Scarcity of scientific data, a real interest in the physical world, and the need to validate the scriptures encouraged seventh-century Irish scholars toward critical reflection on scientific matters. Their world-view was based on materials drawn from the Bible, on earlier Christian works and on personal reflection and contemplation. This volume looks at the Irish contribution to the development of western thought in the early middle ages. MARINA SMYTHis librarian of the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame, and teaches early medieval cultural history.
Scarcity of scientific data, a real interest in the physical world, and the need to validate the scriptures encouraged seventh-century Irish scholars ...
Ireland has the most substantial corpus of annalistic chronicles for the early period in western Europe. They are crucial sources for understanding the Gaelic world of Ireland and Scotland, and offer insights into contacts with the wider Christian world. However, there is still a high degree of uncertainty about their development, production, and location prior to 1100, which makes it difficult to draw sound conclusions from them. This book analyses the principal Irish chronicles, especially the -Annals of Ulster-, -Annals of Tigernach-, and the Chronicum Scotorum, identifying their...
Ireland has the most substantial corpus of annalistic chronicles for the early period in western Europe. They are crucial sources for understanding th...
Of all the Celtic countries, Scotland has lacked the kind of scholarly attention that has been lavished fruitfully on Wales, Ireland, Cornwall and Brittany. And yet of all of them, Scotland offers the widest range of interfaces with broader work on the cult of saints. The papers presented here cover this territory very effectively.... (the book) brings together excellent studies that successfully explore the wide ramifications of the topic. Anyone with an interest in saints' cults will want this book. DAUVIT BROUN, Professor of Scottish History, University of Glasgow. This volume examines the...
Of all the Celtic countries, Scotland has lacked the kind of scholarly attention that has been lavished fruitfully on Wales, Ireland, Cornwall and Bri...
-Original, innovative work which elucidates a number of individual narratives; but more significantly, by placing these texts in their proper intellectual context, the author demonstrates how the world of learning in eleventh- and twelfth-century Ireland really worked. He illuminates a world of medieval education and scholarship; he tells us (as no-one has done previously) what medieval Irish classicism was all about.- Dr Maire ni Mhaonaigh, St John's College, University of Cambridge. The puzzle of Ireland's role in the preservation of classical learning into the middle ages has always...
-Original, innovative work which elucidates a number of individual narratives; but more significantly, by placing these texts in their proper intellec...
Thomas Charles-Edwards, the distinguished scholar of medieval Britain and Ireland, has made important contributions to a number of fields, but is particularly renowned for his studies in Celtic history and law. In this volume, colleagues pay tribute to his work with essays that range across the medieval Celtic world, including medieval Wales, Ireland and Scotland. In the first part of the volume, they cover historical aspects (and, as is fitting, often reflect the honorand's interest in archaeology and epigraphy); in the second, they focus on medieval Irish and Welsh legal institutions and...
Thomas Charles-Edwards, the distinguished scholar of medieval Britain and Ireland, has made important contributions to a number of fields, but is part...
The early history of the religious community at Glastonbury has been the subject of much speculation and imaginative writing, but there are few sources which genuinely further our knowledge of Glastonbury Abbey in the Anglo-Saxon period. This has resulted in a lack of serious historical research and hence the neglect of an important ecclesiastical establishment. This study brings together the evidence of royal and episcopal grants of land and combines it with material from Domesday Book, to produce a survey of the landed endowment of Glastonbury Abbey before 1066, and an analysis of the...
The early history of the religious community at Glastonbury has been the subject of much speculation and imaginative writing, but there are few source...
These four major studies, thoroughly revised for this book, reflect this distinguished historian's continuing interest in relations between England and Wales in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. An introduction places the conclusions offered in these studies within the current framework of historical thinking about Wales in this period. The first chapter, a survey of Anglo-Welsh ecclesiastical life in the tenth and eleventh centuries, is followed by "The Archbishops of St Davids, Llandaff and Caerleon-on-Usk," in which the twelfth-century claims of certain major Welsh churches to...
These four major studies, thoroughly revised for this book, reflect this distinguished historian's continuing interest in relations between England an...
"This edited volume will make a major contribution to our appreciation of the importance of classical literature and learning in medieval Ireland, and particularly to our understanding of its role in shaping the content, structure and transmission of medieval Irish narrative." Dr Kevin Murray, Department of Early and Medieval Irish, University College Cork. From the tenth century onwards, Irish scholars adapted Latin epics and legendary histories into the Irish language, including the Imtheachta Aeniasa, the earliest known adaptation of Virgil's Aeneid into any European vernacular; Togail...
"This edited volume will make a major contribution to our appreciation of the importance of classical literature and learning in medieval Ireland, and...
Was femininity in early Irish society perceived as weak and sinful, innately inferior to masculinity? Was it seen as powerful and dangerous, a threat to the peace and tranquility of male society? Or was there a more nuanced view, an understanding that femininity, or femininities, could be presented in a variety of ways according to the pragmatic concerns of the writer? This book examines the sources surviving from fifth- to ninth-century Ireland, aiming to offer a fresh view of authorial perceptions of the period. It seeks to highlight the complexities of those perceptions, the significance...
Was femininity in early Irish society perceived as weak and sinful, innately inferior to masculinity? Was it seen as powerful and dangerous, a threat ...
Powys, extending over north-east and central Wales, was one of three great medieval Welsh polities, along with Gwynedd to the north and Deheubarth (south-west), occupying nearly a quarter of the country. However, it has been somewhat neglected by historians, who have tended to dismiss it as a satellite realm of England, and viewed its leaders as obstacles to the efforts of Gwynedd leaders to construct a principality of Wales. This book provides the first full, authoritative history of Powys in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It argues in particular that the Powysian rulers were dogged...
Powys, extending over north-east and central Wales, was one of three great medieval Welsh polities, along with Gwynedd to the north and Deheubarth (so...
