Content area
Full text
RR 2007/297 Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia Edited by John T. Koch ABC-Clio Santa Barbara, CA and Oxford 2006 5 vols. ISBN 978 1 85109 440 7 $485 Also available as an e-book (ISBN 978 1 85109 445 5; $530: printed set and e-book $770)
Keywords Encyclopaedias, Europe, History
Review DOI 10.1108/09504120710775633
Research into the world of Celtic studies for the educated general reader has hitherto been fraught with problems. On the one hand are the daunting scholarly works, full of difficulty for the non-specialist, from which information must be teased; on the other, the often insubstantial and inaccurate works emphasizing popular elements of a loosely-defined "Celtic" tradition where dubious information is presented as scholarship. John Koch, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Wales, reader at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies in Aberystwyth, and editor of an earlier work, The Celtic Heroic Age, has assembled work from leading researchers worldwide to produce the first encyclopedic treatment of the Celts, the largest linguistic and cultural group prior to the rise of Rome, in a comprehensive reference resource on Celtic culture and scholarship. It is both a quickreference for specialists and a basic resource for general readers, but one that bridges the divide between the over-complex and the simplistic.
Criticisms of this splendid work should perhaps be dealt with first. The index (referred to as a "quick-reference and glossary containing 10,000 entries") is neither a proper index nor a glossary and its limitations soon become obvious. Article titles appear in bold; other indexed terms do not refer to...