BOOK REVIEW: MEDIEVAL CULTURES OF THE IRISH SEA

MacQuarrie, Charles W., and Joseph Falaky Nagy, eds. The Medieval Cultures of the Irish Sea and the North Sea: Manannán and his Neighbors. The Early Medieval North Atlantic.

Amsterdam, Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2019. pp. 212. ISBN: 978-9-46298-939-9 (hardback).

Reviewed by:
Elizabeth Boyle
Maynooth University

The vital role of the Isle of Man in the political, economic, and cultural history of the North Atlantic world during the Middle Ages has been championed recently in a range of significant publications. These studies show how the Isle of Man acted as a central node in the networks of communication, trade, diplomacy, and warfare throughout the period. The significance of its intermediary location between Gaelic-, English-, Welsh-, and Old Norse-speaking polities is increasingly being explored and recognised by historians, archaeologists, and literary scholars. Whether one speaks of the "Insular Viking Zone" or the "North Atlantic Archipelago" or, as in this case, the "Irish Sea Cultural Province," this conception of the Isle of Man as sitting at the heart of a broader, multilingual, cultural sphere is ripe for further study, which at first glance appears to be what is offered here, though the volume in reality is not so focused.

The Medieval Cultures of the Irish Sea and the North Sea emerges from an NEH-funded summer seminar on the "Irish Sea Cultural Province," which involved participants spending just over a month in 2015 in Belfast, Glasgow, and the Isle of Man. It is as contributions and responses to this seminar that the essays are gathered in this volume, without any shared thematic, disciplinary, or conceptual underpinning. As such, it lacks cohesion, and most readers will only be interested in one or two of the articles, depending on whether their research lies, say, in numismatics, Old English literature, reception studies or sociolinguistics.

The first chapter comprises Helen Davies's clear and useful discussion of Manx coinage during the so-called late Viking Age. She argues that the diverse nature of the abundant foreign and domestic coin evidence surviving from the Isle of Man reflects its position as a centre for international markets and commerce. Davies also observes that coins represent a particularly useful case study in the phenomenon of cultural contact, since the first Manx coins were cast using a die from Dublin, whose own dies were modelled on those used in early medieval England. The use of a Dublin die to cast Manx coins is further evidence, Davies notes, of the ways in which Man was drawn into the political ambit of Dublin in the eleventh century.

To read the complete article, see:
21.01.07 MacQuarrie/Nagy (eds.), Medieval Cultures of the Irish Sea and the North Sea (https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr/article/view/31860)

For more information, or to order, see:
The Medieval Cultures of the Irish Sea and the North Sea (https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789462989399/the-medieval-cultures-of-the-irish-sea-and-the-north-sea)

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