Abstract
Much that I have already said about the definition of ethnic groups must be taken, mutatis mutandis, to apply to the modern Celts. In passing from antiquity to the modern day, I have taken a detour via Gerald of Wales, and in so doing I have bowed to modern retrospective definition of what a Celt is: in modern parlance the Welsh are Celts, although Gerald would not have called them so. I would otherwise have had to leave the Celts in antiquity, and rejoin them in this chapter, in the eighteenth century, with nothing but a gulf in between. For there were, over this period, no Celts in north-western Europe; nobody called themselves, or anybody else, Celts (with the few fantastic scholarly exceptions, to which we shall come). I could have pursued the career of the Byzantine keltoi, down to their presumed conceptual disappearance with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks; it is again a measure of the limitations of our historical vision, that this would seem an entirely different subject, interesting though it might be.
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© 1992 Malcolm Chapman
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Chapman, M. (1992). The Modern Celts. In: The Celts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378650_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378650_13
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38949-0
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37865-0
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