Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  • Cited by 5
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
July 2022
Print publication year:
2022
Online ISBN:
9781009225601

Book description

The inhabitants of early medieval Britain and Ireland shared the knowledge that the region held four peoples and the awareness that they must have originally come from 'elsewhere'. The Origin Legends of Early Medieval Britain and Ireland studies these peoples' origin stories, an important genre that has shaped national identity and collective history from the early medieval period to the present day. These multilingual texts share many common features that repay their study as a genre, but have previously been isolated as four disparate traditions and used to argue for the long roots of current nationalisms. Yet they were not written or read in isolation during the medieval period. Individual narratives were in constant development, written and rewritten to respond to other texts. This book argues that insular origin legends developed together to flesh out the history of the insular region as a whole.

Reviews

‘A welcome and precious reading of the Insular origin narratives, The origin legends of early medieval Britain and Ireland proves to be a useful window on mentalities of the time. … A thoughtful and honest piece of academic writing, this book … will hopefully produce further discussion and inspiration in searching for fresh approaches toward the reading of early medieval historical and 'pseudo-historical' production.’

Donato Sitaro Source: North American Journal of Celtic Studies

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
×

Contents

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.