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.

Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in Cambridge Libraries

Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in Cambridge Libraries
Author: Pádraig de Brún
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 1986-03-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0521302617

This 1986 book gives a detailed account of the manuscripts in Cambridge written wholly or partly in the Irish language and contains a highly informative introduction. This comprehensive, rigorously researched volume will be of value to anyone with an interest in Irish manuscripts and bibliography in general.

The Book of the British Library

The Book of the British Library
Author: Michael Leapman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2012
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN:

As well as holding some of the world's most prized cultural treasures, the British Library is the repository of the nation's collective memory. Owing its origin to the generosity and far-sightedness of a handful of 18th-century scholars and booklovers, and built up over 250 years, the Library's very extensive collections--of books, manuscripts, maps, music, newspapers, photographs, sound recordings, stamps, and digital media--offer keys to the understanding of human achievement in literature, art, music, politics, journalism, exploration, and much else, from ancient times to the present day. In this highly illustrated book, Michael Leapman tells the Library's story, highlighting the most significant and beautiful items in its care, as well as exploring some of the lesser known, more surprising artifacts housed in its iconic building in the heart of London.

The Gospels of Tsar Ivan Alexander

The Gospels of Tsar Ivan Alexander
Author: Ekaterina Dimitrova
Publisher:
Total Pages: 74
Release: 1994
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

The Gospels of Tsar Ivan Alexander is the outstanding treasure of a cultural and spiritual Renaissance in fourteenth-century Bulgaria, and a masterpiece of Byzantine manuscript art. The Gospels' creation was not only the supreme achievement of Bulgarian medieval culture; it also marked its final flourishing, 500 years after the introduction of Christianity and the Cyrillic script into Bulgaria and shortly before the country's collapse under the invasion of the Ottoman Turks. Commissioned, in 1355 for Tsar Ivan Alexander, the Gospels was completed in just one year by a single scribe, Simeon, and by artists of the Turnovo school, the Bulgarian capital, ecclesiastical and cultural centre, of the time. It contains 367 miniatures, among which is an outstanding portrait of the Tsar himself and his family. Following the fall of Turnovo in 1393, the manuscript was moved to safety across the Danube to Moldavia. By the early seventeenth century it was in the monastery of St Paul on Mount Athos and it was here that in 1837 the young Hon. Robert Curzon contrived to acquire it as a souvenir of his visit.