Welsh Journals

circumstance and context. That is what gives comparative history a bad name, which Toynbee indubitably succeeded in doing. Rutherford used to say that 'there are two kinds of science-there's physics and there's stamp-collecting'. This is a work of considerable interest to anybody who wants to study the enormously talented and perverse response of so many of the heirs of the Victorian liberal intelligentsia to the impact on their own cultural hegemony of the rise of the rational and empirical spirit which they themselves had advocated. Others, and especially those who look to comparison to save history from stamp collecting, and who welcome the present revival of interest in world history as the only serious basis upon which it can be conducted, will greet this reissue only with a heavy sigh. R. I. MOORE Sheffield EARLY IRISH LITERATURE-MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION: Mundlichen und Schrift- lichkeit in der friihen irischen Literature. Edited by Stephen Tranter and Hildegard L. C. Tristram. Gunter Narr Verlag, Tubingen, 1989. Script Oralia 10. Pp. 306. DM 86. Despite the considerable degree of attention paid to the subject over the years, the nature of the relationship between the oral and manuscript traditions in the evolution of the indigenous literature of Ireland remains very much an open, and indeed at times contentious, issue. Consequently, keen interest attaches to the establishment of Interdisciplinary Research Project 321, Section A5 of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in Freiburg im Breisgau under the leadership of Professor Dr. Hildegard Tristram, with the specific brief to promote and sustain research in this particular aspect of Irish literary scholarship. Section 5's first Colloquium was held in Freiburg in June 1987. At this meeting, members drawn from Germany, Austria, and Ireland presented ten papers of diverse range on some facet or other of this perennial oral/literary debate. These ten papers, accompanied by the convener's own substantial introduction, make up the volume under notice. To give the material some cohesion the editors have grouped the essays under five rubrics: 1. Introduction, 2. Fundamentals, 3. Narrative, 4. Textual Aspects, and 5. The Saints. Moreover, for what appears to be perfectly sound pragmatic reasons, the editors have chosen to publish each essay in the language, namely English or German, in which it was originally delivered, but one rather suspects that it is not an arrangement that will find an unreserved welcome in all quarters. In her wide-ranging and yet detailed introduction, *Die Fragestellung: Problem- bereich und Spannungsbreite der Medialitat im alteren irischen Schriftum', the convenor H. Tristram sets out the parameters of the exercise: the introduction of writing to Ireland, the repercussions on the native tradition, the various classes of