'The Celts: A Modern History' by Ian Stewart Review

Around the 1990s, the historical Celts endured something of an identity crisis. First in academic articles, then in popular books, and eventually in newspaper headlines, people started loudly declaring that ‘Celts’ did not really exist. Not all the scholarly ideas were new, but the mood certainly was: the general consensus that you could use the word Celtic to conjure up a relatively coherent historical people was called into question. The discipline of Celtic Studies grew anxious and self-critical: I have heard, from senior colleagues, accounts of students begging them to teach what could be said about the Celts, rather than the things that couldn’t. Modern ‘Celts’, in particular, started to gain scare quotes: these identities, it appeared, were recent inventions grafted onto historical abstractions, a collage of disparate symbols from the pre-Roman past, stuck together with imagination, enthusiasm, and academic linguistics. Ian Stewart’s The Celts: A Modern History broadly agrees wit ... Read full article.