The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People Or Modern Invention?Ancient sources and modern scholars have often represented the Athenian festival of Adonis as a marginal and faintly ridiculous private women's ritual. Seeds were planted each year in pots and, once sprouted, carried to the rooftops, where women lamented the death of Aphrodite's youthful consort Adonis. Laurialan Reitzammer resourcefully examines a wide array of surviving evidence about the Adonia, arguing for its symbolic importance in fifth- and fourth-century Athenian culture as an occasion for gendered commentary on mainstream Athenian practices. Reitzammer uncovers correlations of the Adonia to Athenian wedding rituals and civic funeral oration and provides illuminating evidence that the festival was a significant cultural template for such diverse works as Aristophanes' drama Lysistrata and Plato's dialogue Phaedrus. Her fresh approach is a timely contribution to studies of the ways gender and sexuality intersect with religion and ritual in ancient Greece. |
Contents
Preface | 7 |
assumptions limitations and objections | 26 |
How the Celts were created and why | 43 |
Current ideas on ethnicity and the insular Ancient Celts | 67 |
Towards a new ethnic history of the isles | 86 |
are the modern Celts bogus? | 136 |
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Anglo-Saxon appearance archaeological cultures archaeologists archaeology archipelago areas aristocratic artefacts assumptions Atrebates became boundaries Britain and Ireland British British Iron Age Britons Bronze Age burial Caesar Catholic Celtic art Celtic identity Celtic languages century BC common complex context continental Celts continued Cú Chulainn Dál Riata defined early eighteenth century élite England English especially established ethnic group ethnic identity European evidence example France Gaelic Gaul Germanic Highland hillforts human ideas imperial important indigenous insular Celts insular Iron Age invaders invasions Ireland and Britain Irish islands isles kingdoms largely later Iron Age least Lhuyd linguistic major material culture medieval migrations military modern Celts national identities nationalist nineteenth century particular past patterns Pezron Picts political population pre-Roman pre-Roman Iron Age province regional religious remains Roman Roman Britain Scotland Scots Scottish seen sense settlement shared social societies tions traditions Viking Wales Welsh wider
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Page 153 - The Antiquities of Nations; more particularly of the Celtae or Gauls, taken to be originally the same people as our ancient Britains...