The Celts: A Modern History

by Ian B. Stewart

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.

Genres: History, Audiobook, Nonfiction, Ireland, British Literature, Anthropology

576 pages, Hardcover

First published March 4, 2025

Reviews

[History Today]

Around the 1990s, the historical Celts endured something of an identity crisis. First in academic articles, then in popular books, and eventually in newspaper headlines, people started loudly declaring that ‘Celts’ did not really exist. Not all the scholarly ideas were new, but the mood certainly was: the general consensus that you could use the word Celtic to conjure up a relatively coherent historical people was called into question. The discipline of Celtic Studies grew anxious and self-critical: I have heard, from senior colleagues, accounts of students begging them to teach what could be said about the Celts, rather than the things that couldn’t. Modern ‘Celts’, in particular, started to gain scare quotes: these identities, it appeared, were recent inventions grafted onto historical abstractions, a collage of disparate symbols from the pre-Roman past, stuck together with imagination, enthusiasm, and academic linguistics. Ian Stewart’s The Celts: A Modern History broadly agrees with these conclusions. But rather than seeing this as a reason to abandon the Celts, Stewart builds on recent scholarship to make a compelling case for the significance of modern Celticism, in all its paradoxical glory.

This is a big, ambitious, erudite book. After a crash course on academic trends, and on ancient evidence for the Celts, Stewart begins in the early modern period, with the scholarly recovery and reconstruction of Celtic knowledge. This recovery was required after the near-total disappearance of Celtic ideas in medieval Europe, but Stewart avoids portraying the era as one of dry, disinterested scholarship. As he writes, nation and race ‘are kept firmly in view throughout’, and he shows that debates about Celtic history and linguistics frequently descended into squabbles over ‘prestigious ancestors whose legacy was up for grabs’. Repeatedly, we come across authors who just so happen to discover that their own local dialect was the original tongue of all Europe.

Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...

Rhys Kaminski-Jones is a Research Fellow at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies and the author of Welsh Revivalism in Imperial Britain (Boydell & Brewer, 2025).

[BJ Richardson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I should have read the book details more closely. This is not a book on the history of the Celts. It is a book on the study of the history of the Celts. It moves chronologically from about 1600 to the current day talking about what various scholars, linguists, historians, and even a few crackpots had to say about the ancient Celts. If you are interested in a history of scholarship in this field has evolved over time, this is a great book. But if you are looking for a genuine history of the Celts, look elsewhere.

To be fair, Ian Stewart did a great job at doing what he attempted to do. But his audience is very niche and I doubt many people outside of graduate level students in this area will ever be interested in this book.

[Jessie · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF - too dry. A history for historians.

[Shannon Heaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Putting a 1,500-year intellectual history within the confines of one book is a challenge, to be sure, but I got a lot of, for about the first half of it, 'Celts were Frankish and therefore German,' 'no, Celts were Gauls and therefore French/Celtic.' Which is all fine, as it were, but I wanted some more military, diplomatic and social history than just this.
Which means maybe I wanted more than one book, to be fair, but the voluminous amount of sources cited just started to meander a bit. It was very comprehensive and probably hit most if not all of the marks the author intended for it.