Codices Hibernenses Eximii III: Book of Ui Mhaine , livre ebook

Royal Irish Academy

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

208 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Sujets

Stephen Ireland

Informations

Publié par	Royal Irish Academy
Date de parution	01 novembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781911479604
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,2250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Book of U Mhaine
Codices Hibernenses Eximii III
Edited by Elizabeth Boyle and Ruair hUiginn
Book of U Mhaine Codices Hibernenses Eximii III
First published 2022 Royal Irish Academy, 19 Dawson Street, Dublin 2 www.ria.ie
Text the contributors 2022
ISBN 978-1-911479-55-0 (HB) ISBN 978-1-911479-56-7 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-911479-60-4 (epub)
All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owners or a licence permitting restricted copying in Ireland issued by the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency CLG, 63 Patrick Street, D n Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, A96 WF25.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The assistance of the School of Celtic Studies, Maynooth University is gratefully acknowledged.

Copyediting and indexing: Brendan O Brien
Book design: Fidelma Slattery
Printed in the UK by CPI
Royal Irish Academy is a member of Publishing Ireland, the Irish book publishers association
5 4 3 2 1

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
We want to try to offset the environmental impacts of carbon produced during the production of our books and journals. For the production of our books this year we will plant 45 trees with Easy Treesie. The Easy Treesie - Crann Project organises children to plant trees. Crann - Trees for Ireland is a membership-based, non-profit, registered charity (CHY13698) uniting people with a love of trees.
It was formed in 1986 by Jan Alexander, with the aim of Releafing Ireland . Its mission is to enhance the environment of Ireland through planting, promoting, protecting and increasing awareness about trees and woodlands.
Contents
Introduction
Elizabeth Boyle and Ruair hUiginn
1. The Book of U Mhaine, c .1390 to 1690, and Some of Those Associated with the Manuscript in That Period
Nollaig Mura le
2 The Origins and Later History of the Book of U Mhaine
Bernadette Cunningham and Raymond Gillespie
3 Heroes and Ancestors in the Book of U Mhaine
Ruair hUiginn
4 The Poems on World-Kingship in the Book of U Mhaine
Michael Clarke
5 The Dindshenchas in the Book of U Mhaine: Ninety Years Later
Marie-Luise Theuerkauf
6 A fhir, n h ad dreich temrach : a Poem on Medieval Irish Society
Liam Breatnach
7 Do Dhubhfhoclaibh : Word-Lists and Glossaries in the Book of U Mhaine
Paul Russell
8 Auraicept na n ces and the Study of Language in the Book of U Mhaine: Textual Transmission and Scribal Context
Deborah Hayden
9 Aspects of the Transmission of Poetry by Adam Cusin in the Book of U Mhaine
P draig Mach in
10 Classical Modern Irish Poems on the U Cheallaigh within and without Leabhar Ua Maine
M che l Hoyne
11 A Memorial Manuscript: the Illumination of the Book of U Mhaine
Karen Ralph
Bibliography
Contributors
Introduction
Elizabeth Boyle and Ruair hUiginn
Royal Irish Academy MS D ii 1 (Cat. no. 1225) has been known as the Book of U Mhaine since the early nineteenth century, as Nollaig Mura le shows in the opening chapter of this volume. Before that, it was referred to as Leabhar U Dhubhag in , after the Dubhag in family of hereditary learned scholars, who were based in the territory of U Mhaine, which straddles the borders of modern-day counties Galway and Roscommon, as well as parts of Clare and Offaly. The manuscript, which is the work of some ten different scribes, was written for Muircheartach Ceallaigh (d. c .1407), bishop of Clonfert and later archbishop of Tuam. At least part of the manuscript, in the hand of the scribe Fael n mac an Ghabhann, was written while Ceallaigh was still bishop of Clonfert, that is, between 1378 and 1393; another part seems to be contemporaneous with Ceallaigh s election to the archbishopric of Tuam. A final section of the manuscript is in the hand of the scribe Adam Cusin (on whom see below, Chapter 8 by Deborah Hayden and Chapter 9 by P draig Mach in). The most thorough modern palaeographical and codicological analysis of the manuscript up until now was William O Sullivan s detailed study published in 1989 (for a summary of O Sullivan s argument as well as updated analysis see Cunningham and Gillespie below, Chapter 2, and Mach in, Chapter 9).
The Book of U Mhaine is miscellaneous in content, comprising a wide range of texts in Old, Middle and Early Modern Irish, in prose and poetry, and covering a diverse range of genres from history to poetry, grammar to dindshenchas , glossaries to genealogies. Miscellaneous, however, should not necessarily be understood to mean random. Certain thematic clusters can be identified, and the layout and juxtaposition of texts appear to be both deliberate and meaningful. While the manuscript contains much that represents senchas , that is, the learned historical discourse of medieval Ireland, there is also much about the manuscript that is more innovative, not least the free mixture and association of contemporary poetry and older poetry in a single book ( Mach in, Chapter 9). Many of the poems in the manuscript are of particular social or political importance, and a significant number of them are uniquely preserved in the Book of U Mhaine. For example, Senchas Gall tha Cl ath The History of the Foreigners of Dublin , a late Middle Irish poem that not only seeks to assert Armagh s ecclesiastical primacy over the city of Dublin but is also an important document for Ireland s economic history, is found in its only complete copy on 68vb-69va of the manuscript (Boyle and Breatnach 2015). Similarly, the Middle Irish poem beginning A fhir, n h ad dreich Temrach O man, do not close the front of Tara , only survives in the Book of U Mhaine, and the edition and translation of the poem by Liam Breatnach (Chapter 6), the first detailed analysis of this poem, is a significant contribution.
As with most of our other surviving medieval Irish codices, the Book of U Mhaine preserves many texts that are considerably older than the date of the manuscript itself. In the case of the historical material in the manuscript, much of it dates from the Middle Irish period ( c .900- c .1200), and represents the sophisticated chronological and synchronistic scholarship that was being undertaken in Irish schools during that period. Although senchas is the learned historical discourse of medieval Ireland, its subject matter is not Ireland alone. As Michael Clarke demonstrates in his contribution (Chapter 4), senchas was also concerned with the genealogies, wanderings, wars and achievements of ancient and modern nations across Europe and eastwards to Mesopotamia and beyond . In this regard, the Book of U Mhaine has much in common with another contemporaneous manuscript, namely the Book of Ballymote (on which see hUiginn 2018), which also contains a good deal of material concerned with universal history . As Ruair hUiginn notes in Chapter 3 of this volume, the presence of considerable quantities of genealogical material in the Book of U Mhaine also brings it into line with other contemporaneous manuscripts. Similarly, dindshenchas , the sub-discipline of senchas concerned specifically with discourse on places, is strongly represented in the Book of U Mhaine, and this is explored by Marie-Luise Theuerkauf in Chapter 5.
Poetry and learned discourse in medieval Ireland were built upon, and intimately bound up with, the study of the Irish language and the metalanguage of grammatical discourse. In this respect, it is unsurprising that the Book of U Mhaine contains texts that reflect this intellectual context, not least a copy of the grammatical treatise Auraicept na n ces The Scholars Primer (Hayden, Chapter 8). The manuscript also contains glossaries and word-lists, whose complexity and rich textual connections are explored by Paul Russell (Chapter 7). These learned texts provided pedagogical and poetic foundations for what would subsequently evolve and adapt into the Early Modern Irish bardic tradition. In Chapter 10, M che l Hoyne uses the corpus of bardic poetry addressed to the manuscript s patron and his family to consider the surprising omission of such poetry from the Book of U Mhaine. As Hoyne notes, there is only one praise poem to a member of the U Cheallaigh preserved in the manuscript, namely that to Muircheartach Ceallaigh s grand-uncle, Uilliam, and Hoyne assesses the significance of this for our understanding of the manuscript s production.
The Book of U Mhaine is an example not only of medieval Irish textual culture but also of visual culture, most notably in the form of the zoomorphic and geometric initials that populate the manuscript. Elsewhere, animals are used as turns-in-the-path , visual aids to the reader. Although the manuscript s decoration may not be as ornate and impressive as some other medieval Irish manuscripts, in the final chapter of this volume Karen Ralph argues that its nature and positioning within the manuscript work in tandem with the textual contents to form a testament to memory and commemoration , reflective of the ambitions of its patron.
The present volume grew out of the conference on the Book of U Mhaine held at the Royal Irish Academy in March 2017 and organised in collaboration with the Department of Early Irish at Maynooth University. This was the third in a series of conferences on medieval Irish manuscripts, and the papers from the first two, on Lebor na hUidre and the Book of Ballymote, have already appeared as volumes in the Codices Hibernenses Eximii series. A volume on the Book of Ballycummin (23 N 10), the subject of the fourth conference in 2019, is forthcoming. Most of the chapters presented here are revised versions of the papers that were delivered at the 2017 conference, but in some cases contributors have opted to submi