Twenty-Five Women Who Shaped the Celtic World

Twenty-Five Women Who Shaped the Celtic World takes readers on a whirlwind journey through over two millennia of sources that provide insight to the lives and lore of remarkable women in the Celtic tradition.

From approximately 500 BCE, when the so-called ‘Lady of Vix’ was interred in her Hallstatt-era cart burial in what would become Central France, to the twelfth century when the Irish, Welsh, and Scots navigated the changes brought by Anglo-Norman colonization, women’s stories trace the rise and fall of the Celtic-speaking world. The chapters provide a broad and varied examination of historically attested women as well as the mythological, literary, and legendary women of the medieval tradition. Finally, women of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ‘Celtic Revival’ movement demonstrate the continued significance of the ancient and medieval Celtic past into the modern era.

While the Celtic past is all too often ignored or fetishized, this book provides readers with a concise yet fully contextualized introduction, valuable to anyone seeking to better their understanding of women’s history and Celtic history.