Authorities and Adaptations

Dr Elizabeth Boyle writes:

On Friday 15th and Saturday 16th April, thirty scholars working on various aspects of medieval Irish history and literature gathered in Cambridge for an advanced research workshop on the theme of 'Authorities and Adaptations: the Reworking and Transmission of Sources in Irish Textual Culture, c. 1000 - c. 1200'. The reshaping of earlier source material to accommodate contemporary concerns is a significant phenomenon in medieval literary culture, and particularly so in Ireland. The process of recycling and reworking textual materials has often been commented on by scholars of medieval Irish, but had never been systematically interrogated. Over the course of the two days of the workshop, Celticists from Britain, Ireland, Germany and the United States, addressed the question of how sources were reshaped and adapted in eleventh- and twelfth-century Ireland. By studying how older authorities were used in medieval Ireland, the participants sought to further our understanding of how medieval Irish intellectuals and authors understood their own history and literary inheritance.

The papers presented at the workshop encompassed texts in both Latin and Old/Middle Irish, and ranged across many genres, from law to history-writing, from narrative prose to doctrinal poetry, and from biblical exegesis to grammatical tracts. A number of papers also focused on how earlier texts, including legal texts, grammars and poetry, accreted layers of learned commentary, which shaped the way those texts were read and understood by later audiences. As all of the papers demonstrated, the reworking of earlier source material was not merely a deferential act of preservation: rather, authors engaged actively with their sources, reshaping them to meet contemporary concerns, and using authorities to lend weight to words that would resonate with new, and changing, audiences.

The workshop was funded by the Leverhulme Trust, the H. M. Chadwick Fund, and the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. The programme of papers was as follows:

Papers I – III
Session chair: Dr Pádraic Moran (NUI Galway)
I. Prof. Patrick O'Neill (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill): 'Old wine in new bottles: the reprise of early Irish Psalter exegesis in the eleventh and twelfth centuries'
II. Dr Deborah Hayden (Hughes Hall, Cambridge): 'Metrical mnemonics and anatomical accents in Auraicept na nÉces'
III. Dr Paul Russell (University of Cambridge): 'Adaption, re-working and transmission in the commentaries to Amrae Coluimb Chille'


Papers IV - VI
Session chair: Dr Paul Russell (University of Cambridge)
IV. Dr Elizabeth Boyle (St Edmund’s College, Cambridge): 'Invisible authority: Echtgus Úa Cúanáin’s use of Paschasius Radbertus in his poetic treatise on the Eucharist'
V. Dr Brent Miles (University College Cork): 'The Hiberno-Latin background to the Sermo ad reges and an Irish tradition of advice to kings'
VI. Dr Caoimhín Breatnach (University College Dublin): 'Irish and Latin abridged versions of the Gospel of Nicodemus'


Papers VII-VIII
Session chair: Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh (St John’s College, Cambridge)
VII. Prof. Thomas Charles-Edwards (Jesus College, Oxford): 'The manuscript transmission of Bretha Comaithchesa'
VIII. Prof. Máire Herbert (University College Cork): 'Some thoughts on history and history-writing in the post-Viking era'


Papers IX-XI
Session chair: Dr Ralph O’Connor (University of Aberdeen)
IX. Prof. Ruairí Ó hUiginn (NUI Maynooth): 'Recycling a cycle: some late "Ulster" tales'
X. Dr Hugh Fogarty (University College Cork): 'Aided Guill 7 Gairb and the "inward look" in late Middle Irish prose saga'
XI. Dr Geraldine Parsons (University of Glasgow): 'Revisiting Almu in Middle Irish texts'


Papers XII – XIII
Session chair: Dr Mark Williams (Peterhouse, Cambridge)
XII. Prof. Michael Clarke (NUI Galway): 'Catheads and Trojans: reworking of Sex Aetates Mundi material in later medieval narratives'
XIII. Prof. Dr Erich Poppe (Philipps-Universität Marburg): 'On some sources of "On the beginning of Christ’s teaching" in the Leabhar Breac'


Paper XIV-XV
Session chair: Dr Elizabeth Boyle (St Edmund’s College, Cambridge)
XIV. Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh (St John’s College, Cambridge): 'Authorial attribution in twelfth-century Ireland: new wine in old skins'
XV. Dr Kevin Murray (University College Cork): 'The reworking of Old Irish texts in the Middle Irish period: contexts and motivations'

Author, authority and books in Benevento

Dr Rosalind Love writes:

Ten days ago I stepped off the crazy whirl of Cambridge term-time to attend the 6^th Congress of the International Medieval Latin Committee, at Naples and Benevento (10-13 November). After inaugural speeches at the University of Suor Orsola Benincasa in Naples, two coach-loads of medieval latinists embarked for Benevento, causing total gridlock, a cacophony of car-horns and colourful Neapolitan execration. At the rather quieter city of Benevento we witnessed a remarkable event: the coming-home of the first item to be repatriated under the Holocaust (Return of Cultural Objects) Act 2009. In 1943 the Allies bombarded Benevento, flattening most of it, including the Cathedral and the Metropolitan Chapter Library. The manuscripts were taken to safety in a hand-cart, but in the confusion one went missing and ended up for sale in Naples, where it was bought in 1944 by an English officer, Captain Ash. The book, a 12^th-century illuminated missal in characteristic Beneventan script, and was bought at auction in 1947 for the then British Museum and catalogued as MS Egerton 3511. Later, although Benevento had proved its original ownership, requests for the missal’s return foundered on legislation preventing the British Library from ‘alienating’ any of its holdings, and even when the Spoliation Advisory Panel, set up to examine the loss of artefacts during the Nazi era, judged in 2005 that the book should go back to Benevento on loan, the BL’s rules about the safe-keeping of its manuscripts prevented it. A British journalist, Martin Bailey (of The Art Newspaper), and then more recently a lawyer, Jeremy Scott, took up the case, which was ultimately swung by the 2009 Act. Jeremy Scott finally handed the missal (which had travelled inside a box inside officially-sealed wrappings inside a padlocked case – after all that, thankfully a satisfyingly fat codex!) over to Monsignor Andrea Mugione, the Archbishop of Benevento (in the picture below, with Dr Mario Iadanza, Director of the Office of Culture in the Archdiocese), in the presence of us medieval latinists, the great and good of Benevento, and a hoard of paparazzi. It was rather a moving moment, not least because the handing-back took place within minutes of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

After that excitement, it was down to business for the 200 of us attending the Congress, whose theme was ‘Auctor et auctoritas’. I was there to represent a research project with which I’ve been involved since 2007, ‘Boethius in Early Medieval Europe. Commentary on The Consolation of Philosophy from the 9th to the 11th centuries’, funded for five years by the Leverhulme Trust and headed by Professor Malcolm Godden, of the University of Oxford, with Dr Rohini Jayatilaka as full-time researcher (see the project website). Written in about 525 as the exiled Boethius awaited execution, the Consolation is a remarkable work which is thought to have been ‘rediscovered’ in the late 8th century by Alcuin, and then steadily gained in popularity, prompting translations into Old English and Old High German, for example. Lady Philosophy’s effort to console her ‘pupil’ meant confronting BIG questions of universal interest: why evil people often seem to prosper, why bad things happen to good people, what true happiness is, how humans can have free will under the gaze of an omniscient God with a divine plan.

Parchment, Print and PHP: ASNC Leading the Way

Dr Denis Casey writes:

A recent report on how university research in the arts and humanities is serving society (and how its impact may be effectively measured), undertaken by the not-for-profit policy research organisation RAND Europe, has singled out ASNC's Early Irish Glossaries Project for praise.

Under the heading Research Can Have Planned and Unplanned Impacts, the report highlights the impact that the purpose-built database of that three-year project (undertaken by Dr Paul Russell, Dr Pádraic Moran and Dr Sharon Arbuthnot) has had.

There are often unexpected impacts from a research project. For example, in the Faculty of English, an AHRC-funded project on medieval Irish glossaries developed a sophisticated database which had the unanticipated impact of becoming a model for other such databases in other fields.

The report was commissioned jointly by the University of Cambridge and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.