The Lives of Daniel Binchy: Irish Scholar, Diplomat, Public Intellectual by Tom Garvin (review)

Abstract

not appear to have provided new revelations about the period or the person. This is perhaps unsurprising given Cosgrave’s wariness about archives, history and historians: a recalcitrant subject, he left behind no personal diaries, while other personal records did not survive the destruction of the family home during the Irish Civil War. Not all readers of this biography will feel as favourably disposed to Cosgrave as its author, but Michael Laffan’s measured and scholarly study allows readers to come to their own conclusions. As is customary with the Royal Irish Academy’s ‘Judging’ series, the book is beautifully designed, with a wealth of fascinating documents, photographs, cartoons, election leaflets and other material vividly evoking the period. Professor Fearghal McGarry teaches in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics in Queen’s University Belfast. His The Rising. Ireland: Easter 1916 was published by Oxford University Press in 2010. Notes 1 www.irishhistoryonline.ie 2 Seán Keating, Art, Politics and Building the Irish Nation (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2013), p.135. The Lives of Daniel Binchy: Irish Scholar, Diplomat, Public Intellectual, Tom Garvin (Sallins: Irish Academic Press, 2016), xii+212 pages. Full-length biographies of Irish scholars are relatively rare. Perhaps the delivery of lectures, interaction with students and colleagues, marking of exams and occasional forays into scholarly publication are not lively material for the biographer. The small number of exceptions such as John Pentland Mahaffey, George O’Brien and Eoin MacNeill generally had in addition something of a public persona. This is also true of Daniel Binchy, the subject of this study, who was not only a leading scholar, but also a diplomat and a perceptive public intellectual, noted for his early and clear-eyed articulation of the evils of Hitler and Nazism. He always described himself as a medieval historian, but in truth, as his friend Donal Cregan observed, he was a ‘Renaissance man’. Spring 2017: Book Reviews 118 Studies • volume 106 • number 421 Binchy was born in 1899 into a prosperous middle-class family in Charleville, Co. Cork. He was educated with the La Sainte Union nuns in Banagher, Co. Offaly and at the Jesuit college of Clongowes, before going on to a brilliant career in UCD, where he concentrated on history and law, and was auditor of the Literary and Historical Society. He was called to the bar in 1920. He won a travelling scholarship to the University of Munich, graduating DPhil magna cum laude with a thesis on the medieval Schottenkloster of Ratisbon. He returned to UCD in 1925 to take up the chair of Roman law, jurisprudence and legal history. The latter discipline included early Irish law, and this brought him into the world of Old and Middle Irish linguistics, without which, as Eoin MacNeill advised him, ‘your medieval and legal qualifications won’t be much use’. He set about mastering modern and older forms of Irish, study that eventually culminated in his great publication, the formidable seven-volume Corpus Juris Hibernici. This transcription of the whole body of early Irish law manuscripts commenced during his tenure of a senior research fellowship at Oxford, but was largely the product of thirty years of subsequent labour in the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. Professor Thomas Charles Edward’s opinion is that the Corpus will ‘probably never be superseded, at least not for many generations’. In 1936 he collaborated with the great Rudolf Thurneysen and others to publish the discreetly titled Studies in Early Irish Law, which dealt frankly with the position of women in early Irish law and today is recognised as a pioneering contribution to women’s studies. He made a number of other notable contributions on early law and philology, including an English edition of Thurneysen’s A Grammar of Old Irish, which he published in collaboration with Osborn Bergin in 1946. Professor Garvin is good at relating Binchy to the twentieth-century Celticists, a clear-eyed, near-legendary group of outstanding pioneering scholars, with whom he has come to be included. He argues that they represented, with the Gaelic League and the literary movement, the third pillar of the Irish cultural revival. Binchy’s qualities as an exacting, evidence-based...