Fiery Shapes
Subtitle: Celestial Portents and Astrology in Ireland and Wales 700-1700
By: Mark Williams
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Oxford; New York
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9780199571840
Subjects: Druids and druidism; Omens; History and criticism; Irish literature; Celtic Astrology; Welsh literature
Description: The presentation of the magical and mantic in Celtic literature has persistently been dogged by misunderstanding and over-romanticized readings. Among the misconceptions about the ancient and medieval Celtic peoples, the notion of a specifically 'Celtic' astrology remains widespread in the popular mind. This study aims to counter such myth-making, and to demonstrate how a number Irish and Welsh literary writers in the medieval and Early Modern period conceived of portents in the heavens - comets, blood-coloured moons, darkened suns - and what they knew of the complex art of astrology.

Early Irish churchmen felt that the end of the world was imminent, and this book explores the ways in which they saw signs in the heavens as evidence of impending apocalypse, and how they adapted such millenarian imagery for use in native sagas in Irish. It then moves on to an extended discussion of the cloud-divination ascribed to Irish druids in high medieval literary texts; this has sometimes naively been taken as evidence for the actual customs of the druidic caste, but it is shown here to be a development of the later Middle Ages, long after the druids' disappearance. Turning to Wales, the cosmological knowledge of two linked figures is scrutinized: the super-poet Taliesin, and King Arthur's prophet Merlin, whom Geoffrey of Monmouth represented in the mid 12th century as an astrological sage with a purpose-built observatory. Evidence for the knowledge of astrology amongst the learned poets of later medieval Wales is then laid out, with an analysis of a powerful late 15th century poem indicting the evil influence of the planet Saturn; such knowledge seems to have been largely medical in nature, and the book concludes with an examination of a number of Welsh astrological texts in manuscript, setting them against the longest astrological poem in a Celtic language, the mid 17th century Puritan mystic Morgan Llwyd's spiritualizing and evangelical 'Heavenly Science'.

"The English Romance in Time Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare Helen Cooper" "T̀he English Romance in Time is a scholarly and engagingly written account of a genre, as suitable for a student as for an academic audience. It is important and innovative because of the way it uses romance to expose the medieval contribution to the early modern world.' 

---Alex Davis, Times Higher Education Supplement"--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [191]-204) and index.