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This article was downloaded by: [Linnaeus University] On: 07 October 2014, At: 17:28 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK History: Reviews of New Books Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vhis20 Divided Gaels: Gaelic Cultural Identities in Scotland and Ireland, c.1200-c1650 Joseph Cope a a State University of New York, Geneseo College , USA Published online: 23 Jul 2012. To cite this article: Joseph Cope (2004) Divided Gaels: Gaelic Cultural Identities in Scotland and Ireland, c.1200-c1650, History: Reviews of New Books, 33:1, 23-24, DOI: 10.1080/03612759.2004.10526408 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03612759.2004.10526408 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http:// www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Divided Gaels: Gaelic Cultural Identities in Scotland and Ireland, c.1200-c1650

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This article was downloaded by: [Linnaeus University]On: 07 October 2014, At: 17:28Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

History: Reviews of New BooksPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vhis20

Divided Gaels: Gaelic Cultural Identities in Scotland andIreland, c.1200-c1650Joseph Cope aa State University of New York, Geneseo College , USAPublished online: 23 Jul 2012.

To cite this article: Joseph Cope (2004) Divided Gaels: Gaelic Cultural Identities in Scotland and Ireland, c.1200-c1650,History: Reviews of New Books, 33:1, 23-24, DOI: 10.1080/03612759.2004.10526408

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03612759.2004.10526408

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) containedin the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of theContent. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon andshould be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable forany losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use ofthe Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

where order held sway amid the bustle of everyday life.

Having created the stage and its elaborate set, in “The People” Picard introduces the players in her drama, from the member of Parliament to the felon with the noose around his neck. From a veritable feast of facts, read- ers become acquainted with the precarious nature of existence in Elizabethan London, the English passion for xenophobia, what the citizens of London preferred to eat and drink, their attitudes toward sex and religion, their hopes, their fears, and especially their super- stitions. Students are led from one chapter to another as in a well-written novel, but this is no work of fiction.

Elizabeth’s London: Everyday Life in Eliz- abethan London is perhaps the best introduc- tion to Elizabethan London now in print. The three appendices, especially the one that deals with words and pronunciation, are particular- ly valuable. The notes and bibliographic ref- erences are impressive. There are two inserts devoted to portraits, plates, maps, and dia- grams, but they pale in comparison to the pic- tures that Picard paints with words. This exceptional book should be part of every aca- demic library that boasts a collection of works on Elizabethan England.

CLIFTON W. POTTER, JR. Lynchburg College

Guy, John Queen of Scots: The ”rue Lie of Mary Stuart New York: Houghton Mifflin Company

Publication Date: April 2004 608 pp., $28.00, ISBN 0-618-25-41 1-0

Mary, Queen of Scots, has generated intense interest since her death and is the subject of an immense literature, beginning with William Camden’s Historie of the Life and Death of Mary Stuart in 1624. It is surpris- ing then that John Guy’s Queen of Scots is the first scholarly biography since Antonia Fraser’s Mary, Queen of Scots in 1969. Guy, a fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, and a distinguished Tudor historian, weaves his way through the familiar but extraordinarily controversial episodes of Mary’s life with great care and clarity. Few historians have brought such a sure knowledge of sixteenth- century France, England, and Scotland to the task of understanding Mary’s life and times. She was, after all, the queen of France and Scotland and heir to the throne of Eng- land. Guy’s mastery of sources is unrivalled. He is the first historian to reexamine the provenance and meaning of some of the well-known sources in centuries. He devotes two entire chapters to the famous Casket Letters, which the Lairds offered as evi- dence of Mary’s complicity with Bothwell in the murder of Darnley. Other of Guy’s sources are previously unstudied. His end- notes are not the standard references but a

valuable commentary on the sources for each chapter.

Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stu- art contains a great deal of new and exciting information. Guy makes clear that William Cecil, Elizabeth’s chief secretary, was Mary’s nemesis who worked single-mindedly to destroy her even before she left France for Scotland. Also, Elizabeth’s attitude toward Mary was far more sympathetic and complex when her voice-rather than Cecil’s-was heard. The treachery and brutality of the Scot- tish lairds, those she knew to be enemies, as well as those she trusted, is breathtaking. Above all, a remarkable portrait of a talented and forceful woman emerges. Neither a manipulative femme fatale nor a political pawn, Guy concludes that Mary was highly intelligent, quick-witted, physically brave, charismatic, loyal, and generous and pos- sessed a commanding personality. Mary understood and embraced the role of queen, but her deeply emotional nature and her painful isolation placed her in mortal danger. Guy makes clear how difficult it was for Mary to apply her intellect and her vision of royal authority in the factional and sexual politics of sixteenth-century Scotland.

This is the definitive biography of Mary for our time. Those familiar with the outline of Mary’s incredible life will gain the most from the book, but Guy’s lively and efficient style makes his work accessible to any interested readers. His account reads like a thriller and will attract a wide readership. Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart is an instant classic of historical biography.

CURTIS W. WOOD, JR. Western Carolina University

Barron, Caroline London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People, 1200-1500 Oxford Oxford University Press 472 pp., $74.00, ISBN 0-19-925777-9 Publication Date: December 2003

London civic records, beginning around 1200, are voluminous. Few scholars have mastered these sometimes daily records of the actions of the city’s various institutions and offices. Caroline Barron, a professor of the history of London at Royal Holloway, Uni- versity of London, is one of the few people who has perhaps read and absorbed all of the London civic materials. She has now gathered her conclusions of years of study (which began as a doctoral dissertation) into a com- prehensive institutional and administrative history of London during the later middle ages.

Because of the scope of the subject and the nature of the records themselves, London in the Late Middle Ages: Government and Peo- ple, 1200-IS00 tends necessarily to be an encyclopedic description of the various offices of the City and of the City’s official

relations with the Crown and the economy. The book also shows the birthmarks of its on- gin as a dissertation: It recapitulates most, if not all, of the modern scholarship done on London in the later middle ages. For example, Barron has a long section (89 ff.) devoted to the declining export of raw wool and the ris- ing export of finished cloth during the four- teenth and fifteenth centuries. This was already done in more interesting detail by Eileen Power in The Wool Trade in English Medieval Society (1941). It is not clear how this discussion and others like it add to the book.

One of the book’s theses seems to be that London, over three hundred years, developed “a sophisticated London civil service” (172) to augment the oligarchic, rich amateurs, such as the mayor and aldermen, who often were elected annually and who were responsible for governing the City. What were their responsibilities? Primarily they were in con- trol of “the urban environment” (that is, streets, walls, buildings, plague control, gar- dens, sewage, and so on) and “welfare ser- vices” (almost nonexistent and left to the Church and craft guilds). Although this argu- ment and the evidence supporting it are not particularly new or startling, Barron’s book will now be the standard, indispensable source on the institutional and administrative history of medieval London. It is a valuable reference, especially its comprehensive bibli- ography, for undergraduate and graduate stu- dents, and it should be in large university libraries.

RICK WUNDERLI University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

McLeod, Wilson Divided Gaels: Gaelic Cultural Identities in Scotland and Ireland, c.12OO-c.1650 Oxford: Oxford University Press

Publication Date: November 2003 304 pp., $95.00, ISBN 0-19-924722-6

In Divided Gaels: Gaelic Cultural Identities in Scotland and Ireland, c.1200-c.16S0, Wil- son McLeod-a lecturer in Celtic and Scot- tish studies at the University of Edinburgh- explores cultural interrelationships between Gaelic Scotland and Ireland in the late- medieval and early-modern periods. McLeod argues that despite connections based on social custom, kinship, and shared intellectu- al traditions, Gaelic Ireland and Scotland did not form a single “culture province” (4-5). The two nations did not share identical tradi- tions, and Scottish Gaels were perceived as peripheral by the Irish.

Much of McLeod’s analysis focuses on a comparison of Gaelic-language bardic poetry. In contrast to rich discourses on genealogy, history, and landscape found in poetry about Ireland, Irish bards had “strikingly little to say about Scotland” (1 15). The peripheral sta- tus of the Scottish Gaels is likewise reflected

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in Scottish poetry, which demonstrates less sophistication and an “underimagined” con- tent (1 37). McLeod finds intriguing evidence of descriptions of the sea as a dangerous obstacle and a route to exile, suggesting flaws in the assumption that travel and communica- tion between Ireland and Scotland were com- mon and convenient.

McLeod is honest about the limits of his sources. Scottish bardic works sources are generally rare, and work with this kind of poetry runs the risk of overinterpretation because “integrated expository analysis, especially of political or cultural topics, is not normal” (1 11). McLeod is sensitive to these concerns but rightly stresses the significance of bardic poetry as some of the only surviving evidence of Gaelic culture in this time period.

Divided Gaels shows a clear engagement with the “new British history,” particularly the problem of ethnic identity within the Isles. McLeod focuses intensively on interac- tions between Gaelic communities. The result is a Gaelic-centered history that does not assume the inevitability of conquest and cen- tralization. On the other hand, this focus does not lend itself to a very deep exploration of the dynamics of cultural and political interac- tion with the English and lowland Scots in a wider British context. Although McLeod states in his conclusion that “neighboring non-Gaelic communities . . . tended to bring about differences between the two Gaelic communities and to pull them apart from each other,” his discussion of this kind of interplay is not as compelling as his work on the Gael- ic sources (221).

Despite this criticism, Divided Gaels is an ambitious work that speaks to an important gap in scholarship on Gaelic culture. This book is targeted to an advanced scholarly audience, although McLeod’s introductory chapters and extensive bibliography would be accessible and useful to advanced undergrad- uates interested in exploring the history of the medieval and early modem Gaelic world.

JOSEPH COPE State University of New York, Geneseo College

Bartlett, Robert The Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory, and Colonialism in the Middle Ages Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

Publication Date: April 2004 192 pp., $24.95, ISBN 0-691-11719-5

Focusing on an obscure but fascinating event-the hanging and “resurrection” of Welshman William Cragh in 1290-this microhistory explores issues central to the late medieval world. Over the course of The Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory, and Colonialism in the Middle Ages, Robert Bartlett covers issues as diverse as medieval conceptions of time and space, the clash of

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lay and clerical cultures, and the conquest and colonization of Wales. Bartlett, a professor of medieval history at the University of St. Andrews, successfully uses the canonization records of Thomas of Cantilupe-the dead bishop to whom Cragh appealed as he hung on the scaffold-to paint a broad picture of medieval life in the thirteenth century.

In this book, dead men do indeed speak. Using the testimony of witnesses (including the revived William Cragh) from varying social classes, Bartlett analyzes the records compiled by three papal commissioners sev- enteen years after Cragh’s supposed execu- tion. Bartlett follows the scholarly example started by, among others, Ronald Finucane in his Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (1977) by using perceived miracles as a touchstone to explore the men- tality of the medieval world. For example, the discrepancies between the accounts of the miracle of Cragh’s resurrection lead Bartlett into a discussion of the way that memory worked in medieval times. He also notes how references to time and space are recorded by the commissioners, with peasant and noble alike giving subjective rather than objective impressions that are vivid and pictorial.

Bartlett examines both the testimonies of the witnesses and the interactions between these witnesses and the papal commissioners. As Karen Sullivan did in her work The Inter- rogation of Joan of Arc (1999), Bartlett explores the clash of cultures between the scholastic-trained clerics and the laity that appears when clerics conduct interviews of witnesses, whether for the purpose of weed- ing out heresy, as in the case of Joan of Arc, or for the purpose of creating a new saint, as in the case of Thomas of Cantilupe. However, Bartlett sees as much a difference in world views between the day laborer who witnessed Cragh’s execution and the papal commission- ers as he does between the poor local priest who administered Cragh’s last rites and the papal commissioners. In his exploration, the size of the gulf that separates lay and cleric is based more on class than on education.

The two-hundred-year history of the con- quest and colonization of Wales by the Anglo- Normans provides the background necessary for understanding why royalist William de Briouze would seek the death of Welsh rebel William Cragh in the first place. In exploring this issue and making comparisons to Scot- land’s William Wallace (of Braveheart fame), Bartlett makes his fascinating book, primarily intended for scholars, accessible to general readers as well.

DIANE L. MOCKRIDGE Ripon College

LeBor, Adam Milosevic: A Biography New Haven, CT: Yale University Press

Publication Date: February 2004 448 pp., $35.00, ISBN 0-300- I03 17-4

For at least the past decade and a half, Slo- bodan Milosevic, the now former leader of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), from the Balkans and The Hague has occupied a portion of center stage in international affairs. Consequently, there has been an increasing number of books published recently about this controversial figure. One such volume is Milosevic: A Biography, by Adam LeBor, a British journalist who has reported on the Wars of Yugoslav Succession for the Independent and the London Times and who has written several other books on Central and Eastern Europe, including Hitler’s Secret Bankers (1997) and Seduced by Hitler (2000).

LeBor’s study is a life and times of the man and a history of the complex region from which he comes. Although this is not an authorized biography, the author did have close access to Milosevic’s family and friends, including a lengthy interview with his equally notorious wife, Mira Markovic. Approximately the first third (ten chapters) of this volume rightfully deals with its sub- ject’s early life and amazing rise to power, using socialism, capitalism, and nationalism at will after Tito’s death. The rest of the book, save the final two chapters, concen- trates on the turbulent years of his dictator- ship. Chapters 24 and 25 briefly cover his overthrow and transition to The Hague, respectively. Although LeBor’s approach is more journalistic and narrative rather than historically critical-analytical, he has written a solid and thoroughly informative biogra- phy of Milosevic.

Given some of LeBor’s previous experi- ences, research, and publications, it is per- haps not surprising that he casts his subject overall in the light of other twentieth-century European dictators, such as Hitler and Stalin. Although this is a standard interpretation, it is by no means the only one. Louis Sell, for example, in his Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (2002) attributes his actions, especially in captivity, more to his unique Balkan (Serbian) personality and context.

LeBor’s biography is straightforward, clearly written, and quite objective, and it should be engaging even to a wide-ranging readership. Milosevic: A Biography contains some black-and-white illustrations and basic maps and also has endnotes and an extensive bibliography of English language sources that should help readers less experienced with the specific or broader subject matters

HISTORY

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