15th Oxford-Cambridge Celtic Colloquium

Ronni Phillips writes:

The Oxford-Cambridge Celtic Colloquium took place last Saturday, 22nd May. It was held in the Old Music Room at St John’s College, Cambridge, with a dinner afterwards in the Upper Hall, Peterhouse. The Colloquium is a conference for postgraduate students from the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, held alternately at each institution, and is now in its fifteenth year. This year there were eight speakers, four from Oxford and four from Cambridge, representing a variety of disciplines within the Celtic Studies field.

The programme was as follows:

11am: Tea and Coffee, Old Music Room, St John’s College

Session 1 
Chair: Veronica Phillips

11.30: Kelly Kilpatrick (Oxford), ‘The Medieval Perceptions of the Pre-Christian ‘cemeteries’ of Ireland: a Toponymic Analysis of Senchas na Relec, Aided Nath Í ocus Adnacol and Related Dindshenchus’.

12.00: Dr Denis Casey (Cambridge), ‘Sources for the Annals of Clonmacnoise’.

12.30: Patrick Wadden (Oxford), ‘Cath Ruis na Ríg: Literature and History in the Twelfth Century’.


1.00: Lunch, Old Music Room, St John’s College

Oxford-Cambridge Celtic Colloquium 2010

Session 2
Chair: Robert Crampton

2.30: Angela Grant (Oxford), ‘Rith and Anyan: the Nature of Magical Transformation in Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi’.

3.00: Kelly Randall (Cambridge), ‘(Re-)defining Translation Style: Structure and Variation in Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys’.

3.30: Owain Wyn Jones (Oxford), ‘Cyfoesi Myrddin a Gwenddydd ei Chwaer/The Prophecy of Myrddin and Gwenddydd his Sister’.

4:00 Tea and Coffee, Old Music Room, St John’s College

Session 3
Chair: Jon Wolitz

4.30: Natalia Petrovskaia (Cambridge), ‘The Origins of Delw y Byd’.

5.00: Philip Dunshea (Cambridge), ‘The Sub-Roman Afterlife of the Hadrian’s Wallforts’.

7.00: Dinner, Upper Hall, Peterhouse

Report of H. M. Chadwick Lecture 2010

Ronni Phillips writes:

On Thursday, 11^th March the ASNC Department held the 21^st annual H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture.  The lecture was delivered by Professor Joseph F. Nagy of the University of California Los Angeles.  Its topic was "Merchants of Myth in Ancient and Medieval Celtic Traditions".  Professor Nagy began his lecture with reference to H. M. Chadwick’s work The Heroic Age, which argued that the Celtic literary ‘heroic milieu’ – like other heroic literatures – was peopled only by royal or noble families and their households, but depicted no representatives of merchants, farmers or artisans.  These mercantile figures were thus defined as representing a more cosmopolitan ‘medieval’ era, set in opposition to an ancient ‘heroic’ age.

Professor Nagy argued for a more nuanced understanding of representations of merchants and mercantile behaviour in medieval Celtic literature. Drawing on texts ranging widely from the early Irish glossary Sanas Chormaic to the twelfth-century Middle Irish Acallam na Senórach, he noted various depictions of characters engaging in mercantile behaviour, such as negotiating, bargaining and exchanging.  He argued that these examples reflected networks of trade, cultural and intellectual exchange that existed prior to Viking – and indeed Roman – settlement.  This was not to say that such representations of mercantilism depicted it in an entirely positive light.  Rather, Professor Nagy explained that the ambivalence with which negotiating and bargaining for goods and wealth was portrayed in some texts, and the fact that liminal figures such as the Fenians in Acallam na Senórach were often portrayed as displaying mercentile behaviour may have reflected unease about such behaviour.  In projecting it onto the marginal Fenians, it kept mercantilism safely Other, while still engaging with it on an intellectual level. 

This argument draws on some of Professor Nagy’s earlier research from his book of 1985, The Wisdom of the Outlaw.  In that book he noted that fénnidi occupy an uneasy position in medieval Irish literature as ‘social outcasts forever denied adult status’, but whose position as outsiders allows them to gain wisdom not available to fully integrated members of society and bring the benefits of this wisdom back to society.  Mercantile behaviour, perhaps, was another such marginal activity – at least within literature – and depicting fénnidi as engaging in it allowed writers to reflect on the benefits of trade and exchange while keeping it safely confined to marginal figures. 

Professor Nagy’s Chadwick Lecture will be published by the ASNC Department.