The project conference was held on 1-2 December 2017 at the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, University of Cambridge. Over forty participants came to hear papers by a dozen international speakers. For those who could arrive the evening before, a bonus was the opportunity to attend the annual E. C. Quiggin Lecture by Pierre-Yves Lambert on ‘The Glossed Manuscripts of Early Medieval Brittany’. The following morning, proceedings began with opening remarks by Professor Thomas Charles-Edwards and an introduction to the project by Fiona Edmonds and Caroline Brett, and ended at 1 p.m. on Saturday 2 December with an admirable summing-up by Professor Wendy Davies.
To our regret, three speakers were unable to travel because of illness or accident, but fortunately members of the ASNC Department were able to step into the breach. The paper by John Hines (Cardiff University) was read by Alison Bonner. Karen Jankulak’s projected paper on ‘Breton authorship of the Lives of Welsh Saints in the Pre-Norman period: texts, transmissions, legends, and a look at St Cadog and Llancarfan’ was replaced by a related talk by Ben Guy, ‘Explaining the origins of Brittany: St Cadog’s solution’; and Joëlle Quaghebeur’s paper on Alain Barbetorte was replaced by Paul Russell’s on ‘Names of Bretons in Francia: the Prum charter and the case of Uurgonezlo’. We owe many thanks to all three replacement speakers for stepping in at short notice and in two cases providing original talks which thoroughly fitted the theme of the conference, focusing respectively on twelfth-century Welsh genealogical theories about the settlement of Brittany, and on some points of linguistic interest raised by the reproduction of Breton names in writing by non-Breton speakers.
Several papers addressed the application of archaeology to the question of contact between Brittany and the Insular world. One dilemma perceived by the initiators of the project was the impasse that archaeology seemed to have reached in explaining, or providing evidence for, the ‘Breton migration’ of the fifth and sixth centuries. The opening papers by John Hines and Patrick Galliou ably summed up the dilemma and set it in the context of the evolution of understanding of the ‘migration period’ in early medieval history generally. Those by Magali Coumert and Isabelle Catteddu, placed with a nice balance at the close of the conference, suggested new directions, in the developing understanding of geographical space in the Middle Ages, and in the availability of new evidence on settlement archaeology which, to an extent, displaces the earlier preoccupation with migration and ethnic identity and suggests instead an emphasis on local social evolution and continued external contact, sometimes in surprising directions. Isabelle Catteddu’s exceptionally clearly presented, wide-ranging paper based on recent rescue archaeology introduced material which was new to most of the audience and ended the conference in a mood of excitement at the possible imminent transformation of our evidence base.
Other speakers gave excellent summings-up of the current state of knowledge in their respective disciplines. Oliver Padel provided an overview of the potential for comparison between the place-name elements of Brittany, Cornwall and Wales. Joseph-Claude Poulin dealt with the ‘Celtic’ element (which he was inclined to minimise) in the hagiography of ninth-century Brittany. David Dumville gave an entertaining survey of loci for progress in Breton manuscript studies, and Katharine Keats-Rohan an analysis of Breton monastic interactions with the rest of France as seen in libri memoriales and other liturgical evidence, a complex and less-explored field where there are still considerable gains in knowledge to be made.
The conference dinner took place at ‘La Margherita’ on the snowy evening of Friday 1 December and was very much enjoyed by all present. We ended the conference impressed and grateful at how much care and thought the contributors had put into their presentations, and with renewed confidence in the sound scholarly footing on which the study of early medieval Brittany now stands.
It is intended to publish the conference proceedings and negotiations with a publisher and with the contributors are moving forward.