Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium – serie

Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 38 collects papers ranging widely on topics of the literary and material culture of the Celtic regions of Ireland, Wales, and Breton in the medieval and modern periods. Several articles concern the self-awareness of the literary elite in Ireland and Wales, whose members respected the traditional forms of their literature but used them to further contemporary purposes. For example, they introduce new references to foreign places and cultures, or use older topographical lore to describe and justify contemporary land use and settlement. Other articles review material culture as it is reflected in literary works of their respective periods and discuss how this in turn illuminates the attitudes of the authors and their intended readers. A number of contributions concern the grammatical structure and linguistic formation of the languages of Ireland, Wales, and Brittany, both early and modern.The special lecture for the Harvard Celtic Colloquium this year was given by Dr. Aled Jones, Senior Lecturer in Welsh and Medieval Studies at Bangor University, Wales, comparing modern astrophysics to the plasticity of time in medieval Celtic literature, a thought-provoking consideration of congruences in modern and medieval conceptions of time and space. This volume also contains the 2018 Kelleher lecture given by Dr. William Gilles of the University of Edinburgh on a problematic early Scots-Gaelic text, the Harlaw Brosnachadh.

This volume of the Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium offers a wide range of articles on topics across the field of Celtic Studies. It includes the Colloquium keynote given by Prof. Barbara Hillers which studied the literary use of folklore, Irish and international, in the Irish tale “Aislinge Meic Con Glinne” (“The Vision of Mac Con Glinne”).More recent literary topics expand the scope of this volume from the medieval into the early modern period, and into the early twentieth century. Of special interest to scholars of more recent times will be articles on the Irish language in nineteenth-century American print media, and on the unpublished sequel by Muiris Ó Súilleabháin to his memoir Fiche Blian ag Fás (1933), which was published in English as Twenty Years a-Growing.

This volume of Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium is graced with two J. V. Kelleher lectures: the 2019 lecture by Máire Ní Mhaonaigh on Irish chronicles and the 2021 presentation by Ruairí Ó hUiginn assessing the Irish genealogical corpus in its sociological context. It also includes Georgia Henley’s 2021 keynote on the differing literary receptions in Norman Ireland and Wales of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history of Britain and related prophecies.Other articles in Volume 40 survey a wide array of topics in Celtic Studies, centering on Irish and Welsh material with the smaller language areas appearing as well, and ranging from medieval to modern times. While most are literary or linguistic in their focus, some historical context is also provided.

The sixteen articles in Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 41, present a broad range of topics in Celtic Studies and an equally broad time scale. The October 2022 keynote by Dr. Natasha Sumner examines the common folklore trope in Celtic literature of an individual trapped, tricked, or accidentally trespassing into the Otherworld, seeking escape or rescue. Several contributions to the volume examine Irish and Welsh poetry, medieval and modern in both form and content. Women, as poets as well as subjects, are highlighted. Literary culture in the early modern period in Ireland is covered through published reviews, as well as in an article about an Irish émigré’s notebook. Medieval Irish religious beliefs feature in articles on Irish hagiography, divination, and the use of relics. Drama and performance are represented in two articles which discuss Welsh translations of Shakespeare and Scots-Gaelic theatre. A study of place names in the vicinity of Iona reveals a cultural topography as well as actual landscape. An investigation into the attitudes towards the disabled and impaired in medieval Irish literature, an apparently modern concern, finds surprising resonance with themes of compassion and acceptance.

Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, Volume 42 begins with two distinguished lectures from the 2023 Harvard Celtic Colloquium. Dr. Helen Fulton explored the links between place and emotion in CelticR narrative as evoked by the author and experienced by the audience in her J. V. Kelleher Lecture. Dr. Gregory Darwin gave the keynote address on some facets of maritime folklore. Other presentations at the Colloquium to be published in this volume examine the Irish language and its effect on English in Ireland, Irish topography, medieval libraries, the role of music in the Welsh Mabinogi, and the emerging area of animal studies in relation to Celtic literature.

Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, Volume 43 showcases the wide geographic, temporal, and linguistic range of the presentations at the 2024 Harvard Celtic Colloquium. This volume contains Liam Breatnach’s 2024 J. V. Kelleher lecture on the Senchas Már, an early Irish legal text and Benjamin Bruch’s keynote address on the quantity system shared by the p-Celtic languages Cornish and Welsh. The ten other articles present detailed studies of various aspects of Irish and Welsh language, literature, folklore, and culture, both medieval and contemporary. Several of them examine Irish and Welsh literature in a European context. These range from analysis of portrayal of Ireland in film, to enduring lore concerning the Irish famine, to themes of ecology in the writing of Rachel Carson and R. Williams Parry. Two articles examine religious tenets, one on the medieval context of the Apostles Creed in post Conquest Wales, and the other compares how gender influenced the idea of penance in medieval Ireland and Korea.