:<i>The Bible in the Early Irish Church, A.D. 550 to 850</i>

Abstract A search of the Irish State Administration Database (ISAD, www.isad.ie), which records the origins, life cycle, policy domain and functions of all central public organisations since the foundation of the Irish state over a century ago, reveals that, following the formative and turbulent year of 1922, the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General was the first new agency formally established in 1923. The primacy given to what we might now refer to as a supreme audit institution (SAI) for the public sector reflects the importance of financial control to the effective functioning and legitimacy of the executive organs of the nascent state. In this paper we analyse the changing range and scope of functions undertaken by the Comptroller and Auditor General in its first century. We examine first the sustained growth in the number and type of public bodies subject to Comptroller and Auditor General scrutiny. Second, we look at the broadening in scope of audit functions beyond the traditional concerns of regularity, ensuring the money was spent for the purposes for which it was given (financial and compliance audit), to encompass wider values such as efficiency, economy and effectiveness and even performance, more broadly conceived. Finally, as well as the instrumental perspective on the role of the Comptroller and Auditor General’s Office, we reflect on the key relationships and cultural and symbolic dimensions of the Office’s work across time. From this analysis we draw some conclusions about the nature of financial control in the contemporary state, as compared with the early Irish state.

Book Review: The Bible in the Early Irish Church, A.D. 550 to 850

ABSTRACT: According to the hand-written list of contents bound with British Library MS Egerton 92, the last six pages, numbered 55–60, contain early Irish legal material related to fines for injury. A note added by Eugene O’Curry in 1849 notes that there were no legal texts contained in the volume. This article presents evidence that the last six pages of Egerton 92 have not been lost, but rather that they were bound with British Library MS Egerton 90 at some point after the original list of contents in Egerton 92 was written, but before O’Curry saw the manuscript.

THE BIBLE IN THE EARLY IRISH CHURCH (A.D. 550 TO 850). By MartinMcNamara with assistance from Michael T. Martin. Commentaria Sacred Texts and their Commentaries: Jewish, Christian and Islamic, Volume 13. Leiden: Brill, 2022. Pp. xii + 213. Hardcover, $161.00.

The Rhetorical Arts in Late Antique and Early Medieval Ireland, by Brian James Stone

Graciela Cabal (1939-2004) was an Argentine children’s writer and an important and active figure in the consolidation of a youth literature in Argentina in the 1980s. She descended from two large Irish families who settled in Suipacha (Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina). Cabal lends her marvelous literary voice to those sheep raisers in the short story “Gualicho”, about a failed wedding and a bewitched groom in the Irish community around 1850, in which even Father Fahey is present to bless the ceremony. What at first sight appears as a beautiful children's story turns into a narrative of migration with intertexts from Jorge Luis Borges and from Argentina's national poem Martín Fierro. Cabal’s “Irishness” (also present in Secretos de Familia, her autobiographical novel) has never been studied and her texts are probably the only ones in Argentine children's fiction which make reference to the early Irish community

The Afterlife of St Cuthbert: Place, Texts and Ascetic Tradition, 690–1500

Abstract: This paper consists of two notes. The first argues that Scottish Gaelic sgitheach and Modern Irish sceach both have their origins in plural forms of Early Irish scé 'thorn tree', a paradigm in which we would expect to find alternation between iä and e . Similar paradigm splits and instances of paradigmatic levelling are discussed, with examples from Old, Middle and Early Modern Irish. The second note draws on the evidence of Scottish Gaelic dìthean 'flower' to clarify the earlier form of the word attested in Early Modern Irish manuscripts as dithan or dithen 'corn marigold'. It is argued that dìthean most likely goes back to Early Irish díán . This discussion also sheds some light on the form of the Early Irish word for 'purple foxglove'.

When did nd become nn in which Early Irish environments?

Features of early medieval stone-built churches in Ireland, such as antae, have been identified as skeuomorphs — symbolic imitations — of features of timber architecture. It is argued in this paper that skeuomorphism is much less in evidence in the stone churches than has been supposed. It is also argued that antae must be understood as architectural iconography, and that their referent might have been the Temple of Solomon.

Though medieval Irish literature is awash with characters described as ‘heroes’ by scholars and the public alike, such as Cú Chulainn and Finn mac Cumailll, what precisely is meant when we describe these characters as heroic remains uncertain. This project argues that, based on an intensive comparative study of two hundred and fifty-one medieval Irish works of heroic literature, drawn predominantly from the seventh through the fifteenth centuries, that there are six common qualities connecting medieval Irish heroes. These six qualities do not exist in a vacuum they emerged in response to cultural factors and were modified as society developed. At least two of the qualities are potentially based in ancient Celtic cultural practices described by Classical authors, while others appear to be rooted in medieval Irish aristocratic lifestyles. All six qualities change as they are influenced by historical events that shift how medieval Ireland conceptualizes aristocratic violence, such as the Norse and Norman invasions.

When exploring the relationship between her Irish ancestry and her creativity, Roxanne learned that women’s poetry in Ireland was largely obliterated from the literary canon and missing from the archives. Early Irish poetry was often anonymous, and scholars presumed this indicated male authorship even when written with a female persona. However, while women’s poetry may have, as Mary N Harris says, gone ‘unnoticed and unpublished’, the lack of archival evidence does not indicate that women were not composing poetry and an increasing body of academic research supports this argument. The mythological collection makes significant references to female poets, and oral poetry such as the lullaby and the lament commonly went unrecorded. Irish poets, including Eavan Boland and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, demonstrate that contemporary poetry can bridge the gap where female poets were actively written out of history to a new understanding of the importance of their contribution.

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland by Crawford Gribben Kevin Hargaden (bio) Crawford Gribben, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 352 pages. 'The dominance of Christianity in Ireland was never complete and has never been uncontested' (p. 2). So begins Crawford Gribben's superb account of the history of the Irish Church. Over the course of five immensely readable chapters, Gribben takes the reader across 1600 years and demonstrates that the rise of the Church was never as stratospheric as is popularly held, both within and without the Church, and he offers solid ground to place its precipitous fall in context. This is an excellent book, which will be of value to those interested in history, Christianity, or Irish culture. In the opening chapter, Gribben tells a story familiar in rough outline to many – the conversion of Ireland in the fifth century – but with much finer detail than many of us have to hand. Patrick and Palladius, the two main figures in that early stage of conversion, are explored at length. In his introduction and then continuing in this chapter, Gribben elegantly outruns popular theories about the pre-Christian religion of the Celts. What we do know for certain is limited, but this evidence does not match the widely accepted narrative that Christianity came with a persecuting zeal against the pagan beliefs that were prevalent on the island. The conversion process advanced by assimilation rather than annihilation. 'Christians co-opted traditional legends', 'sanctified festivals' and even turned some Celtic deities 'into saints' (pp. 35–36). He also disposes of the idea that can be found in some contemporary spirituality traditions that the Irish Church understood itself as an alternative to the centralised Roman orthodoxy. In the seventh century, Columbanus could write, to Pope Boniface, that the Irish Church were disciples of Peter and Paul who 'accept nothing outside the evangelical and apostolic teaching' (p. 56). The mission appeared complete: 'Christianity had converted the Irish' suggests Gribben, 'But Christianity might also have created the Irish' (p. 56). In chapter two, Gribben charts how a religious insurgency matured into the most stable institution on the island. A noteworthy strength of the book is how Gribben demonstrates that while Ireland is definitionally peripheral from the European continent, it was never isolated (p. 16). In one fascinating aside he mentions how the partial skeleton of a barbary ape was discovered [End Page 454] at the Emain Macha site in Armagh, dating from a century before Christ (p. 24). If nothing else, this suggests that Irish people were embedded within a wider consciousness long before they joined the European Economic Area and became poster-children for economic globalization! That outward-looking stance was embraced by the Irish missionaries who moved from their local monastic strongholds into Britain and then deep into the continent. The arrival of Scandinavian pirates we now know as Vikings drew 'Ireland into extensive international networks' and, in time, 'together in the structures of a common faith' (p.69). Through Gregorian reform, the arrival of the Normans, the rise of the mendicant orders and the tumult that followed the partial solidification of English rule in Ireland, the Church stayed strong. As Churches across Europe were about to become engines of acrimony with the Reformation, in Ireland it 'existed as a genuinely incorporating body' for the different communities that shared the island (pp. 86–87). The book is about the rise and fall of Christian Ireland, not Catholic Ireland. And chapter three is a fascinating account of how we came to have our three historic Christian identities: Protestant and Dissenter along with Catholic. More is said about why the Reformation never truly took hold in Ireland, but Gribben's suggestion that a key factor was the commitment of the 'Old English families in the Pale' to stay faithful to Rome is compelling (p. 91). A striking insight in this chapter – at least to this reviewer who is a leader in a Presbyterian congregation marked by its busyness – is how dreadfully lax the early Irish Protestants were. 'The small number of committedly Protestant clergy were sometimes left with nothing to do' (p. 99). As haphazard...

Apocrypha Hiberniae II: Apocalyptica 2

Abstract This article introduces Corpus PalaeoHibernicum (CorPH), a corpus currently consisting of 78 texts in Early Irish (c. 7th–10th cent.) created by the ERC-fundedChronologicon Hibernicum(ChronHib) project by bringing together pre-existing lexical and syntactic databases and adding further crucial texts from the period. In addition to being annotated for POS, morphological and syntactic information, another layer of annotation has been developed for CorPH – ‘Variation Tagging’, i.e. a tagset that numerically encodes synchronic language variation during the Early Irish period, thus allowing for much improved research on the chronological variation among the material. Another new pillar of studying linguistic variation is Bayesian Language Variation Analysis (BLaVA), in order to address the challenge that “not-so-big data” poses to statistical corpus methods. Instead of reflecting feature frequencies, BLaVA models language variation as probabilities of variation.

A wealth of political writings survives from early Christian Ireland. While traditionally this material has been understood in terms of a dichotomy between "pagan" and "Christian," recent scholarship has borrowed the category of the "secular" from late antique studies to make sense of early Irish intellectual culture and its political discourses. This article builds on this trend to reveal, through close examination of seventh-century Irish writings, a multitude of differently Christianized discourses existing simultaneously, sometimes even within a single text. Just as the boundary between the "pagan" and the "secular" was not fixed, so too the boundary between the "Christian" and the "secular," giving rise to many different ways late antique Christians (in Ireland and elsewhere) could speak about politics. Much late antique scholarship on the "secular" assumes it was a passing phase ending in Christianization, but this research argues that "secularity" retained its importance in societies where Christians constantly debated and disagreed over where the boundaries of the "Christian" lay.

Reviewed by: A landscape of words. Ireland, Britain and the poetics of space, 700–1250 by Amy Mulligan A. Joseph McMullen (bio) Amy Mulligan, A landscape of words. Ireland, Britain and the poetics of space, 700–1250. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1-5261-4110-1. xii + 251 pages. $120 (hardcover), $36.95 (paperback). The field of Celtic Studies has had to wait a long time for the next word on the medieval Irish ‘environmental imagination.’ With A landscape of words, however, Amy Mulligan has made that wait more than worth it. This scintillating book persuasively argues for an Irish poetics of space—a deep interconnection between landscape and words at the very core of place-making in the literature from and about medieval Ireland. It is this attention to ‘verbal topographies,’ as well as the various readers and audiences of these works, that separates A landscape of words from other studies. Mulligan digs deeply into a wide range of texts—from immrama to the dindshenchas, from vitae to ethnographies—to tell a new story about a well-known feature of early Irish literature. A landscape of words not only further excavates ‘one of the richest and most complex bodies of medieval topographical writing’ (3), it reveals how central the writing of these literary landscapes was to the poets, authors, and redactors of medieval Ireland. The first two chapters are connected by an interest in journeying and pathfinding. In Chapter 1, Mulligan puts Adomnán’s De locis sanctis and Vita Sancti Columbae in conversation with the Navigatio Sancti Brendani and Immram curaig Maíle Dúin. She explains how Adomnán ‘transmits an embodied, sense-based engagement with the Holy Land’ (26) that allows his audience to inhabit holy sites through their imaginations. This spatial practice is expanded in his Life of Columba, where closer (but potentially dangerous) places can be visited by the Iona community. Mulligan then argues for the presence of similar literary conventions at work in Irish voyage tales. Developing the concept of ‘boat as book’ (42), she examines how the audiences of the Navigatio and immrama might themselves ‘row-about’ in the narratives. Much like how the voyagers [End Page 255] must undertake spiritual journeys before reaching the promised land, readers of these texts can also undergo transformative experiences through contemplation. Chapter 2 moves inland to the Ulster Cycle and the figure of Cú Chulainn, ‘heroic Ireland’s most productive and conscientious place-maker’ (67). Rather than focusing solely on Táin bó Cúailnge, Mulligan considers how Ireland’s most famous hero is entwined with the natural world throughout his heroic biography. She examines, first, his ‘spatial precocity’ (69) in Compert Con Culainn and the Macgnímrada (from the Táin), especially in terms of wayfinding and border crossing/guarding, before considering topographical language and eroticism in Tochmarc Emire. The Táin itself suggests that Cú Chulainn is a successful warrior in large part because of his mastery of placelore. Through and because of this knowledge, Cú Chulainn becomes enmeshed in the landscape: the natural world, in turn, supports him (especially in the form of rivers) and he frequently uses inscriptions on stone and trees to communicate (this focus on textuality returns later in an analysis of Siaburcharpat Con Culaind). Furthermore, in the Táin and Mesca Ulad, the destruction of the landscape asks readers to consider the violence of war. The third chapter offers an important new study on the Dindshenchas Érenn collections of stories dedicated to how places got their names. Though the dindshenchas tales have begun to receive more attention recently, they remain still vastly underappreciated. Mulligan takes great strides in this chapter to rectify that, paying particular attention to the poets of the verse compositions and their audiences. It is also not a surprise that this chapter is at the core of her book, given its focus of the poetics of space via the construction of literary landscapes. Reading these poems as ‘verbalized topographies’ and ‘extensive virtual landscapes’ (110) which encourage a view of ‘landscape as literature and text as territory’ (114), Mulligan argues that the dindshenchas ‘became the national landscape as created, preserved and performed by the...

Táin Bó Cúailnge or the “Cattle Raid of Cooley” (TBC) is the most famous epic narrative in early Irish literature, having been brought to prominence in modern times by Thomas Kinsella’s iconic translation (1969). The origins of TBC were described by Kinsella as “far more ancient” than the medieval manuscripts that relate it and associated prequels to the tale, called remscéla. One of these, not included in Kinsella’s translation, is Táin Bó Fraích — “The raid of Fráoch’s cattle” (TBF). TBF comes in two discontinuous parts which differ in subject matter and style. We examine the structural relationships between TBF as presented by Leahy [Heroic Romances in Ireland (David Nutt, London, 1906)] and TBC from a social networks point of view and compare them with the seven smaller tales presented in Kinsella’s text. We find that network structures in Kinsella’s text — both TBC itself and the remscéla he selected — are similar to those in TBF, and somewhat moreso the first part than the second.

This paper provides a brief overview of the history of occupational therapy in psychiatry in Ireland and explores why the contribution of an early Irish psychiatrist and proponent of occupational therapy, Dr Eamon O'Sullivan (1897-1966), was not fully recognised in the decades after his retirement in 1962. A review of selected key reports, papers and publications related to the history of occupational therapy was undertaken. Eamon O'Sullivan was appointed Resident Medical Superintendent at Killarney Mental Hospital Co. Kerry in 1933 and developed an occupational therapy department at the hospital from the 1930s until his retirement in 1962. He wrote one of the first textbooks of occupational therapy published in 1955. His occupational therapy philosophy reflects the early decades after the formalisation of the profession in 1917 when beliefs about the curative properties of occupation flourished and professional education programmes were scarce. By the time O'Sullivan's textbook was published it received a lukewarm reception within occupational therapy as it did not reflect 1950s practice and professional philosophy. The professionalisation of occupational therapy in Ireland in the 1960s was also a factor in the lack of acknowledgement of O'Sullivan's contribution to the profession. Practice and professional philosophy change and the paper concludes by considering O'Sullivan's work in light of contemporary occupational therapy which once again places occupation at its centre and emphasises the importance of balance, health and wellbeing.