This volume of the Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium offers a wide range of articles on topics across the field of Celtic Studies. It includes the 2016 J. V. Kelleher Lecture delivered by Jerry Hunter, professor of Welsh at Bangor University, Wales, entitled “The Red Sword, the Sickle and the Author’s Revenge: Welsh Literature and Conflict in the Seventeenth Century.” The articles from other presentations at the Colloquium focus upon language and literary studies from a broad variety of time periods and linguistic areas, including Irish, Welsh, Scots-Gaelic, with some reference to archaic or smaller regional Celtic languages. In addition to linguistic and literary topics, the volume includes some articles on the folkloric and religious culture of Celtic culture and society.

This volume of the Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium offers a wide range of articles on topics across the field of Celtic Studies.

It includes the 2017 J. V. Kelleher lecture delivered by Paul Russell, Professor of Celtic, University of Cambridge, entitled “‘Mistakes of All Kinds’: The Glossography of Medieval Irish Literary Texts.” In this address Russell offers cogent analysis of this rarely addressed facet of medieval Irish codicology. The articles from other presentations at the Colloquium extend the focus on Celtic glossing into other areas of Celtic linguistics and literary studies. In addition, the volume includes articles on the medieval folkloric, religious, legal, and material culture of Celtic communities, some aspects of which persist into modernity. This volume exemplifies the broad range of topics and time periods characteristic of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium.

The creative reuse of materials, texts, and ideas was a common phenomenon in the medieval world. The seven chapters offer here a synchronic and diachronic consideration of the receptions and meanings of events and artifacts, analyzing the processes that allowed medieval works to remain relevant in sociocultural contexts far removed from those in which they originated. In the process, they elucidate the global valences of recycling, revision, and relocation throughout the interconnected Middle Ages, and their continued relevance for the shaping of modernity. The essays examine cases in the Arab and Muslim world, China and Mongolia, and the Prussian-Lithuanian frontier of eastern Europe.