"A history of Celtic thought and identity over the last three centuries. This book will be the first synoptic historical study of Celtic ideas in the modern era. The Celts are perennially popular in both academic and popular culture, having been the subject of several recent books--scholarly and otherwise--as well as a major exhibition, The Celts: Art and Identity, at the British Museum and National Museum of Scotland in 2015-16. However, attention remains overwhelmingly focused on the ancient peoples labelled Celts, with little interrogation of how and why they became known as such during the modern period. In addressing these questions this study will be the first to account for the trajectory of ideas of the Celts--or Celticism--and how they became fundamental pillars of national identities in western Europe, especially in Britain, Ireland, and France. A transnational approach covering the period from roughly 1700 to the present day will allow the proposed volume to chart the transformation of perceptions of the Celts from those of a sought-after European ancestor to those of a marginalised people living on the fringes of western Europe. In doing so it will illustrate the wider intellectual, cultural, and political ramifications of this protracted ideological shift in different national contexts. As nationalism resurfaces across Europe, this timely study will reveal the intellectual history of a prominent cultural identity and show the historical contingency of Celtic-based nations, national identities, and nationalisms"--"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 is still matters today, as the tide of nationalism is once again on the rise"--.