While business travelers come from hundreds of different countries, speak many different languages, and work for thousands of different companies, we have a culture and lifestyle as unique as that of the traveling Gypsies. REUPLOAD NEEDED
Carved on the trunk of the mighty copper beech that embraces the school yard in Shancarrig are declarations of love, hope, and identity - the youthful dreams of the children who played there. Now grown, yet shaped by their years in the schoolhouse, they lead different lives. The Copper Beech is about eight of these dreamers. From Ryan's Hotel to Barna Woods, where the gypsies came each year, from Nellie Dunne's sweet shop to Father Gunn's church, the tenor of life in this small Irish village is outwardly placid and uneventful.
Originating in India, the Gypsies arrived in Europe around the 14th century, spreading not only across the entirety of the continent but also immigrating to the Americas. The first Gypsy migration included farmworkers, blacksmiths, and mercenary soldiers, as well as musicians, fortune-tellers, and entertainers. At first, they were generally welcome as an interesting diversion to the dull routine of that period. Soon, however, they attracted the antagonism of the governing powers, as they have continually done throughout the following centuries.
While a great deal has been written about Spain's minority populations of Jewish and Muslim origin in the late medieval and early modern periods, relatively little scholarly attention has been devoted to its gypsies. Drawing extensively on the author's archival research in Spain, The Gypsies of Early Modern Spain, 1425-1783 is the first major study in English of the first three and a half centuries in Spain of a people, its gypsies or gitanos, who, despite their elevation by Spaniards and non-Spaniards alike to culturally iconic status in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have until now remained largely invisible to history in the English-speaking world.
