Celtic Studies

Students engage with the cultures and histories of Scotland through a multi-disciplinary perspectives offered by archaeology, Celtic languages, history, and literature all with the common question of how Scottish society has interacted with the outside world. Students consider how Scotland’s migratory, economic, intellectual, and cultural links overseas as well as its own distinctive experience of globalization influenced the development of a range of other societies while simultaneously transforming the country’s own domestic character and culture. This central theme of both influencing and being influenced by links with the outside world enables students to assess the global history of a non-US society in a multi-disciplinary way. In doing so, this course demonstrates how humanities-based disciplines explore the mutually influencing nature of the global, the national, and the local.

The course provides a comprehensive overview of the origins, ideology, society, and history of the inhabitants of Ancient Ireland, and introduces the rich and violent world of early Irish literature. Ireland is studied in the context of its legal and historical material, mythology, poetry and legends, exploring the links between the tales, the landscape and the people. Other sources such as ogham stones and manuscripts are considered as well.

The Celts once occupied large parts of Europe including areas such as modern France, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, and Britain. This course introduces the early history of the Celts and discovers what kind of society they had, including the king, the druids, the position of women, what the Greeks and Romans thought about the Celts, and Celtic mythology.

One of the tools required in order to successfully interpret a medieval Celtic text, is to know as much as possible about the circumstances under which it was produced. This historicist approach is common in the field of Celtic studies. In the first four lectures of this course, students are given a brief overview of medieval Irish literature; medieval Irish history; medieval Welsh literature, and medieval Welsh history. After this, important concepts and themes relating to medieval Welsh and Irish history and literature are examined, compared, and contrasted. This is done by reading background literature, and by closely analyzing texts relating to a particular weekly topic, for example the king, the hero, the role of women, the role of the poet, the saint, and children.