The Leverhulme Trust has made a grant to the Department for an international network entitled ‘Converting the Isles: Conversion to Christianity in the Insular World’. Máire Ní Mhaonaigh will serve as Principal Investigator for the grant, working in collaboration with her co-applicant, Roy Flechner. A Network Facilitator for the grant will be appointed in due course. A colloquium on one aspect of the theme will be held on 12 May in the Department; for further details click here.
Megan Cavell, who has just completed her PhD in ASNC on Old English literature, has been awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Post Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto.
Denis Casey has been awarded a fellowship by the European Institutes for Advanced Study (EURIAS) international researcher mobility programme. He will hold his fellowship at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies during 2012-13, conducting research on ‘The intellectual world of Conall Mag Eochagáin: the medieval and early modern contexts of the Annals of Clonmacnoise’.
Dr Margo Griffin-Wilson announces a series of public events, exhibitions and lectures, celebrating Irish in Cambridge:
5 MARCH (Monday, 5pm): Irish Poetry Reading, Biddy Jenkinson
Seachtain na Gaeilge will open with a reading by the Irish poet Biddy Jenkinson, who has been praised by Professor Ciaran Carson (Queen’s College, Belfast) as ‘one of [Ireland’s] greatest writers in any language’. Ms Jenkinson will introduce the background and content of each poem in English. The poems will be read in Irish. The Poetry Reading will take place in the English Faculty (9 West Road) in Room G-R05. A wine reception will follow in the ASNC Common Room. The reading is free of charge and open to students, staff and the general public.
Biddy Jenkinson brings a distinctive style and purpose to her writing, and her highly regarded collections of verse include Baisteadh Gintlí (1987), Uiscí Beatha (1988), Dán na hUidhre (1991), An Grá Riabhach (1999), Mis (2001), Rogha Dánta (2000) and Oíche Bhealtaine (2005). She is also the author of prose works, including An tAthair Pádraig Ó Duinnín—Bleachtaire (2008).
8 MARCH (Thursday, 5.30pm): Dánta agus Ceol ‘Poems and Music’ / Irish films
Modern Irish language students will present Irish poems and traditional Irish songs in the ASNC Common Room (2nd floor, English Faculty, West Road).
The performance will be followed by a showing of the short Irish film Lipservice and the RTE documentary Oileán Eile ‘Another Island’ (1985), which presents the literary and cultural legacy of the Great Blasket Islands through archive footage of daily life, an examination of the island autobiographies (Tomás Ó Criomhthainn’s An tOileánach and The Autobiography ofPeig Sayers) and accounts by well-known scholars who visited the island, including Robin Flower, Carl Marstrander, Kenneth Jackson and George Thompson.
The Blasket Islands
13 MARCH (Tuesday, 1-3pm): Exhibition of Irish and Irish related manuscripts, Parker Library, Corpus Christi College (*Registration required)
More than thirty items of Irish interest from the Parker Library’s world renowned collection will be on display. Students, staff and members of the public are invited to register for a guided viewing of these exquisite examples of Irish insular art, decorated initials, glossaries, saints’ lives, prophesies, chronicles and charters dating from the 8th to the 16th century. Highlights of the exhibit include the Hymn on St. Patrick attributed to Saint Secundias (Seachnall) or Saint Colmán Elo, the only extant copy of the canons of the ‘First Synod of Patrick’, the first European description of a giraffe (written by an Irish monk!), one of the earliest maps of Ireland, and the first printed piece of Irish anywhere in the world: the bardic poem Tuar feirge foighide Dé, composedby Philip Bocht Ó hUiginn in 1571. Two tours (1-2pm and 2-3pm) will be conducted on 13 March. To register please contact Dr Denis Casey: dc399@cam.ac.uk.
The Parker Library exhibit has been organized by Dr Denis Casey, Teaching Associate in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic and Postdoctoral Fellow of the Society for Renaissance Studies, and Dr Christopher de Hamel, Donnelly Fellow Librarian at the ParkerLibrary
The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
picture courtesy of the Parker librarians
15 MARCH (Thursday, 5pm): Public Lecture: 'H.M. Chadwick: A Centennial Commemoration'
Professor Michael Lapidge, Fellow of Clare College, will deliver the 23rd Annual H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture in the Riley Auditorium, Gillespie Building (off Memorial Court), Clare College, Queen's Road, Cambridge. The lecture will be followed by a reception in Clare College at 6pm.
The interdisciplinary Insular Economics workshop, run jointly by Andy Woods and Russell Ó Ríagáin (McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research) and Denis Casey (Department of ASNC) was held in the McDonald Institute on Saturday 10th of September.
The workshop was opened by Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh (Reader in Celtic at ASNC, and Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge) and there followed a series of papers that offered major challenges to current scholarly assumptions about economic activity in medieval Ireland and how it is studied. For example, volumes of coin use in medieval Dublin were shown to be considerably higher than one might have imagined, methods of defining economic hinterlands were challenged and texts such as Lebor na Cert (‘The Book of Rights’) were the subject of fresh scrutiny.
The workshop finished with an open discussion led by Dr James Barrett (Deputy Director of the McDonald Institute) in which a number of the points raised were further examined and the thorny question of synthesis in archaeological, historical and textual studies explored — to limited agreement! Nonetheless, it is hoped that many of the contributors will go on to publish their findings and contribute substantially to the study of the economy/economies and economics of medieval Ireland.
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 10th September 2011
The programme and abstracts for the workshop Insular Economics: Ireland in the Eleventh and Twelfth Century (10th September, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge) are now available on the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic website: http://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/news/2011/07/25/651. This interdisciplinary workshop will feature new lines of enquiry into the economies and economics of eleventh- and twelfth-century Ireland, being pursued by early-career researchers (PhD and Post-doctoral), from Cambridge, Belfast, Dublin, Manchester and Liverpool. Attendance is free and limited number of places are still available. Anyone interested in attending should contact the convenors, via the above link, before Friday 2nd September.
Venue: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research
Address: Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3ER
This one-day workshop—hosted by the Department of ASNC and McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research—will be dedicated to exploring the economies and economics of Early Medieval Ireland and their wider Insular contexts. Papers by early career researchers from Britain and Ireland will explore topics such as numismatics, exchange networks, administrative documentary traditions, settlements, environmental impact and the application of theoretical economic models.
Attendance is free and places are limited. Please contact one of the coordinators (Denis Casey dc399@cam.ac.uk; Russell Ó Ríagáin rmo31@cam.ac.uk or Andy Woods arw66@cam.ac.uk) for more information.
The Scandinvian Studies Fund awarded the 2011 Wallenberg Prize to two students: Moa Höijer (ASNC & Hughes Hall) for her essay on 'Perceptions of an outcast: Loki's motivation in Lokasenna', and to George Walkden (Dept of Linguistics & Clare College) for his essay 'The correspondence problem in syntactic reconstructon'. The Wallenberg Prize is awarded for an essay on some subject connected with the language, history or civilization of one or more of the Scandinavian peoples
And last but not least, Dr Denis Casey has been awarded a Fellowship by the Society for Renaissance Studies, to work on Christopher Nugent's primer of the Irish language, created for Elizabeth I, within the contexts of second language teaching during the Renaissance and the Gaelic grammatical tradition. Dr Casey wrote about this primer for the Irish Examiner recently.
In Acallam na Senórach, the dialogue between St Patrick and Caílte (an aged survivor of Finn Mac Cumail’s war band) on the places and lore of Ireland, Finn enquired of his companions what music was best. Their answers conjured up a cacophony of the landscape: baying hounds, bellying stags, swords striking, ladies laughing, cuckoos calling.
Like Caílte’sreminisces, Pat Collins’s film Tim Robinson: Connemara, based on the work of the current Parnell Fellow in Irish Studies, was dominated by sound and music, as much by the physical landscapes and seascapes that have been the subject of Robinson’s work. The landscape filled the ears, while the camera panned slowly in soft focus over Robinson’s extraordinarily detailed maps of Connemara. Funneled wind howling through the bearnaí and mámanna faded into a soft breeze over bogs where the naosc binn ’s an crotachglórach could be heard, before morphing into the cry of a gull by the shoreline’s contours, only to be drowned in rhythms drummed against wave-lashed cliffs. Similarly, Susan Stenger’s soundtrack, inspired by Marconi’s wireless experiments in Connemara, strikingly encapsulated the natural themes, as the Irish word cuach (‘cuckoo’) was played in Morse Code while Robinson searched amid the denuded foliage of Derryclare wood for Cuach na Coille (‘The Cuckoo of the Wood’).
Tim Robinson: Connemara brilliantly brings to another medium the work of a latter day embodiment of both Caílte and Patrick, and is a film deserving of repeated viewing — and listening. Finn’s conclusion is admirably justified: the best music is ‘the music of what happens’.
The two-week celebration of Seachtain na Gaeilge in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic opened on 9 March with a lecture by Dr. Tim Robinson, Parnell Fellow at Magdelene College for 2011, author of several books and creator of beautifully detailed maps on Aran, Connemara and the Burren. Robinson spoke on the ‘Geophanic Language of Ireland’ and led a discussion on the value of place and Irish placenames—a topic touched upon in his Parnell Lecture and developed further in this open discussion. Faculty, students and guests from various disciplines had an opportunity to examine Robinson’s detailed maps, which were passed around the large round table during the discussion. Robinson noted the importance of the lore of prominent places (dindshenchas) in medieval Irish texts; he also recounted stories about sacred places which he collected from local inhabitants while walking in remote landscapes in search of holy wells, prehistoric forts and other antiquities. The long-term consequences of the loss of place and the effects of rapid change in Ireland were also considered.
On 17th March the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, and St John’s College, offered faculty, students of palaeography and visitors from various disciplines an opportunity to see the ‘Southampton Psalter’, an Irish psalm-book of ninth or tenth century date and one of the finest treasures of the Old Library of St. John’s College (more details on the Southampton Psalter can be found here).
Examining a map from Cox's Hibernia Anglicana (1679) (photograph by permission of the Master and Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge)
Dr. Denis Casey, Honorary Research Associate in medieval Irish history, guided participants through the history of the manuscript and spoke on the significance of the interlinear Irish and Latin glosses in this predominantly Latin manuscript. Dr. Casey offered insights into the bilingual culture in which the Psalter was produced and drew attention to some particularly interesting Irish glosses, including the scribe’s passing comment in his own native language: ‘it is Beltaine (Mayday) today, a Wednesday.’ Those who were present at the viewing had the pleasure of closely examining the decorated initials, interlace work and three striking illuminated images (of David and Goliath, David fighting the lion and the Crucifixion) in the intimate setting of the Old Library. The Special Collections librarian, Kathryn McKee, graciously welcomed the group and prepared a display of other texts of Irish interest from the library’s collection of rare books. These included sketchbooks of travels in Ireland by the antiquary and astronomer, John Lee (1783-1866), a graduate of St. John’s College; a life of St. Patrick by Richard Stanyhurst (published 1587); a map of Ireland from Richard Cox’s Hibernia Anglicana (published in 1679), and a natural history of Ireland from 1729.
Examining the Southhampton Psalter (photograph by permission of the Master and Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge)
Visiting the Old Library at St John's (photograph by permission of the Master and Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge)
The Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas held its Annual Colloquium in the Faculty of English on Saturday 19 March 2011, organised by Deborah Hayden with the help of several members of the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. The day began with the Leslie Seiffert Lecture, given this year by Professor Emeritus Richard Hudson of UCL, who discussed ‘Why History Matters: From Babylon to Sweet, Tesnière, Chomsky and the National Curriculum’. This was followed by a variety of stimulating papers on topics ranging across the historical study of Chinese, Dutch and Italian. In the afternoon members were treated to a series of Celtic-themed talks, including a discussion of the study of Gaulish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and two papers on medieval and early modern Irish respectively by ASNaC members Paul Russell and Denis Casey. The event ended with an engaging contribution from Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade concerning her recent book on the life and work of the eighteenth-century English grammarian Robert Lowth.
John Walmsley (Bielefeld) and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (Leiden/Cambridge)
Graham Pointon, Georgia Henley (ASNaC) and Louis Kelly (Cambridge)
The famous Irish poet Antaine Ó Raiftearaí may have complained that he was ag seinm cheoil do phócaí falamh (‘playing music for empty pockets’) but anyone who attended last night’s Irish poetry and music event at the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic will have come away feeling much fuller than that blind poet’s pockets ever did.
As part of the ongoing Seachtain na Gaeilge, Tim Robinson (Parnell Fellow at Magdalene) held an informal discussion of the value of Irish placenames (Wednesday 9th March), before last night’s wonderful recital by the students of the Department’s modern Irish language classes, which ranged from Katie McIvor’s enchanting solo harp performance of The Waves of Gola to a rousing ensemble chorus of the old Jacobite song Óró sé do bheatha abhaile (‘You are welcome home’). The beautifully enunciated poetry performances were similarly varied, as the words of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Pádraig Pearse and Seán Ó Ríordáin (among others) and the landscape of Connemara (through a special visual presentation), were all vividly brought to life.
Katie McIvor plays The Waves of Gola
The performers are all students of modern Irish in Cambridge (while also studying and working in a variety of departments throughout the university) and hail from a variety of countries, including Holland, Australia, USA and Finland. Their high standard of Irish is a credit to their teacher in the Department of ASNC, namely Dr Margo Griffin-Wilson.
Ensemble performance of Irish songs
In the first performed poem, Ceist na Teangan (‘The Language Issue’), Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill wrote that she placed her hopes in the little Moses basket of the Irish language, in the anticipation that it might one day land in the lap of a Pharaoh’s daughter. It appears to be in good hands so far.
Students of Modern Irish in the University of Cambridge (in front of portraits of some of our illustrious Elrington & Bosworth Professors of Anglo-Saxon)
As part of the celebration of 'Seachtain na Gaeilge', a two-week festival which promotes Irish language and culture in Ireland and abroad, the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic will host the following events in the English Faculty Building, Sidgwick Site, 9 West Road.
9 MARCH (Wednesday), 5pm, English Faculty Board Room
Dr. Tim Robinson, Parnell Fellow The 'Geophanic' Language of Ireland: A Discussion on the Value of Irish Placenames
Tim Robinson, author of several books on the landscape of Connemara and the Aran Islands and creator of beautifully detailed maps, will consider the importance of place in Ireland and the consequences of the loss of place in the modern world. All are invited to come and examine Dr. Robinson's maps of Connemara and participate in an informal discussion on the value of place--a topic thoughtfully probed by Robinson in his recent Parnell lecture.
10 MARCH (Thursday), 5pm, ASNC Common Room
Dánta agus Ceol/ Poems and Music Irish Film: 'KINGS'
A group of students from Modern Irish language courses will read selected Irish poems, perform traditional music and present a photographic travel account of the Irish landscape.
Student performances will be followed by a showing of 'KINGS', an Irish language film (with subtitles) and winner of five Irish Academy Awards. The film explores the lives of six men who left their homes in Connemara in 1977 with hopes of a better life in England.
Colm Meaney in Kings (image from Alt Film Guide www.altfg.com)
17 MARCH: H. M. Chadwick Lecture, 5pm (G-R 06/ 07)
Professor Wendy Davies (University College London) will present the annual H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture: Water mills and cattle standards: probing the economic comparison between Ireland and Spain in the early middle ages
Irish Manuscripts: The Chadwick lecture will be preceded by a viewing of medieval Irish manuscripts at St. John's College. Places for the viewing are limited; to book please contact Denis Casey (dc399@cam.ac.uk).
These events will be followed by refreshments. All are welcome to attend.
‘What makes a place out of a locality?’ was one of the many thought-provoking questions posed by Dr Tim Robinson, 2010–11 Parnell Fellow in Irish Studies, in his masterful 2011 Parnell Lecture, delivered at Magdalene College, Cambridge, yesterday.
Charles Stewart Parnell (image from www.nndb.com)
Named for Charles Stewart Parnell, the ‘Great Adulterer’ and Magdalene College dropout still beloved of the Irish people, the Parnell Fellowship and Annual Lecture have provided forums for some of the most talented minds in Irish studies. This year the polymath Tim Robinson — author, mathematician, geologist, poet and cartographer (among other things) — skillfully expounded upon potential threats to the landscapes and seascapes of the Aran islands, Burren and Connemara; places on which he has become the greatest commentator and authority since J. M. Synge. His discussion of present day (and potential) adverse human impact upon these areas, both upon the physical environment and our perceptions of place, was set within an impressively large timeline stretching over geological and environmental eons. Questions from the audience, however, indicated that not everyone was in complete agreement with his assessment of modern human impact vis-à-vis that of previous generations and indeed natural forces of much longer duration. I came away feeling that while Robinson has not squared this circle, his answer to the above question, ‘it is the attention which we bring it’, is deserving of deeper reflection somewhere in the ‘long dark night of the intellect’ upon which he has previously written.
In recent years the internet has become an indispensable tool for medieval scholars, with websites such as the Early Irish Glossaries Database, Parker Library on the Web and the Celtic Digital Initiative providing access to texts and images to users around the world. Websites, like any other medium, have both their advantages and limitations but an interesting, most likely unplanned, though certainly useful side effect has been produced by archive.org. That website, as its URL suggests, is a vast archive of useful material not always readily available in every library. The beauty of this service is that some of the actual digitized volumes themselves were formerly owned by well-known scholars and their annotations offer interesting insights into the texts and their interpretations of the texts, just like any medieval gloss or commentary.
To take an interesting example, consider the case of the Ancient Laws of Ireland series. That six-volume edition and translation of the corpus of medieval Irish law was based on the earlier work of the mid-nineteenth-century scholars Eugene O’Curry and John O’Donovan, but not completed until 1901. It was widely castigated for errors in transcription and translation (not necessarily the fault of O’Curry and O’Donovan); to prove the point, Eóin Mac Néill, the great Scholar-Revolutionary, published a translation of two of its texts in 1923, shortly after emerging from jail and taking up the post of Minister for Education in the new Irish Free State, during the civil war. A later scholar and former Free State ambassador to Weimar Germany, D. A. Binchy (who incidentally left fascinating pen-portraits of Hitler, von Bruning and others in the pages of Studies), spent much of his career editing and translating various legal texts and finally produced a six-volume diplomatic transcript of the known legal manuscripts: Corpus Iuris Hibernici (1978). Nonetheless, many of the texts have neither been reedited nor retranslated since the publication of the Ancient Laws series. Luckily, at least some volumes from Binchy’s library found its way into the collection of Stephen B. Roman, who subsequently bequeathed them to J. M. Kelly Library, St Michael’s College, University of Toronto. Among these are at least three volumes of Binchy’s annotated copies of the Ancient Laws, which are now available on archive.org. Anyone who has dealt with the complexities of (and frustrations attendant upon) working with medieval Irish legal texts will appreciate the help of one of the most notable scholars of medieval Ireland. Here are the links to volume 1, volume 3 and volume 4.
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.
In a previous post, Dr Elizabeth Boyle drew attention to the wealth of ASNC-related medieval manuscripts housed in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, which were recently digitised as part of the Parker Library on the Web project. Thanks to that project, the Parker Library's collection is now not only the best-known in Cambridge but also the most accessible (on this, see the recent audio slideshow on the BBC News website). The Parker Library, however, is not the only repository of such valuable material. Other Cambridge libraries also contain many interesting (and sometimes overlooked) manuscripts, not least the Cambridge University Library. To illustrate my point, let's look at one Irish manuscript in Cambridge University Library: a nineteenth-century paper miscellany, now sporting the fetching title of 'Additional MS 4182'.
Additional MS 4182, whose contents vary greatly in age and genre, contains a little something for everyone interested in Irish studies. Excerpts from the ninth-century Triads sit comfortably alongside poems ascribed to the eighteenth-century Jacobite master poet Seán Clárach mac Domhnaill, whose work has been performed in recent years by a collection of Irish and Scottish musicians and singers on BBC Four's Highland Sessions and in alternating Irish and English stanzas in a wonderful collaborative recording by Sting and The Chieftains. Alternatively, for those whose interests lie in analysis of the Irish language, grammatical sections like Ga mhéad rann san oraid? ('How many divisions in speech?') may prove interesting.
Other gems in this manuscript include two copies of an anecdote explaining the origins of the name Ó Súilleabháin (O'Sullivan), which appear to be a version of a story Míchél Ó Cléirigh recorded at the end of his copy of the Life of Saint Ruadán of Lothra (Plummer, ed. & trans., Bethada náem nÉrenn: Lives of Irish Saints, I, 329 & II, 319-20). In this anecdote, a druid named Lobán came to Eochuadh mac Máolura and made exorbitant demands of him, including that he give the druid one of his eyes! Eochuad, fearing that refusal of Lobán would result in dishonour, plucked out one of his own eyes and gave it to the druid. Saint Ruadán avenged Eochuadh by causing Lobán's eyes to replace Eochuadh's, hence the name Súilleabháin, i.e Súile Lobáin ('Lobán's eyes' - a play on súil amháin 'one-eyed'?) stuck to Eochuadh and his descendants.
The contents of Additional MS 4182 are not confined to amusing anecdotes and vignettes. A seemingly separate book bound into the volume contains a lengthy text entitled Gabháltais Shéarlais Mhóir ('The Conquests of Charlemagne'), a late medieval Irish translation of an eleventh-/twelfth-century Latin original. Douglas Hyde edited and translated Gabháltais Shéarlais Mhóir for the Irish Texts Society in 1919, but does not appear to have known about (or at least he did not make reference to) the Cambridge copy. Who knows whether this copy may represent a previously unrecognised recension of Gabháltais Shéarlais Mhóir? Even if there is nothing new in it, it still may broaden our knowledge of manuscript dissemination of that text.
Cambridge University Library Additional MS 4182 is just one of a substantial number of Irish manuscripts in Cambridge, which, although catalogued, have yet to be explored in depth (the Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in Cambridge Libraries was compiled by Máire Herbert and Pádraig de Brún and published by Cambridge University Press in 1986). Hopefully this brief note will show that, like an oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, the Cambridge collections contain a vast amount of material just waiting to be properly exploited ...
This week Cambridge has been a hive of Irish-related activity. Events began on Monday with a seminar given to the Medieval Archaeology group at the McDonald Institute by Dr Kieran O'Connor, of the National University of Ireland Galway, on élite Gaelic settlements in Ireland in the high Middle Ages. This was followed by the Kathleen Hughes Memorial Lecture, organised by the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic in assocation with Hughes Hall, which this year was given by Prof. Marie-Therese Flanagan of Queen's University, Belfast. Prof. Flanagan spoke on the twelfth-century ecclesiastical reform movement in Ireland, highlighting Ireland's manifold connections with England and continental Europe during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Prof. Flanagan noted the poor survival rate of sources from Ireland itself at this time, and pointed out that the very good survival rate of evidence from centres such as Canterbury may lead us to overestimate the importance of that Metropolitan See for the ecclesiastical reform movement, in comparison with other potentially significant centres, such as the Regensburg Schottenkloster, from which fewer sources survive.
One of the few reform documents to have survived from Ireland is Gille (Gilbert) of Limerick's De statu ecclesiae, one copy of which survives in a Durham manuscript, and the other surviving copy of which is now preserved in Cambridge University Library and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Prof. Flanagan spoke in detail about Gille's tract, identifying a number of its sources and their links to the Continental reform movement, and she also highlighted Gille's emphasis on reform at the parish level, and his focus on priests and on women.
Cormac's Chapel, Cashel - the architectural embodiment of ecclesiastical reform in Ireland
On the same occasion as Prof. Flanagan's erudite lecture, the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic also celebrated the publication of last year's Kathleen Hughes Memorial Lecture, given by Dr Colmán Etchingham, National University of Ireland Maynooth, entitled The Irish 'Monastic Town': Is this a Valid Concept? The lecture is available from our Departmental Secretary for a modest sum, and its publication was launched by our Head of Department, Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, in the presence of the cultural attaché of the Irish Embassy in London, Mr Ciaran Byrne.
As if this was not enough, Monday's events were followed by a fascinating seminar as part of the Cambridge Group for Irish Studies series, which meets regularly at Magdalene College under the direction of Prof. Eamon Duffy. At this most recent seminar, Dr Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail, of University College Dublin, spoke about the prolific scribal culture which existed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland. Indeed, aside from Iceland, one would be hard-pressed to think of another region in which scribal culture enjoyed such vibrant and creative life so late into the modern age. Dr Ní Úrdail's paper focused in particular on one text ('The Battle of Clontarf') which exists in almost ninety different modern manuscript copies, and she demonstrated the creative engagement of the scribes who copied the text, resulting in virtually every manuscript copy of the text containing textual variants to a greater or lesser degree (thus rendering her task, as editor of the text, that much more difficult!).
Our Irish week continued with Dr Deborah Hayden, Lecturer in Modern Irish in the Department, giving a seminar on 'Poetic Law and the Medieval Irish Linguist' at Hughes Hall on Wednesday, and that is followed today by Dr Denis Casey, who will be giving a Research Seminar to ASNC on his work towards a new critical edition of the 'Annals of Clonmacnoise'. It has been an exhausting but intellectually stimulating and immensely rich week, and is testimony to the strength and diversity of medieval Irish studies in Cambridge.
A recent reading experience has left me with the feeling that perhaps I should emerge from under my cultural rock a little more often. The work that inspired this minor bout of introspection was Don Akenson's large two-volume An Irish History of Civilization (2005). That's right, An Irish History of Civilization; not A History of Irish Civilization. Akenson's intriguing work is not a history of Ireland or Irishness but a presentation of the Irish experience of world history in Talmudic form. In his preface Akenson suggests that his work is 'a collection of fictive short stories or, if you prefer, of Aggadah: very little in the way of Halachah here'.
Even from a purely 'ASNC' point of view his book is full of individually-titled pieces that provoke an examination of how we appreciate the materials with which we work and also our own relationship with them. For example, in 'The Beginning', on the passage graves along the Boyne, he remarks of their creators that 'these are a stone-aged people, but they are as far from being primitive as we are from being civilized' (vol I, p. 59). Certainly food for thought, especially when one reflects on the continuing controversy over the proposed route of the M3 motorway through the Tara-Skreen valley. In 'The Land', Akenson contrasts the pre-modern and modern Irish landscape and suggests that 'you've never been there even if you've lived there all your life' (I, p. 60). His brief tale focuses on changes such as deforestation, widespread enclosure of land, draining of lakes and consumption of bogs and concludes:
The Boyne Valley (from www. mythicalireland.com)
'So all the events that happen before, say, 1600, happen in a theatre that we have never visited, and are outlined against backdrops we can only intuit. When heroic chariot battles occur in the central plains, they are on a topographical scale now impossible to duplicate; when journeys in the northern drumlins and woodlands are mentioned, they take place in a claustrophobic tangle of scree and tree that is no longer tangible; and when an adventurer crosses parts of the far south or far north, he is frequently travelling and travailing across a desert waste where there is no fodder for horses, no grass, all is heather or bog and there are only tiny settlements, most of which the traveller can pass within a mile of and never know are there' (I, pp. 60-1).
One might go to the works of Frank Mitchell (The Shell Guide to Reading the Irish Landscape, Dublin, 1986) or Fergus Kelly (Early Irish Farming: a Study based mainly on the Law-Texts of the 7th and 8th Centuries A.D., Dublin, 2000) for a discussion of the medieval Irish landscape from a more 'scientific' point of view and find a great deal to contradict the details of Akenson's description, but to do so would be to miss the point of this particular piece of Aggadah. It is the overall thrust of the stories that is critical and, as Akenson wryly notes in his prefact, 'as far as mere accuracy is concerned, not all seeming errors in the text are accidental. Sometimes even the immortal Homer only pretended to nod'!
From 2005-9, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, was involved in a project (in collaboration with Stanford University) to digitise their superb collection of medieval manuscripts. The resulting online resource is the 'Parker Library on the Web' site. More than five hundred manuscripts were digitised, ranging from the 'Augustine Gospels' (a sixth-century, Italian Gospel-book, thought to have been brought to England by Augustine of Canterbury), to letters and documents concerning the sixteenth-century Reformation archbishop, Matthew Parker, who bequeathed the collection to Corpus, and after whom the Parker Library is named. A number of members of the ASNC Department, past and present, were involved in this project, particularly Dr Rebecca Rushforth, Dr Denis Casey, and myself, who were employed as Research Associates on the project, and who were particularly involved in the production of the site's metadata, such as the extensive bibliographies of scholarship which were compiled for each manuscript. For us, the project represented an unrivalled opportunity to have firsthand access to the manuscripts, as well as the chance to immerse ourselves in the copious modern scholarship which has been produced on various aspects of provenance, script, contents and decoration of each of the manuscripts.
This was an expensive and ambitious project, and one which is ongoing, in the sense that bibliography, and new information about the manuscripts, will be added to the site as it arises. The cost of maintaining the site is such that most of the site is only available to institutions that subscribe to it. However, the basic manuscript images are available to everyone, and it is hoped that the site will attract interested members of the public, as well as scholars. For those interested in ASNC-related topics, the Parker Library on the Web site offers a multitude of treasures, from the A-text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (in MS 173) to the Historia Brittonum (in MS 139), from the poetry of John Scotus Eriugena (in MS 223) to the homilies of Wulfstan (in MSS 190, 201, 419, and others). It is to be hoped that this will prove to be an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike.
This blog is written and maintained by members of the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, University of Cambridge. We study the history, languages, literatures and material culture of medieval Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia.
For more information about us go to: http://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk
