The Medieval Cultures of the Irish Sea and the North Sea: Manannán and his Neighbours ed. by Charles W. MacQuarrie and Joseph Falaky Nagy (review)

The title of this book evokes a current trend in medieval studies. Scholars are increasingly turning to major topographical features in the landscape to provide centripetal forces for study. This is one means to escape the powerful and long-enduring incentive to partition scholarly enquiry along national-linguistic fault lines. Within the context of early medieval historical and especially literary study, the North Sea has long fulfilled this role, due to the close connections between the scholarship of Old English and Old Norse as well as the importance of journeying across the sea itself in literary classics like Beowulf. The arrival on the scene of the Irish Sea is perhaps a more recent phenomenon. Although the Irish Sea has previously symbolized the bonds persisting between the Celtic-speaking peoples, it has recently assumed a more visible profile as a locus of wider medieval interconnectivity. This is for two related reasons: first, the Irish Sea was the hub of Scandinavian activity in the Insular world between the ninth and eleventh centuries; and second, the Irish Sea can be invoked as a space where the traditionally separate fields of Celtic history/literature and English history/literature can be seen to collide. These, for example, are some of the motivations that drive the “Irish Sea in the Middle Ages Research Network” based in the Department of History at the University of Liverpool, which has succeeded in bringing together scholars from Britain, Ireland, and the USA who work on all of these themes.

The editors of The Medieval Cultures of the Irish Sea and the North Sea clearly had some of the same motivations in mind as they were bringing together the nine studies in this book. According to the preface, the book derives from “a 2015 Summer Seminar for University Professors” which moved between Belfast, Glasgow, and Douglas on the Isle of Man (p. 9). A quick skim through the titles of the chapters reveals that the book’s editors, following the seminar, did indeed succeed in juxtaposing essays that would more traditionally belong in the fields of Celtic, English, and Scandinavian Studies. But there the clarity of principle ends. By the time the reader encounters the chapters, confusion has already set in. Turning first to the blurb, one is surprised to find no reference at all to the North Sea; instead, it is claimed that “the contributors to this collection dive deep into the rich historical record, heroic literature, and story lore of the medieval communities ringing the Irish Sea, with case studies that encompass Manx, Irish, Scandinavian, Welsh, and English traditions.” One looks in vain, however, for any case study that encompasses the “Welsh tradition.” The editorial introduction, meanwhile, focuses exclusively on the Isle of Man, essentially summarizing the recent (and excellent) third volume of the collaborative New History of the Isle of Man, covering the period 1000–1406 AD. Within the chapters themselves, the Irish and North Seas and their respective perimeters are barely noticed outside of the three chapters that have anything to say about the Isle of Man. These are Helen Davies’s consideration of the coins supposedly minted on the Isle of Man in the eleventh century (chapter 1), Rhonda Knight’s survey of the Gawain texts in the Percy Folio (which might have interrogated the significance of the Manx connection further)(chapter 6), and Marc Pierce’s fascinating comparison of the declines of Manx and Texas German in the twentieth century (chapter 9).

Reading through the book cover to cover can therefore be a disorienting experience, but this is not to say that individual chapters are not well executed. The most cogent chapters for this reviewer, which had defensible topics in relation to the theme, were the comparative studies that...