The Irish Sea Cultural Province: Crossroads of Medieval Literature and Languages

FAIN: FS-50390-14

CSU, Bakersfiled (Bakersfield, CA 93311-1022)
Charles William MacQuarrie (Project Director: March 2014 to May 2016)

A five-week seminar for sixteen college and university faculty to study the cultural and linguistic confluence of five distinct but related populations of the medieval British Isles.

The purpose of this five-week NEH summer seminar for college and university teachers is to provide participants with a rich and detailed scholarly experience and discussion of the linguistic and cultural confluence which characterizes the British Isles, Man, and Ireland (the Irish Sea cultural province) in the Middle Ages. The five-week seminar is designed to balance scholarship and field experience; we will explore important archaeological material that is challenging to access and interpret, and also face the considerable linguistic and literary challenges of texts from five distinct but related cultures and languages. We will explore too the fraught civility within this multi-cultural nexus, and the dynamic, especially as it is expressed in the literature, both between cultures and within particular cultures to prevent blood feud and vengeance from reducing provisional peace and order to bloodshed and destabilization.