The Language of Gender, Power and Agency in Celtic Studies eds. by Amber Handy and Brian Ó Conchubhair (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Language of Gender, Power and Agency in Celtic Studies eds. by Amber Handy and Brian Ó Conchubhair Lisabeth C. Buchelt The Language of Gender, Power and Agency in Celtic Studies, edited by Amber Handy and Brian Ó Conchubhair, pp. 290. Dublin: Arlen House, 2014. $39.95 (paper). Since its establishment as an academic discipline in the late eighteenth century, Celtic Studies has been conceived of as the study of the six designated cultures’ pre-Christian to late medieval pasts. The discipline has always been interdisciplinary, encompassing philology, linguistics, archeology, art history, history, and literature, but for the most part has remained a highly specialized area of the more broadly conceived disciplines of ancient and medieval European culture. Part of this conception has been driven, most likely, in a European intellectual history that perceived the Celtic as only archaic. The Bretons, the Irish, the Welsh, the Scottish, the Manx, and the Cornish were anachronisms to the modernity of the French and the English. Even within medieval European studies, “Celtic” sometimes becomes a convenient classification for motifs that have no readily identifiable (Classical) sources—a sort of box marked “Other”—and Celticists, and what they study, are often seen as radically different from their other medievalist colleagues. It is as if modern medievalists feel that in the twelfth century those Celtic cultures were already existing behind a curtain of mist, in their own Otherworld and separated from the broader cultural developments happening in the Middle Ages. Within Irish Studies, scholars working in the Irish medieval time period—the Celticists—seem to have no place at the table, a point made clear when the [End Page 141] post for the Celtic Studies representative was recently abolished by the American Conference for Irish Studies. In the last decade or so, the Celtic Studies Association of North America, along with the MLA Celtic languages and literatures discussion group, has been working to rend the curtain, as it were, and has been doing so with success. The association’s 2010 conference held at the University of Notre Dame, “Saints, Sinners, and Scribes in the Celtic World,” from which this collection of essays is drawn, purposefully created an intellectual community that brought together scholars working in every possible area of Celtic Studies. The conference presentations, in the words of the editors, represented “literary, historical, and linguistic studies on topics from the seventh through twenty-first centuries.” In the introduction, Joseph Falaky Nagy asks the questions and concerns that link these essays covering over nineteen centuries’ worth of Irish texts: whose voice, and which languages deserve to be heard? What constitutes authorized speech? How does speech or language confer agency, or protect those in danger of exploitation? The essays that explore these questions are grouped into two broad categories: medieval and early modern, and modern and contemporary. In the first section, there are comparative essays, such as Theresa O’Byrne’s work on St Patrick’s Purgatory as it appears in Irish and late medieval Hungarian texts; Hannah Zdansky’s on the character of Dido in the medieval Irish vernacular translation of Virigl’s Aeneid; or Lawrence Eson’s examination of the motif of Merlin’s mixed-race heritage across several Arthurian texts. There are also textual interpretations in various theoretical frameworks, mostly based in cultural studies: Kristen Lee Over’s discussion of the notion of sovereignty in the Arthurian Welsh text Culhwch ac Olwen; or Marina Smyth’s continuing insightful work on the relationship between early medieval scientific thought and the Hiberno-Latin text De mirabilibus sacrae scripturae by a writer known as “the Irish Augustine.” Two of the best essays here examine relationships between texts and material culture. Catherine McKenna traces—through textual sources, archeological records, and maps—the proliferation of holy wells in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland and suggests that many, if not most, of these sites had not been in existence since the “age of Tírechán [one of St. Patrick’s medieval biographers] and beyond into the pre-Christian era.” Rather, the radical altering of the landscape because of the new economics of land tenure led to a communal re-creation of sacred sites and their accompanying dinnseanchas, or stories...