Inventing and Resisting Britain (original) (raw)
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British Ethnogenesis: A Late Antique Story
Celts, Romans, Britons: Classical and Celtic influence in the Construction of British Identities, 2020
This chapter will deal with the origin of the people known as the Britons as defined under the headword 'Briton, n.1. A member of one of the Brittonic-speaking peoples originally inhabiting all of Britain south of the Firth of Forth, and in later times spec. Strathclyde, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany' in the OED, rather than the neologistic sense which has gradually displaced it and become more common since the late seventeenth century as applied to inhabitants or citizens of Great Britain or the United Kingdom. The principal argument here will be that this identity came into being in the course of Late Antiquity (i.e. c. 300-700). Parts of this argument will contest the essentialist view that medieval British culture represents a direct continuity from pre-Roman identity on the island, which, it is suggested, would have been far from homogenous. Equally, however, this argument will contest the view that the medieval Britons were the direct cultural heirs of the Romano-British population. Britishness, like Englishness, was a product of the fragmentation of the Western Roman Empire. : It has long been recognized that medieval Britons derived their culture from a mixture of Roman and Celtic heritage. Whilst Welsh, for example, is classed as a Celtic language it contains more than 900 words borrowed from Latin during Antiquity, including terms for quite prosaic items such as 'fish', in sharp contrast to the mere dozen or so words borrowed from Celtic into Old English. The British language also displayed a greatly simplified morphosyntactical structure, as compared to its contemporary Celtic cousin Old Irish, which was probably brought about by a degree of creolization between Latin and the Celtic dialects it encountered in Britain.¹ In this chapter I will look at both the way in which British identity was constructed out of Roman and Celtic elements, and the way in which the Late Antique Britons understood that relationship. I will argue, inter alia, that from as early as the mid-sixth century, when Gildas, writing in Latin, attempted to reconstruct recent history from fragmentary sources, the relationship between Romano-British of the imperial era and the people who self-identified as Britons ¹ Charles-Edwards (2013) 75-115.
The Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland
2011
This is a major new study of the cultural foundations of the Tudor plantations in Ireland and of early English imperialism more generally. John Patrick Montaño traces the roots of colonialism in the key relationship of cultivation and civility in Tudor England and shows the central role this played in Tudor strategies for settling, civilizing, and colonizing Ireland. The book ranges from the role of cartography, surveying, and material culture-houses, fences, fields, roads, and bridges-in manifesting the new order to the place of diet, leisure, language, and hairstyles in establishing cultural differences as a site of conflict between the Irish and the imperializing state and as a justification for the civilizing process. It shows that the ideologies and strategies of colonization which would later be applied in the New World were already apparent in the practices, material culture, and hardening attitude towards barbarous customs of the Tudor regime. j o h n p a t r i c k m o n t a ñ o is Professor of History at the University of Delaware.
Material Culture and Sedition, 1688–1760
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Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print will feature work that does not fit comfortably within established boundaries-whether between periods or between disciplines. Uniquely, it will combine efforts to engage the power and materiality of print with explorations of gender, race and class. By attending as well to intersections of literature with the visual arts, medicine, law and science, the series will enable a large-scale rethinking of the origins of modernity.
The Economic History Review, 2012
Thorps in a changing landscape, Explorations in Local and Regional History ser. vol. 4, ser. eds. Nigel Goose and Christopher Dyer (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2011. Pp. xviii + 224. 47 maps. 9 tabs. ISBN 9781902806822 Pbk. £14.99/$29.95)
1991
Volume I Michael Burden Contents Volume I Con tents Acknowl edgemen t s i Association of Commonwealth Universities who awarded me a Commonweal 1.11 Overseas Scholar strip in 1984. Further support was received from tire Musica BriLarmica Trust who gave me the Louise Dyer Award in 1985 arid 198C, the Music and Letters Trust, the Royal Music Association, and the Faculty of Music in Edinburgh who administer the Birchard-Coar Fund. Research funding given by the Warden and Fellows of New College, Oxford, enabled me to complete the work. Among the institutions which have assisted this dissertation, and to which I am particularly indebted, are the British Library, the Bodleian Library Oxford, the Faculty of Music of the University of Edinburgh, the National Library of Scotland, the Parry Library of the Royal College of Music, the Reid Music Library Edinburgh, and the Royal Academy. I am also grateful to their respective librarians and administrators. The following scholars, institutions and owners of manuscripts have, on occasion, provided me with help on specific points or details: