely obtained Munster land in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, beginning his family’s rise to prominence as earls of Orrery and later Burlington—or of such characters as the Roman Catholic Bishop Moylan, who warned his flock against participation in the violence of the late eighteenth century. Throughout the book, the reader cannot avoid the tortuous and torturing thread of inter-sectarian antagonism during this two-hundred-year period.

As Dickson notes, his aim in focusing on the Cork and south Munster region is not to compose “a social history of Ireland in miniature” (xi). Instead, he focuses on the area in such a way that “the aim has been more of a search for the elements that went into the creation of this region as a region, the factors driving change, and the possible explanation for the distinctive outcomes” (xi). From the very beginning of the English foray into Ireland, Dickson points out, “Henry II made the conquest of the small town of Cork one of his immediate objectives” (xi). In subsequent centuries, this area remained Ireland’s southern exposure to other nations, like France and Spain, with mercantile and political interests. This fact, combined with “the perception of outsiders that it contained untapped riches” contributed to “the strategic importance” of this region (xii). Therefore, south Munster in the 1580’s was chosen at “the site for the English state’s first programme of settler colonization” (xii)—a decision which was to have repercussions in subsequent centuries.

In any case, through developments “within a greatly strengthened exchange economy,” Cork became “one of the great ports of the Atlantic world” (xii). As Cork grew, so did the surrounding area, with Cork’s “growing commercial muscle helping to transform landscape, social relations and material culture in the ‘back country’ with all its inherited cultural and ecological variety” (xii). Economic developments, however, offer only “one perspective” for the changes in this area of Ireland “between the early seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries” (xiii). Noting that south Munster, like the rest of Ireland, was torn apart “in the ‘long’ seventeenth century by civil war and the expropriation of the existing landowner elite,” Dickson describes in his book the formation of a “new elite”: “Between the 1580s and the 1690s political and economic power passed for the most part to an entirely new elite, which was installed in the wake of the great reconquest, whose ideology and culture was freshly English and whom we label as ‘New English’ “ (xiii). Shaping this group was its “largely Protestant allegiance” in the midst of a people adhering to Catholicism (xiii). Dickson analyzes “the severe reverses” of this “new elite” during the 1590’s, the 1640’s, and the 1680’s—reverses that “profoundly shaped their sense of mission and their view of the indigenous community over which they had at least nominal control” (xiii). Dickson does not hesitate to call this group “colonial”: “But by any definition the victors in the struggle for control of south Munster were a colonial group insofar as the region (like the province of Ulster) experienced heavy, varied and sustained immigration, principally but not exclusively from England, over a period of seventy years” (xiii). This group possessed “economic power in the region” and “constituted a self-defined community with colonial characteristics” (xiii).

Dickson divides his book into three sections. In the first part, he takes up the period from 1630 to 1770. In the first two chapters, he traces “the totality of seventeenth-century developments” with the year 1641 as a dividing line (xiv). In later chapters, he concentrates on “social and economic change between the mid-seventeenth century and the 1760s,” taking into account “land ownership and the world of the gentry,” “commercial change,” and “the rural estate system and the working out of agricultural change” (xiv). In the second part, Dickson discusses “the surface tranquility of south Munster before the late eighteenth century,” while considering “evidence of profound underlying tensions” (xiv). In the third part, he studies “thematic developments between 1770 and 1830,” including metamorphoses in “agriculture and demography,” “changing power relationships in rural society,” “trade and manufacturing,” “urbanization and infrastructure” (xiv). In the last two chapters, he delineates “the origins of the crisis of the 1790s” and “the bitter post-Union period” which ends “in the dénouement of 1829” (xiv). Dickson in this study of Cork and south Munster has chosen to work within the context of the “long” eighteenth century in order “to address some of the limitations in current historiographical convention, both as to periodization and to theme” (xiv).

In his Afterword, Dickson considers post-1830 issues in the light of earlier history. Most salient among these issues is the Famine of the 1840’s, the “memory” of which for Dickson is imbued with “elements of a deeper past”: “The terrible years of sickness, death and displacement passed into collective memory. But in the process, elements of a deeper past were compressed into the political aspects of that memory” (499).

In this detailed, well-researched study of Cork and south Munster, well provided with chart