Women in the Celtic World

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course proposes to discuss the lives of Celtic women. To some, this might seem like an impossible task: if one is able to surmount the initial difficulty of defining just what a ‘Celtic woman’ is, then there remains the intractably spotty historical record to contend with. In this course, we will examine the historiographical difficulties of defining the Celtic World. We will undertake a broad and varied examination of the women who appear in the texts of ancient historians, of the historically attested women of the medieval political and ecclesiastical realms, and of literary and legendary women whose lives are placed in an ancient Celtic past by the medieval and modern authors who created them. Finally, a study of women active in the ‘Celtic Revival’ intellectual movement will demonstrate the continued significance of the ancient and medieval Celtic past into the modern era.