A new history of the Celts that reveals how this once-forgotten people became a pillar of
modern national identity in Britain Ireland and France Before the Greeks and Romans the
Celts ruled the ancient world. They sacked Rome invaded Greece and conquered much of Europe
from Ireland to Turkey. Celts registered deeply on the classical imagination for a thousand
years and were variously described by writers like Caesar and Livy as unruly barbarians
fearless warriors and gracious hosts. But then in the early Middle Ages they vanished. In
The Celts Ian Stewart tells the story of their rediscovery during the Renaissance and their
transformation over the next few centuries into one of the most popular European ancestral
peoples. The Celts shows how the idea of this ancient people was recovered by scholars honed
by intellectuals politicians and other thinkers of various stripes and adopted by cultural
revivalists and activists as they tried to build European nations and nationalisms during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Long-forgotten the Celts improbably came to be seen as
the ancestors of most western Europeans—and as a pillar of modern national identity in Britain
Ireland and France. Based on new research conducted across Europe and in the United States
The Celts reveals when and how we came to call much of Europe “Celtic ” why this idea mattered
in the past and why it still matters today as the tide of nationalism is once again on the
rise.
