‘The Peculiarities of Irish Celticism’
Abstract:
Ireland’s relationship to Celticism is complicated. Although it is now often thought to be the most Celtic of nations, it was only in the late eighteenth century that Irish Gaelic scholars began to understand themselves, their language, and their nation as ‘Celtic’. Protestant nationalists followed in the nineteenth century for slightly different reasons. However, because of the idiosyncrasy of Irish history and its tenuous place within the United Kingdom, advanced Irish nationalists tended to prioritise their Gaelic identity rather than adopt a Celtic perspective (which entails the other five Celtic nations, four of which were quite happily incorporated into union with England). What became one of the world-leading centres for the study of Celtic topics, the School of Celtic Studies within the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, was originally intended as an Irish School until Éamon de Valera personally interceded and made its focus more broadly Celtic. This paper places Irish Celticism in the context of European ideas about the Celts more broadly from the Renaissance to the Present, showing how the politics of Celticism did not always fit comfortably with scholarship about the Celts.
About the speaker:
Dr Ian Stewart is an intellectual historian of western Europe from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and am interested in the history of ideas broadly conceived, from the history of political thought to the history of science. He has published on the histories of linguistics, race, nation, and the idea of the Celts, as well as on the French Revolution and its effects on political and historical thinking in France and Scotland
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This page was last updated on 2 May 2025
