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15 - Travelling Westwards: Finding Europe in the Irish Middle Ages
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- By Ann Dooley
- Edited by Marjet Brolsma, Alex Drace-Francis, Krisztina Lajosi-Moore, Enno Maessen, Marleen Rensen, Jan Rock, Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez, Guido Snel
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- Book:
- Networks, Narratives and Nations
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 16 November 2022
- Print publication:
- 11 July 2022, pp 189-202
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Summary
Abstract
Medieval Irish bardic verse is a frustratingly esoteric and inward-looking genre, deeply self-referential in its own hidebound traditions exclusive to native Irish poetics and politics. This chapter attempts to pry open one example of the genre to reveal a European core, and a mediation of Irish and European understandings of “gaisgeadh/prowess.”
Keywords: Irish bardic poetry; Dublin University; Connacht kings and lords; translatio studii
It is often claimed that Ireland lies quite outside the historical experience of the European Middle Ages. In this view, her marginal status has been evident since the Roman period or even before, an outlier even in the Celtic world of prehistory. More recent historiographical trends have re-established somewhat a Roman profile for Ireland in terms of trade contact and a related Roman literacy that predates the arrival of Christianity in the fifth century. The links with the Latin West of the early Middle Ages through the mediation of Christian literacy and its effect on law, social custom and literature is now a scholarly orthodoxy and few would have the temerity to question it. The later medieval period and the “two nations” split after the English invasion of Ireland in the late twelfth century seems to find a Gaelic Ireland at a political disadvantage: pushed to the margins as it was, with little understanding or sympathy for its divergent social and cultural underpinnings, it is harder to discern how its native structures link to a wider European world – outside of the very obvious universalizing relations maintained by the network of the Church.
I wish to examine the faint outlines of one such link here. My focus is on a fragment of a bardic praise poem which Lambert McKenna published in his anthology Aithdioghluim Dána from the duanaire or poem-book embedded in the manuscript called the Yellow Book of Lecan.4 McKenna cautiously suggested an identification for the named subject of the eulogy as Toirrdhealbhach Ó Conchobhair, one of the most powerful kings of his dynasty to rule Connacht and to be accorded the title of High King of Ireland in the Irish Middle Ages.
10 - The Plague and Its Consequences in Ireland
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- By Ann Dooley, Professor of Celtic Studies at the University of Toronto
- Edited by Lester K. Little, Smith College, Massachusetts
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- Book:
- Plague and the End of Antiquity
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 December 2006, pp 215-228
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Summary
Analyses of plague visitations in medieval Ireland, including the epidemic of 544, were first advanced in some detail by William P. MacArthur in 1949. Apart from the discussion by J. R. Maddicott of the plague in seventh-century England, which also uses Irish evidence, there has been no subsequent analysis of the Irish material in any detailed way. It may be useful then, in fleshing out the trajectory and consequences of the Justinianic Plague outbreaks in Europe generally, to consider the evidence from Ireland, where a contemporary annalistic record survives. The witness afforded by these early Irish records remains sketchy, however, and thus part of the purpose of this essay, besides assessing the outbreaks themselves and their immediate historical consequences, is to map something of the cultural form that evolved from the impact of these events; plague visitations provide an insight into the formation of a particular crisis-management mentality in Ireland and Irish-influenced European zones.
The arrival of a plague in Ireland in 544 would seem to concur with the westward trajectory of the outbreak of Justinianic Plague at this time; it had arrived in central Gaul by 543. The exact mode of ingress is not clear, but one possible way was the one that ran through the western route from Narbonne to the Garonne and thence past Brittany to western Britain. Such a route extends to southern Ireland also and does not necessarily make landfall in Britain.
I - Arthur of the Irish: A Viable Concept?
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- By Ann Dooley
- Edited by Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, Cardiff University
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- Book:
- Arthurian Literature XXI
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 12 September 2012
- Print publication:
- 02 December 2004, pp 9-28
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Summary
The myriad reconstructions of a figure of King Arthur, whether defined by literary works and/or situated in a historical context, have been one of the great distractions of British medieval cultural historians. Arthur never figured in medieval Irish tradition in any significant way; indeed, it is precisely because whatever traces may be recovered of an Arthurian tradition in Ireland are presumed to carry for an Irish scene none of the same configurations, developments and cultural concerns as in Britain, that these Arthurian markers have never been seriously revised or considered. For reasons that are as much political as historical, Arthur is only of minor interest to Irish scholars and a study of Irish Arthuriana will be presumed to yield no insights for the course of Ireland's own distinctive cultural or political history. Although Irish scholars may easily dismiss Irish references to the British hero – the material is, after all, thin – the fact remains, however, that scholars of British history may not so quickly ignore them. I am reminded rather forcibly how all too easy it is to forget the Irish dimension when a truly masterful study of the early British tradition appears and has every appearance from its exhaustive thoroughness of being held for some time to come as the last word on the subject. I refer of course to Higham's recent volume on Arthur. One look at the generous number of distribution maps in this work shows a Britain of splendid isolation in relation to which not even a bare outline of the Irish east coast is allowed to intrude.