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New Directions in Celtic Studies. Edited by Amy Hale and Philip Payton. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000. x + 235 pp. L14.99 pbk, L42.50 hbk. ISBN 0-85989-587-4 (pbk), 0-85989-622-6 (hbk)
Deconstructing Celtic Studies is something of a hot topic at present. Particularly since the publication of Malcolm Chapman's The Celts: The Construction of a Myth (1992), there has been a flurry of activity among Celticists, anthropologists, archaeologists and other interested parties, which some have regarded as indicative of an identity crisis within Celtic Studies. In part, this has been a reaction against the discipline's traditional bias towards language and literature (especially medieval) on the one hand and Iron Age archaeology on the other. Philology is now regarded by many as rather old-fashioned, while new developments in archaeology and anthropology have cast doubt on the validity of clear-cut ethnic labels. "Celt" has now been recognised as an externally-- imposed term, which until at least the eighteenth century was not used by the various peoples now so-called. In addition, old school Celtic Studies pays little attention to modern aspects of "Celticity," causing many contemporary Celts to feel simultaneously excluded from serious study and robbed of their rightful name. This has prompted some useful recent reviews of the state of the discipline and attempts to broaden its outlook. Good examples include Celticism, edited by Terence Brown (1996), and Patrick Sims-- Williams's article, "Celtomania and Celtoscepticism" (Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 36, 1998).
This book attempts to do something similar, beginning with a clear, useful introduction by Amy Hale and Philip Payton, describing in more detail the issues briefly outlined above. The editors' stated aim is to demonstrate that Celtic Studies is an interdisciplinary "area studies" (p. 11), and to draw together some of the disparate work now being done on subjects which, while not part of the traditional remit of Celtic Studies, they feel properly belong within it. To this end they have collected ten essays within three thematic sections, each prefaced by a short editorial introduction. As is often the case in such...