Address by Professor Pádraig A. Breatnach, School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, marking the occasion of the digitisation of the collection, September 2019
© Pádraig A. Breatnach, 2019
You have before you (Appendix) the full list of manuscripts in the Irish language from the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) now digitised on Irish Script on Screen (ISOS) for the first time, and displayed with accompanying codicological metadata. The online descriptions have been made ready for public display during the summer period just past (2019), following notice that the digitisation project initiated by KU Leuven was due to be completed. They make available comprehensive indexes of contents together with other summary data extracted from the Catalogue of Brussels manuscripts presently in preparation, and will continue to be updated. It is only appropriate that I should take this opportunity to express my gratitude and appreciation to the Curator, Dr Bousmanne, and staff of the Department of Manuscripts at KBR for their long-standing courtesy in facilitating my examination of these special holdings. I also want to thank Anne Marie O’Brien of the ISOS project for the wonderful work she has done in accommodating the metadata to the images.
The twelve manuscripts listed originally formed part of the library of the Irish Franciscan College of St Anthony of Padua (Colláiste San Antaine) at Leuven/Louvain in the Low Countries (formerly known as the Spanish Netherlands). Many of you will know that St Anthony’s was founded in 1606/07 in response to representations made to the King of Spain, Philip III, by the distinguished Franciscan friar and ecclesiastic Flaithrí Ó Maoil Chonaire (Florence Conry), who famously travelled to Spain from Ireland with Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill after the Irish defeat at Kinsale in 1601/02. In the years following this transfer Conry could prevail on the king on behalf of his own Order of Friars Minor to support the establishment of a College in the university city of Leuven in which to train Irish novices for service in the home country. Accordingly, in due course the king wrote to the commander of Spanish forces in Flanders with orders to provide an annual sum to support the proposed foundation, a Bull establishing it duly issued from the Pope, Paul V, and the first Irish novices were enrolled in the College in April of the year 1607.
All these manuscripts are paper volumes of the seventeenth century, and with just two exceptions they were written in Ireland, though later worked on in St Anthony’s as we shall see. Eight are written wholly or in part in the hand of the famous scholar-scribe Míchéal Ó Cléirigh (Br Michael O’Clery), known widely, of course, as the compiler in chief of the ‘Annals of the Four Masters’ and of various other illustrious monuments of Irish cultural and ecclesiastical history. Collectively these monuments represent some fruits of what has been described as a ‘gigantic’ enterprise, conceived and initiated in turbulent times during the third decade of the 17th century by members of the Irish Franciscan fraternity, with the aim of rescuing from threatened oblivion a priceless trove of hagiographical, historical, and literary material in Irish and Latin for the benefit of future generations of their countrymen.
By far the most substantial sources of our knowledge of how that enterprise came into being and how the vernacular aspect of it progressed are three volumes in particular in the Brussels collection, viz. Nos. 1, 4, and 8 in our list. The first pair (1, 4) are mainly comprised of Saints’ Lives, and the third (8) is notable in particular for its complement of precious Martyrologies in prose and verse. Many of their contents are unique, the sources from which they were transcribed in Ireland being now lost. Each volume is a composite consisting of multiple discrete gatherings or sections varying in size and content and written at different times and locations. However, the paper is uniformly proportioned of quarto size in all instances, although its provenance is by no means homogeneous as shown by a multiplicity of watermarks. Manuscripts 1 and 8 are in their original binding, but a modern binding has replaced the original in case of no. 4. The early bindings date from a time after all the materials they enclose had eventually found their way to St Anthony’s College, and probably postdate the scribe’s own return there, which we know occurred in the Summer of 1637. Ó Cléirigh’s death occurred in 1643.
What it is important to highlight here is that in each of these three volumes the separate sections usually come complete with colophons in the scribal hand documenting the date, location and source of the transcript. A high proportion of items are stated by Ó Cléirigh to have been copied at the Friars Minor convent of Donegal, located ag Drobhaois, near the river Drowes, from originals he drew up elsewhere that are now no longer extant. The range of dates of scribal activity they document belongs between 1627-35, but it is important to emphasize that the materials arrived in Leuven not all at once or coinciding with Ó Cléirigh’s return there. They began to be sent to the learned authorities in Colláiste San Antoine piecemeal from an early date, in form of their various separate components, according as these became available. Indirect confirmation of this circumstance is found for example in a notable comment by Ó Cléirigh in a colophon from November 1629. In this he vents serious frustration directed at the quality of a text of the Life of St Colmán Eala which he has just recopied from an exemplar that read very corruptly. ‘Truly’, he remarks, ‘I myself recognise that I am transcribing much (that is) long, tedious, and wretched: however, let the blame of it rest on those who bade me to follow the form of the old books until the time of their collation’ (a aithbhear ar na daoinibh do athain diom lorcc na seinleabhar do lenmain go ham a sgagtha) (1 f. 226r). Mention of the time of collation (am a sgagtha) bears witness to the fact that the work of assembling transcripts was deemed a first essential step towards a much larger purpose. This was to assemble and prepare ultimately for publication as much of traditional materials as could be rescued from original vernacular sources, possibly or even probably including the aim of turning them into Latin also.
One may speculate regarding what Ó Cléirigh might have thought would be the part he could expect to play in the future conduct of the larger project. But one certainty is that his qualifications on the Latin side fell short. A humorous acknowledgement of his disadvantage is found at the end of his copy of a text on the birth and life of St Moling in 4 f. 58v i. The source before him includes a text in Latin on the saint’s miracles, but he stops short of transcribing it and makes a pun on his own surname in the process, as follows:
In Ath Cliath do scriobad as leabur Tighe Molling. & leiccim mirbuile Moling atá i lLaidin i muinigin na mbrathar cCleirigh cidh im Cleirechsa fein .15. Iuil .1628.
‘This was transcribed in Dublin out of the Book of St Mullin’s, and I entrust the “Miracles of Moling” which are in Latin to the friars clerical, although I am myself a cleric [sc. an O’Clery], 15 July 1628.’
(He was of course a lay-brother (a cleric, that is) as well as an ‘O’Clery’, hence the pun.) Still on the topic of his Latin competency, could it be out of a sense of fun that for the phrase ‘in saecula saeculorum’ Ó Cléirigh often writes in scecula sceculorum in this manuscript (4 ff. 38r etc., 87v, 170v)? On the other hand, let it be said that we know he could write a competent italic hand (Breatnach 2013, 140).
Returning to the instruction mentioned in the colophon at the conclusion of the Life of St Colmán which enjoined him to adhere to the form of the sources he was copying, we know that foremost among those who gave this direction to Ó Cléirigh was Fr Hugh Ward O.F.M. (Aodh Buidhe Mac an Bhaird), whose qualification as ‘an Irish Bollandus’ as he has been described was thwarted only by an early death. As Guardian of St Anthony’s College in 1626 Ward dispatched Ó Cléirigh, as a lay friar of his convent, to make a beginning of the task that was envisaged. It seems clear that a condition of his mission was that the fruits of his labours should begin to arrive in St Anthony’s College soon after he had settled in Ireland. The hard evidence for this is the fact that each of the manuscripts already mentioned, and others besides, include copious annotations and other additions in Fr Ward’s hand, which cannot have been entered any later than 8 November 1635, which is the date on which he passed away, in other words some two years prior to Ó Cléirigh’s eventual return to Leuven. Now as these extensive accretions, unlike Ó Cléirigh’s own work, are left unsigned in the various manuscripts, the process of identifying the writer, as demanded by the work of cataloguing, has had to involve a substantial palaeographical component. The starting point for this was provided by a close analysis being made of signed writings from other sources in Ward’s Latin hand, coupled with the observation that in certain of the manuscript annotations a distinctive, even idiosyncratic, cursive style for writing Irish is seen to alternate with the Latin, thus enabling recognition of his contribution in both languages.
A principal source for this discovery was provided by item 7 in our list of manuscripts. This is a holograph in Ó Cléirigh’s hand containing a unique copy of the so-called Long Recension of the ‘Martyrology of Donegal’, a learned compilation known to have been undertaken by Ó Cléirigh in conjunction with his fellow-member of the group we call the Four Masters, Cú Coigcríche Ó Cléirigh. The copy, item 7, according to a colophon was completed on the 19 April 1630. And we know from a letter addressed to Fr Luke Wadding O.F.M. by Hugh Ward on 9 August 1630 that the manuscript had by then already arrived at St Anthony’s College, a mere six months after completion. In a recent paper on the topic of ‘Scribal accretions in the Martyrology of Donegal (Long Recension)’ (due shortly for publication in a volume edited by Dr Nicole Volmering) I could demonstrate, as I believe, that the instalment of the copious annotations by Ward in both Irish and Latin in this volume came to be followed later by the entry of a large quantity of extensive vernacular interventions by Ó Cléirigh himself consisting of additions to the original text in the main (Breatnach 2020). These can only have been written after his return from Ireland 1637. Moreover, a further series of annotations in a third hand could also be identified, which came to be entered partly contemporaneously with Ó Cléirigh’s supplements and partly later. By way of illustrating the physical aspect of this sequential process of accretion, a single instance will suffice I hope.
On f. 41v (bottom half) the calendar entry in Ó Cléirigh’s hand for 13 August opens with the name of St Molaga. Ward’s hand is responsible for the entry immediately adjacent to it in which a mixture of languages and scripts is used. His entry continues into a second line which is shorter and set closer to the margin. A third line which is aligned with the second and expressly continues it is in a different ink and is by a different hand. (Incidentally, such qualities as ink colour may not be as clearly visible on the virtual image as on the original, a reminder that digitisation should never be seen as a reason to dispense with consultation of the original – librarians please note!) It will be seen that the entire note is separated from the calendar text by a square bracket. Above the calendar entry proper and extending upwards at a slant to avoid the mixed-script note below is a single line supplement. This again is in Ó Cléirigh’s own hand and concerns the genealogy of St Molaga: ‘ata Molaga saingil ar sliocht conaill eachluaith atá ar sliocht corbmaic cais mic oiliolla óluim’. It is evident that he was also responsible for inserting the open bracket preceding Ward’s note, so as to separate his own supplementary from it. (Other confirmation of the sequence is in the writing of ‘eachluaith’ which is raised to avoid the tall ‘A’ (= Æ) of the pre-existing annotation.)
Turning to the identity of the third hand in this complex which writes in the italic script, a process of comparative analysis similar to that applied to Ward’s handwriting, drawing on signed sources in Latin and Irish outside these manuscripts, enables us to identify the hand of this entry as being of that most outstanding of all Irish hagiologists of the period, and a protégé of Ward’s, Fr John Colgan O.F.M., whose Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae was published in 1645. Like Ward, Colgan leaves his mark, but unsigned, in both Latin and Irish not just in this manuscript but throughout the collection. His Irish hand is in fact exemplified a little further down the page (f. 41v) in the final entry under this date which was added to Ó Cléirigh’s list, namely the minutely written ‘Mo Maodhog’. (After it in Latin he names the three Martyrologies where this saint is listed, Marianus Gorman, Aengus, and Tallaght.)
Without entering into the substance of what is at issue in these accretions, what is important to note is that taken together they reveal the particular volume 7 as a veritable forum of scrutiny, evaluation and continuous debate among the scholarly community of St Anthony’s concerning Ó Cléirigh’s productions. I have argued in the paper ‘Scribal accretions’ that this very feature opens up a new pathway towards understanding the intellectual motivation, mission and achievement of the Leuven/Louvain enterprise. Now that the evidence for such interaction is being made available on ISOS it is to be hoped that cultural historians equipped with both languages and a good grounding in historical and hagiographical sources will feel encouraged to comprehensively examine and assess it.
As indicated, almost all volumes in the Brussels collection, be they in Ó Cléirigh’s hand or otherwise, hosted interventions by post-scribal readers among whom none is more prolific than Colgan himself, perhaps not surprisingly since he outlived Ó Cléirigh by fifteen yeas. (His death occurred in 1658.) Colgan’s minute hurried hand often mixing Irish and Latin, and applying the alphabet appropriate to each, proliferates throughout the collection. He can fill a page here with casual entries such as lists of contents (4, f. 1v, 8 f. 1r), or lists of poems with tentative dates attached (3 f. 16r, 10, f. 148r), for instance. Elsewhere at 2 f. 63rv, we find him compiling a list of historical battles with the names of persons who fell in them (in two columns). Observation of the character of this intervention brings us to identify Colgan’s hand outside the confines of the Brussels collection also. Thus bound in at the beginning of Royal Irish Academy MS 23 P 6-7, an autograph double-volume of the Annals of the Four Masters, are eight badly-torn leaves containing a sequence of densely inscribed annalistic notes and excerpts written in double columns, where the hand is the same as wrote the Brussels list of battles. This observation which was first made in my book, The Four Masters and their manuscripts (2013), has caused a significant gap in our knowledge concerning the history of this important Academy manuscript to be closed, in that it can now be identified as having been among the volumes Colgan kept in his room up until his death in 1658, as recorded in the well-known Catalogus manuscriptorum … olim in camera R. P. Colgani repertorum (Breatnach 2013, 66-7).
Colgan’s scribal activity in the Brussels collection extends beyond the categories represented by the samples I have mentioned, however. In item 10 known as ‘The Book of O’Donnell’s Daughter’, for instance, we recognise him as one of a team of scribes who cooperated in transcribing at the end of the volume the long prose tale with an O’Donnell family connection, ‘Eachtra Chonaill Gulban’. And item 9, whose contents include the unique so-called ‘Fragmentary Annals’ and the text of the Annals of Roscrea, likewise unique, includes several gatherings in Colgan’s Latin hand with extracts from printed works he copied while travelling in Germany prior to his assuming the mantle as Ward’s successor at St Anthony’s.
Before concluding this brief introduction to the collection now digitised, I must not neglect to recall some of the detail of its later history. Following its foundation in 1606/07 St Anthony’s soon amassed a large library of Irish and Latin manuscripts not to mention printed books in several languages. The collection remained intact for almost a century and a half following the passing of the principal personalities we have mentioned. But in 1793 the College suffered the same fate as affected the generality of monastic foundations under the revolutionary French Government. It was suppressed and its buildings were confiscated and subsequently put up for sale. As a consequence the library was dispersed. We do not fully know what proportion of its former holdings came to be lost, but of those that survived one major component found its way to St Anthony’s sister-institution in Rome, the Collegio San Isidoro (founded by Fr Luke Wadding in 1625), thus keeping it in Franciscan ownership. The balance of manuscript holdings known to us were transferred at that time into the ownership of the library of the Dukes of Burgundy, later to be merged with the Belgian Royal Library. What subsequently happened to the archive of St Isidore’s is well known. In January 1872, responding to fears that the Italian Government could suppress the convent and sieze its library its ‘manuscripts and other material were brought from Rome to the Franciscan friary, Merchants’ Quay, Dublin, by Fr Luke Carey, O.F.M., in boxes with the seal of the British legation at Rome in order to ensure their diplomatic immunity’ (Dillon et al. 1969, p. xviii). Later on during the twentieth century the library was moved first to the Franciscan House of Studies, Killiney, Co. Dublin, and was later transferred to the Archives Department, University College Dublin, where it is held in trust under the auspices of the UCD-OFM Partnership. That body some years ago agreed to collaborate with the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, in digitising the holdings in the Irish language formerly housed in Killiney, so that they might be hosted online by the ISOS project, whose twenty-years in existence is celebrated this year. The digitisation undertaking with the UCD-OFM Partnership was completed a dozen or so years ago, and its benefits to the scholarly community have been immense, as I myself as much as anyone am happy to affirm.
Reflecting how best to impress on the present audience the landmark importance of the digitisation project now being launched, involving the collaboration KBR, ISOS/DIAS and the initiators KU Leuven, not to mention the Embassy of Ireland in Belgium, it occurred to me to refer to the nineteenth-century giant of Irish manuscript studies, Eugene O’Curry, who pioneered the earliest efforts in modern times to see the sundered elements of the library of St Anthony’s College brought together. A fascinating appendix to his Lectures on the manuscript materials of ancient Irish history takes the form of a memorandum to the Senate of the Catholic University of Ireland which he submitted two years before publication of his Lectures (O’Curry 1861, Appendix no. CLVII, pp. 644-48). This records how during the preceding twenty or so years the writer sought to ascertain the whereabouts of the surviving holdings of the former library of St Anthony’s College, to determine what their contents were, and to retrieve copies where possible. He reports first that a Canon J. P. Lyons P.P. of Belmullet, Co. Mayo when visiting Rome in 1842 had made inquiries in the Collegio San Isidoro on O’Curry’s behalf and discovered a total of 20 manuscripts from which he made tracings. Equipped with these O’Curry was in a position to prepare a short catalogue of the manuscripts’ contents, and to supply an estimate of the price at which he thought the holdings might be purchased, which he put at £400 (i.e. an average price of £20 per item). The list was duly passed to Dr J. H. Todd of TCD whose cooperation in the venture was agreed, but the times were not propitious as O’Curry records:
Dr Todd undertook to raise this sum by subscription, and my catalogue was sent down to Dean Lyons, who transmitted it, with the offer of the money, to Rome; but before we could have an answer back, Dr Lyons died, the Repeal Association ceased to exist, the public sentiment which it had raised subsided, the famine set in, and if any answer came to Dr Lyons’ letters, we have never heard of it.’ (p. 646)
Around the time of those efforts O’Curry made the acquaintance of Laurence Waldron, M.P. for Co. Tipperary, a regular visitor to the continent who agreed to various cities in Belgium including Brussels, where he might ‘look out for Irish manuscripts’. There he sought out the Burgundian Library and was able to make a series of tracings from Irish manuscripts for O’Curry, who at once recognised in these the hand of Br Míchéal Ó Cléirigh. Alerting Dr Todd to the fact that one of the tracings (it was from item 3 in our list) revealed a better copy of the ‘Danish wars’ (Cogadh Gaedheal re Gallaibh, as we know it) than the copy in TCD library from which Todd was proposing to edit, the distinguished clergyman scholar promptly set out for Brussels where, in 1849, during an audience with the King of the Belgians he was given sanction to have several of the manuscripts brought to Dublin for copying. Of these (items 3, 6, 7, 8 from our list were included) O’Curry proceeded to make ‘accurate and laboured copies for Dr Todd’s private library, and at his expense’. Once returned to the Burgundian several further manuscripts were forwarded, but these went back to Brussels uncopied owing to a failure of funding for the project to transcribe them. (O’Curry himself copied a number of saints’ lives for his own use, and from his list of which we deduce that nos. 1 and 4 were among the items obtained (1861, 646).)
The expressed aim of O’Curry’s memorandum concerning the newly-discovered manuscripts in Rome and Brussels was to demonstrate to the Senate ‘the manner in which the materials of our eclesiastical history are scattered all over the continent’. Arguing eloquently from his own experience as Professor of Archaeology and Ancient History in the Catholic University he explains that he has of late been preparing and delivering lectures on the antiquities and early civil History of Ireland, for which purpose he drew ‘altogether from ancient existing manuscript, of which … we have a tolerably large store remaining’. However, for a similar series to be prepared on ‘the still more important subject of our Christian history’, he says, ‘I feel myself greatly embarrassed in my connection with the Catholic University’. This is because ‘the original authorities are so widely scattered and impossible of access’. Accordingly, the Senate should resume efforts to acquire the Rome manuscripts and return them to Ireland, and likewise take advantage of the continuing willingness of the King of the Belgians to allow the Brussels volumes be forwarded for transcription. Were this achieved, he concludes,
then, indeed, would the materials for Lectures on the ancient Catholic History of Ireland, as well as for the general history of this country, be abundant, authoritative, and unanswerable. Indeed I would look upon the collection and concentration, in the Library of the Catholic University, of those scattered fragments of our national history, as supplying nearly as great a desideratum as the University itself
With tonight’s launch O’Curry’s ambition of exactly one hundred and sixty years ago has become reality – or, more to the point, virtual reality!
References
Breatnach, Pádraig A., 2013 : The Four Masters and their manuscripts. Studies in
palaeography and text. DIAS.
—, (forthcoming) 2020: ‘Scribal accretions in the Martyrology of Donegal (Long
Recension)’, in Martyrologies in the Insular World, ed. N. Volmering [2016]. Brepols / Turnhout.
Dillon, Myles, Canice Mooney O.F.M., Pádraig de Brún, 1969: Catalogue of Irish manuscripts in the Franciscan Library Killiney. DIAS.
O’Curry, Eugene, 1861: Lectures on the manuscript materials of ancient Irish history. Dublin.
Appendix
Hand-list of manuscripts in the Irish language in the Bibliothéque Royale de Belgique / Koninkluke Bibliotheek van België (KBR)
1 KBR, MS 2324-2340: Lives of Saints (Padruicc, Brigit, etc.); Litanies.
2 KBR, MS 2542-43: Naoimhsheanchas naomh Inse Fáil; Bansheanchas; Historical notes.
3 KBR, MS 2569-72: Verse, mainly historical; Genealogies; Cogadh Gaedheal re Gallaibh.
4 KBR, MS 4190-4200: Lives of Saints (Adamnán, Berach, Greallán etc.); Litanies.
5 KBR, MS 4639: Martyrology of Donegal (Short Recension).
6 KBR, MS 5057-59: Pious legends, triads, tracts; Miscellaneous poems; Verse scholia on Félire Oengusso.
7 KBR, MS 5095-96: Martyrology of Donegal (Long Recension).
8 KBR, MS 5100-04: Litanies; Metrical Rules; Félire Oengusso; Félire huí Gormáin; Martyrology of Tallaght; Naomhsheanchas naomh Inse Fáil, etc.
9 KBR, MS 5301-20: Fragmentary Annals; Annales Roscreenses; Extracts from printed works in Latin (monastic histories etc.).
10 KBR, MS 6131-33: ‘Leabhor Inghine Í Dhomhnaill’; Bardic poems; Eachtra Chonaill Gulban.
11 KBR, MS 7658-61: Tract on examination of conscience.
12 KBR, MS 20978-79: Religious prose (exempla etc.); Verse.
© Pádraig A. Breatnach, August 2019