The Celts - by Ian Stewart (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A new history of the Celts that reveals how this once-forgotten people became a pillar of modern national identity in Britain, Ireland, and France

Before the Greeks and Romans, the Celts ruled the ancient world. They sacked Rome, invaded Greece, and conquered much of Europe, from Ireland to Turkey. Celts registered deeply on the classical imagination for a thousand years and were variously described by writers like Caesar and Livy as unruly barbarians, fearless warriors, and gracious hosts. But then, in the early Middle Ages, they vanished. In The Celts, Ian Stewart tells the story of their rediscovery during the Renaissance and their transformation over the next few centuries into one of the most popular European ancestral peoples.

The Celts shows how the idea of this ancient people was recovered by scholars, honed by intellectuals, politicians, and other thinkers of various stripes, and adopted by cultural revivalists and activists as they tried to build European nations and nationalisms during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Long-forgotten, the Celts improbably came to be seen as the ancestors of most western Europeans--and as a pillar of modern national identity in Britain, Ireland, and France.

Based on new research conducted across Europe and in the United States, The Celts reveals when and how we came to call much of Europe "Celtic," why this idea mattered in the past, and why it still matters today, as the tide of nationalism is once again on the rise.

Review Quotes

"[A] vivid new book. . . Ian Stewart takes an imaginative, scholarly look at Celticism and its shifting interpretations."---Linda Colley, Financial Times

"Simultaneously intellectual and (very) readable, The Celts - A Modern History really is. . . . magisterial."---David Marx, David Marx Book Reviews

"A fine piece of scholarship. . . Stewart's exposition is clearer than many recent books on the subject and is thoroughly commended."---Stewart Rayment, interLib

"Stewart builds on recent scholarship to make a compelling case for the significance of modern Celticism, in all its paradoxical glory. . . . A big, ambitious, erudite book."---Rhys Kaminski-Jones, History Today

"[A] sweepingly authoritative study. . . . Readers will embrace so diplomatic an author, and this big, dense book will serve most of those readers not only as the grandest possible report on the current state of Celtic studies but as, one can only hope, a death-knell to the kinds of cheaply sentimental pseudo-histories that usually haunt this subject."---Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Review

"Stewart elucidates a clearer understanding of the Celts through disciplines such as linguistics and archaeology."-- "Library Journal"

"An iconic people receive a scholar's attention. . . . Definitive and encyclopedic."-- "Kirkus Reviews"

About the Author

Ian Stewart is an intellectual and cultural historian of modern Europe and a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.