The subject of Arnold Horner’s undergraduate dissertation in 1968 was a mideighteenth-century manuscript atlas depicting estates in Co. Kildare. Since then, nearly half his scholarly publications have dealt with various aspects of early Irish mapmaking. For 40 years and more he has also been committed to teaching and research in mainstream human geography. Far from being in any way competitive, these two interests, map-

Distant Reading, Digital Humanities and the Changing Field of Early Irish Fiction: Micro versus Macro, More or Less?

Purpose– The aim of this paper is to discuss a unique and significant article about advertising that was published in Dublin in 1910.Design/methodology/approach– The article, entitled “The advertising problem” (reproduced in its entirety in the Appendix) is analysed and contextualised.Findings– It is demonstrated that at least some early Irish advertising practitioners had a reflexive understanding of the tools of marketing and advertising as used then in Ireland and abroad, and that their own use of such tools served not only manufacturers and other clients, but also the ideological project of an Irish-Ireland.Originality/value– This analysis has a particular value in rebutting clearly any possible assumption that advertising and marketing practices in Ireland in the early twentieth century were simply “quaint”.

Celtic Tigers: Recent Studies in Early Irish and Welsh Literature

The medieval Cormac's adventure in the Land of Promise contains a list of 'The twelve truths of the kingdom', twelve ordeals that include the cauldron and Morann's three collars. The paper discusses the 'cauldron of truth' in early Irish law and then proposes that Morann's third collar can be regarded as an ordeal by fire.

The ‘Caldron of Poesy’, a seemingly cryptic early Irish text dating probably from the eighth century, discusses three cauldrons in varying positions that represent different degrees of knowledge and art. It will be argued that this construct may have been a local representation of long-standing and basic assumptions about the structure of the human mind and the role of education, which ultimately reach back to the beginnings of Greek learning.

La technologie fabuleuse dans la littérature irlandaise ancienne La description d’objets techniquement ingénieux ou complexes n’est pas un thème reconnu de la littérature irlandaise ancienne, mais l’on trouve des exemples de moyens de transport, de pièces d’armement et de procédés pour acquérir ou préparer des aliments qui montrent qu’une intrigue peut impliquer un élément de technologie fabuleuse – ce dernier pouvant apparaître comme un thème quasiment indépendant dans une histoire culturelle foisonnante. Les objets merveilleux ne sont pas surnaturels, ni même magiques ; pourtant, il s’agit d’objets fantastiques qui ont dû avoir plus d’existence dans la littérature qu’ils n’en ont jamais eu dans la réalité historique. La «réalisation» verbale de ces procédés suppose une domestication et une exploitation du langage, dont la complexité potentielle reflète bien celle de ces inventions.

The article examines riddling as a form of specialized discourse in the circa eleventh-century Irish text Tochmarc Ailbe (“The Wooing of Ailbe”), in which the warrior-hero Finn mac Cumaill tests the suitability of King Cormac Mac Airt’s daughter Ailbe Grúadbrecc as a bride. Ailbe responds admirably to the riddles posed by the aging Finn, displaying her own personal mettle and intellectual acumen by answering him with witty ripostes of her own. The resolution of conflict between the couple is accomplished through this verbal sparring, and ultimately reveals as a major theme of the work the complementarity of the sexes, a dynamic harmony which is achieved through the power of oral discourse. Additionally, the power of the female voice in early Irish storytelling is further emphasized.

Juliana Adelman, Francis Ludlow*, The past, present and future of environmental history in Ireland, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature, Vol. 114C (2014), pp. 359-391

<p>James Clarence Mangan has been celebrated by James Joyce and W. B. Yeats as one of the preeminent Irish writers of the nineteenth century. This essay interprets his poem ‘The Lovely Land’, first printed in The Nation on 18 July 1846, in terms of genre and nationalism. In an early Irish example of ekphrasis, the poem stages a rhetorical misreading where the speaker mistakes an unnamed Irish landscape of Daniel Maclise’s for a painting by Veronese or Poussin. Where – among his English and German Romantic predecessors – might Mangan have found a precedent for the poem’s treatment of landscape? And how does the colonial relationship between Ireland and England fit in with the poem’s complex manoeuvring of different national iconographies? In seeking to answer these questions, this essay looks to<br />further the ‘mapping’ of Mangan’s position in Romanticism as an international movement.</p>

<p>James Clarence Mangan has been celebrated by James Joyce and W. B. Yeats as one of the preeminent Irish writers of the nineteenth century. This essay interprets his poem ‘The Lovely Land’, first printed in The Nation on 18 July 1846, in terms of genre and nationalism. In an early Irish example of ekphrasis, the poem stages a rhetorical misreading where the speaker mistakes an unnamed Irish landscape of Daniel Maclise’s for a painting by Veronese or Poussin. Where – among his English and German Romantic predecessors – might Mangan have found a precedent for the poem’s treatment of landscape? And how does the colonial relationship between Ireland and England fit in with the poem’s complex manoeuvring of different national iconographies? In seeking to answer these questions, this essay looks to<br />further the ‘mapping’ of Mangan’s position in Romanticism as an international movement.</p>

Texts in medieval Irish were traditionally used as a source from which to excavate the remnants of a radically ancient language and world-view – Celtic, oral, pre- Christian, ultimately Indo-European. In the past twenty years a new perspective has become dominant, emphasising the sophisticated contemporary concerns of the monastic literati who composed the texts that have come down to us. However, the disjuncture between those two approaches remains problematic. This article attempts a new approach to the question, emphasising the educational and scholarly context of medieval Irish creativity. Many of the monuments of the early Irish language are part of an enquiry into the history of language and languages, in which Irish interacts closely with the « three sacred languages » and especially Latin; the texts’ depiction of the pagan past of Ireland is oriented through a scholarly engagement with Graeco-Roman paganism; and some of the key discourses of Irish saga literature are influenced by the programmes and methodologies of the Latin-based educational system of the time, especially questionand-answer dialogues. The article applies this approach in a case study from the heroic tale Tochmarc Emire, « The Wooing of Emer », in which a riddling dialogue between lovers is shown to be directly related to the lore of the canonical glossaries of Old Irish. .

ARCHAEOLOGICAL REMAINS OF excavated early medieval houses coupled with the examination of early Irish texts suggest that the location, layout and dimensions of houses were instrumental in communicating status in early medieval Ulster. Changes to houses and settlements from the 9th century onwards may reflect an insecure society adapting to major socio-economic changes and the threat of slave rather than cattle raiders.

Gender & History the thought of the Anglo-Saxon monastic theorist Aldhelm (c.639-709), for example, religious men and women partook, in Emma Pettit's words, of a 'shared invisible spiritual identity heavily indebted to masculinity'. Monks and nuns alike were enjoined to contend 'manfully ' (viriliter) in the battle against vices. The visible dimensions of religious life, however, from dress to demeanour, retained clear gender distinctions, and for Aldhelm the transition to religious life entailed a more dramatic break for men than for women. Elsewhere, hagiographers drew on different models of sanctity in characterising the transition to female religious life, from the transcending of gender through virile asceticism to the transformation of gender through spiritualised motherhood. Often, as Simon Coates has shown in his study of the vitae of the sixth-century abbess Radegund of Poitiers, hagiographers blended elements from these models. cross the diversity of early medieval models of sanctity (and their modern interpretations), chastity was a crucial sign of religious distinction. But chastity was also fragile, an 'unstable condition and easily lost among the pitfalls of the world'. From early Christianity onwards, sexual lapses were rude reminders to individuals and communities of the gender roles which religious orientation sought to reconfigure. When, in the early third century, Tertullian critiqued an emergent custom in Carthage for virgins who had renounced marriage to stand unveiled in church, he noted acerbically that after uncovering their heads many ended up covering their bellies in shame or resorting to abortion to prevent public disclosure of sexual sin. 9 From punitive retribution to the remedy of penance, responses to such lapses endeavoured to recover the communal experience of chastity and to contain the turbulence of sexual sin in communities of the chaste.

This essay expands on recent discussions of the influence of early Irish nature poetry on Brian O'Nolan's writing, specifically with regard to it succinctness of language and restraint of tone. Focusing on representations of death, emotion, and self-reflection across the oeuvre, Ian Ó Caoimh explores the dangerous consequences of indulging one’s self or of excessive self-examination in O'Nolan's writing, a stance which is in constant conflict with the compulsion to strike that personal note in the first place.To read the article, click Download or View PDF.

Women in Ireland came into focus and onto the political stage during and as a result of nationalist and socialist movements that began in the mid-1700s and continued through the 1920s. Women like Anna Parnell, Constance Markievicz, and Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington participated in the land wars, struggles for independence from Britain and the suffragist movement. Indigenous silent feature filmmaking in Ireland was born out of this critical period of political and social change. From 1916 to 1935, Irish filmmakers produced over forty silent feature films only six of which have survived. A close study of these films, fragments of three others, and contemporary film reviews and archival synopses of the non-surviving films reveals how early Irish silent films tackled nationalist issues, but did little to represent the active participation of women. Women in these films are passive sisters, lovers, and mothers, impacted by rather than impacting historical events. This is not surprising. Irish silent cinema was a male-dominated industry with a nationalist agenda that perpetuated gender stereotypes. This study links nationalism and women in Irish silent cinema by looking at how female representation in these early films reflected a gendered ideology that existed in Irish culture alongside other narratives of the nation.

During the heightened cultural activity of the Celtic Revival, the moral ownership and utilisation of Ireland's literary remains became an important cultural issue. At the same time, many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish writers were concerned to ‘retell’ ancient stories in ways which explored their relevance to the modern world. One of the most retold tales from the period was the story of Déirdre and the Sons of Usnach. The story of Déirdre broaches one of the most ubiquitous of human experiences – betrayal – and it does so in relation to both political and interpersonal behaviour. This essay examines two dramatic treatments from the early years of the century: W.B. Yeats's one-act Deirdre (1907) and J.M. Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows, unfinished at the time of his death and finally published in 1910. This essay looks to account for the particular ways in which each author inflects the legend in terms of their own concerns, and in particular how both Yeats and Synge engaged with a discourse of betrayal that – although always significant in Irish cultural history – was moving to a position of centrality in Irish national life in the years leading up to the revolutionary period.

ABSTRACT The synthesis of pagan and Christian cosmologies that informs medieval Irish letters incorporates prestigious and extraordinary weapons, and other such objects into an all-compassing Nature, in which they are preferentially associated with the themes of heroic ethics, legitimate and just royal rule, and the removal of errant rulers through a cosmic deployment of the “instruments of their fate.” Yet only rhetorical effects of literary depiction raise such weapons to a status approximating the preternatural.

The reference to malrunar or 'speech runes' in Sigrdrifumal suggests a performative aspect to the practice of early Germanic law that transcends the swearing of oaths and the reciting of law codes attested to by literary sources. Indeed early runic texts often feature alliteration, much as do the old Scandinavian legal tracts. This parallelism suggests that early Northern legal language was not stylised merely for mnemonic purposes, but instead reflects an oral-performative praxis similar to that which appears to be reflected in early Irish sources. But the relationship between performance and memorisation has not always been demarcated clearly in recent scholarship. Oralperformative theory is often called upon today without reference to explanations of social action. The privileging of generative performance over pre-literate memory culture seems to represent only an awkward victory of the medievalistic 'anthropological turn' over other key expressions of socio-cultural theory.

The growth of digitized archives of books and newspapers has opened up new kinds of research based upon far larger bodies of evidence than was previously possible by manual searches. A pioneering study of this type is Richard Jensen's much-debated article discussing the application of a term, ‘No Irish need apply’ (NINA), which was regarded as commonplace of anti-Irish behaviour in nineteenth-century America and Britain. Jensen searched some of the earliest available digital resources for instances of the term NINA being used in the United States. Finding very few cases, he concluded that, though the term occupied a curiously hardy place in the collective psychology of Irish Americans, NINA was a ‘myth of victimization’ which Irish-Americans used to galvanize their community against Nativist antipathy. Jensen accepted the presence of NINA in early nineteenth-century England, where it was, he argued, a ‘cliché’ for British anti-Irish hostility. However, the scope of his research could not extend to the British context because of a lack of comparable digitized sources. Taking Jensen as a starting point, this article draws upon evidence from over fifty digitized newspapers to examine the British realities of NINA, and early Irish reactions to it. It shows how the Irish themselves were the first to politicize NINA, using it, from as early as the 1840s, as an epithet for any perceived British injustice to Ireland or the Irish. By bringing together these British roots and the American myths, and in mediating them through Irish perceptions of NINA, the article helps us explain why NINA has endured so long in the memory.