Aon Amharc Ar Éirinn

Aon Amharc Ar Éirinn
Author: Bernadette Cunningham
Publisher:
Total Pages: 60
Release: 2013
Genre: Manuscripts, Irish
ISBN: 9781908996220

Many of the late medieval and early modern Irish manuscripts now preserved in the collections of the Royal Irish Academy were long associated with particular learned families in Gaelic Ireland. The scholars who compiled these manuscripts, either for their own use or for particular patrons, produced fascinating cultural artefacts that are the key to understanding Gaelic scholarship and culture in the past. The manuscripts range across the full spectrum of medieval scholarship, with examples surviving of the work of members of the Gaelic learned class who specialised in law, medicine, history and poetry. Many of these same scholars also transcribed religious poems and texts, religious belief being integral to their world. Some of the most important manuscripts such as the Book of Ballymote, Book of Lecan, and Book of Uí Mhaine are miscellanies, their contents reflecting many varied strands of medieval Gaelic learning. Behind every manuscript in the Academy collection lie the very real people from the past, the scribes, compilers and patrons of those manuscripts with all their varied interests, ambitions, and their particular view of the world and their place in it. The manuscripts in our collection are the principal tools for understanding the world of those scribes, scholars, patrons, keepers and readers of manuscripts, the leading families of medieval Ireland. The learned class formed part of the court of the native elite and they were accorded prominence in Irish society and were rewarded with hereditary tenure of land and other forms of wealth in return for their services. They maintained important schools of learning, where students were trained and manuscripts were copied. Many of them retained their privileged status down to the end of the sixteenth century. -Publisher description.

Landscapes of the Learned

Landscapes of the Learned
Author: Elizabeth FitzPatrick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2023-05-04
Genre:
ISBN: 0192855743

Gaelic literati were an elite and influential group in the social hierarchy of Irish lordships between c. 1300 and 1600. From their estates, they served Gaelic and Old English ruling families in the arts of history, law, medicine, and poetry. They farmed, kept guest-houses, conducted schools, and maintained networks of learning. In other capacities, they were involved in political assemblies and memorializing dynastic histories in landscape. This book presents a framework for identifying and interpreting the settings and built heritages of their estates in lordship borderscapes. It shows that a more textured definition of what this learned class represented can be achieved through the material record of the buildings and monuments they used, and where their lands were positioned in the political map. Where literati lived and worked are conceived as expressions of their intellectual and political cultures. Mediated by case studies of the landscapes of their estates, dwellings, and schools, the methodology is predominantly field based, using archaeological investigation and topographic and spatial analyses, and drawing on historical and literary texts, place-names and lore in referencing named people to places. More widely, the study contributes a landscape perspective to the growing body of work on autochthonous intellectual culture and the exercise of power by ruling families in late medieval and early modern northern European societies.

Medieval and Early Modern Representations of Authority in Scotland and the British Isles

Medieval and Early Modern Representations of Authority in Scotland and the British Isles
Author: Kate Buchanan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2016-05-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317098145

What use is it to be given authority over men and lands if others do not know about it? Furthermore, what use is that authority if those who know about it do not respect it or recognise its jurisdiction? And what strategies and 'language' -written and spoken, visual and auditory, material, cultural and political - did those in authority throughout the medieval and early modern era use to project and make known their power? These questions have been crucial since regulations for governance entered society and are found at the core of this volume. In order to address these issues from an historical perspective, this collection of essays considers representations of authority made by a cross-section of society within the British Isles. Arranged in thematic sections, the 14 essays in the collection bridge the divide between medieval and early modern to build up understanding of the developments and continuities that can be followed across the centuries in question. Whether crown or noble, government or church, burgh or merchant; all desired power and influence, but their means of representing authority were very different. These essays encompass a myriad of methods demonstrating power and disseminating the image of authority, including: material culture, art, literature, architecture and landscapes, saintly cults, speeches and propaganda, martial posturing and strategic alliances, music, liturgy and ceremonial display. Thus, this interdisciplinary collection illuminates the variable forms in which authority was presented by key individuals and institutions in Scotland and the British Isles. By placing these within the context of the European powers with whom they interacted, this volume also underlines the unique relationships developed between the people and those who exercised authority over them.

This Is No Time to Quit Drinking

This Is No Time to Quit Drinking
Author: Stephen O'Connor
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2020-02-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1642379670

Ah, the unfortunate Bartley Hannigan. Teacher burnout is just one of his problems. There’s also his disintegrating marriage, the inheritance of a haunted property with its uninvited bibulous guest, a psycho poet with a fatal attraction, the arrival of an Irish banshee hunter with poor personal hygiene, his sudden passion for a stripper, and eventually, the hit man on his trail. But as the gypsy said, this “shit-storm” will lead to either a higher plane of understanding—or sudden death. Either way, Bartley can hear his train a comin', and he's ready to jump aboard and ride the winding rails to the last stop, because he's done with the bullshit! Done!

Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in Houghton Library, Harvard University

Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in Houghton Library, Harvard University
Author: Cornelius G. Buttimer
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2022-01-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0268201005

The first full account of North America’s largest collection of traditional Irish-language manuscripts. Harvard University has the largest collection of Irish-language codices in North America, held in Houghton Library, its rare book repository. The manuscripts are a part of the age-old heritage of Irish book production, dating to the early Middle Ages. Handwritten works in Houghton contain versions of medieval poetry and sagas, recopied in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to which period most of the library’s documents belong. Contemporary writings from that time, as well as ones by the post-Famine Irish immigrant community in the United States, are included. This catalogue describes the collection in full for the first time and will be an invaluable aid to research on Irish and Irish American cultural and literary output. The author’s introduction examines how the collection was formed. This untold story is an important chapter in America’s intellectual history, reflecting a phase of unprecedented expansion in Harvard University’s scholarship and teaching during the early twentieth century when the institution’s program of studies began to accommodate an increasing range of European languages and literatures and their sources. This indispensable guide to a major repository’s records of the Irish past, and of America’s Irish diaspora, will interest specialists in early and post-medieval codices. It should prove of relevance as well to scholars and students of comparative literature, cultural studies, and Irish and Irish American history.