Kenneth Jackson examines nature poetry that was produced in Ireland and Wales in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Reading Old English Texts, first published in 1997, focuses on the critical methods being used and developed for reading and analysing writings in Old English. The collection is timely, given the explosion of interest in the theory, method, and practice of critical reading. Each chapter engages with work on Old English texts from a particular methodological stance. The authors are all experts in the field, but are also concerned to explain their method and its application to a broad undergraduate and graduate readership. The chapters include a brief historical background to the approach; a definition of the field or method under consideration; a discussion of some exemplary criticism (with a balance of prose and verse passages); an illustration of the ways in which texts are read through this approach, and some suggestions for future work.

Patrick Sims-Williams provides an approach to some of the issues surrounding Irish literary influence on Wales, situating them in the context of the rest of medieval literature and international folklore.

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Trees played a particularly important part in the rural economy of Anglo-Saxon England, both for wood and timber and as a wood-pasture resource, with hunting gaining a growing cultural role. But they are also powerful icons in many pre-Christian religions, with a degree of tree symbolism found in Christian scripture too. This wide-ranging book explores both the "real", historical and archaeological evidence of trees and woodland, and as they are depicted in Anglo-Saxon literature and legend. Place-name and charter references cast light upon the distribution of particular tree species (mapped here in detail for the first time) and also reflect upon regional character in a period that was fundamental for the evolution of the present landscape. Della Hooke is Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Research in Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Birmingham.

The volume collects papers from a multi-disciplinary workshop, held under the auspices of the European Science Foundation, which examined the idea of Celticism in its European contexts from the eighteenth century to the present. Linguists, historians, cultural theorists and literary critics from a range of European countries addressed for the first time in a sustained way how the idea of Celticism developed and how it affected many aspects of European culture. A primary focus of the volume is James Macpherson's Ossian, now under-going a re-estimation. Other topics which receive significant examination are Celticism as a force in cultural nationalism, Celticism in contemporary Christianity, primitivism, the image of the Celt in archaeology, historiography, political propaganda and the role of the idea of the Celtic in linguistic taxonomy. This pioneering work will be of interest to scholars and students in a wide range of subjects in which the nature, function and effect of cultural concepts and images are of central concern.