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W. Mahon
THE POST-MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPT TRADITION IN IRELAND
My object is to provide a brief outline of the Gaelic manuscript tradition as it persisted in Ireland from the end of the 'Middle Ages' until its ultimate demise at the close of the nineteenth century. The task is difficult since, when treating of a period in which access to printing was unavailable to the Gaelic literati, the concept of 'manuscript tradition' merges with the processes of transmission, acquisition, and literary creation as a whole. Nevertheless - and with some trepidation - I will attempt to give some impression of the breadth and importance of the phenomenon.
To date, the best concise overview of Gaelic manuscripts is Prof. Brian O Cuiv's well-known article, 'Ireland's Manuscript Heritage' (O Cuiv 1984: 87-110). Originally presented as the Statutory Lecture of the School of Celtic Studies (D.I.A.S.) in December 1981 - when the Institute was celebrating the fortieth year of its foundation - Prof. O Cuiv was keen to remind his listeners that the first of the School's chartered duties was 'the investigation, editing, and publication of extant manuscript material in the Irish language'. With regards to the so-called 'late manuscripts', the importance he attached to this project is clear from some figures he cited: of 4000 extant Gaelic manuscripts only 250 were written before 1600, and most of the remainder in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (O Cuiv 1984: 90).
In the course of my discussion it will be necessary for me to reiterate some of Prof. O Cuiv's most salient points, but I will bring certain aspects up to date by mentioning recent work in the publication of manuscript catalogues and in the interpretation of late scribal practice.
As a matter of practical necessity, a working definition of 'post-medieval' must be selected. Conventionally, the Middle-Ages in Britain and Ireland are seen as extending to the end of the fifteenth century, to a period roughly corresponding to the accession of the Tudor dynasty in 1484. There was some lag in Ireland, however. Outside the eastern region of English colonisation and some scattered baronies under Anglo-Norman feudal control, the old Gaelic polity, with its unique cultural institutions and semi-pastoral economy based on kin-groups, still held sway. I would prefer a
somewhat later date: one which focuses on events that really marked a break with the way the Irish - and the learned classes especially -situated themselves in relation to encroaching modernity (colonial imperialism, incipient nationalism, state bureaucracy, Protestantism, etc.) For that reason, I would prefer to take 1534, the year of Henry VIII's separation from Rome and issuing of the Act of Supremacy, as a better - if no less arbitrary - line of demarcation. This was also the year in which Henry's deteriorating relationship with his Irish lord deputy, Garret Og Fitzgerald, resulted in the latter's imprisonment and a subsequent rebellion led by his son. The 'Dissolution of the Monasteries' that immediately followed likewise poisoned relations between the Tudor sovereign and the Irish, and the destruction of manuscripts that occurred would not be forgotten by the learned classes1. Of course, this was also a period in which the power of print - in this case a Protestant power - was first used for the production of texts in the Irish language. The earliest known work printed in the language was John Carswell's Foirm na nUrrnuidheadh, a translation of Knox's Book of Common Order, was published in Edinbugh in 1567. Four years later, in 1571, Seaan O Cearnaigh's Aibidil Gaoidheilge & Caiticiosma ('An Irish Primer of Religion') was published in Dublin, 'sa rann iartharach so na Europa' ('in this western part of Europe')2.
For the sixteenth century, the chronological manuscript list of the 'Hayes Catalogue' cites 119 Gaelic manuscripts (Hayes 1965: 81619). Not very many, it may seem, but one must take into consideration the destructive turbulence of the century (the 'Desmond Rebellions' of the 70s and 80s and the 'Nine Years War' which ended disastrously at Kinsale in 1601). Nevertheless, Hayes's list includes almost every variety of material one would expect to find in an Irish monastic library: sagas, histories, annals, genealogies, topographic lore (dinnsheanchas), religious verse, saints' lives, and legal tracts. One of the more important post-1534 items is British Library MS Nero A7, which contains the earliest continuous (though
1 See Analecta Hibernica 6 (1934), p. 53 (Nam omnia bona mobilia conventus saepe fuerunt ab haereticis direpta, et libri et monumenta omnia combusta). Also Dr. John Lynch: 'Certain it is, that, within the recollection of our fathers, the English burned with savage rage for the annihilation of our Irish documents' (Lynch 1848: 234).
2 See the beautifully produced facsimile edition by Brian O Cuiv 1994, quotation on p. 3 of the facsimile.
not complete) copy of the eighth-century legal tract Bretha Nemed Toíseach (a copy was made by a Co. Fermanagh scribe, Matha O Luinin, in 1571). There is also the Book of Fenagh, a collection of historical verse copied from a fourteenth-century original (now lost) by Muirghius O Maolchonaire in 1535. This work was commissioned by Tadhg O Rodachain, the hereditary warden of the Church of St. Caillin in Fenagh, Co. Leitrim. In addition to these revisions of older material, however, newer sorts of compilations now appear in greater numbers. These include family poem-books (duanaireadha), bardic grammatical tracts of unprecedented practical detail, and medical tracts.
Of immeasurable importance for the subsequent history Irish manuscripts was the movement of young Irish scholars from the 1570s onwards to colleges in France, Flanders, and Spain in order to study for the priesthood. It appears that sons from the old bardic and scholarly families now saw the Church as an avenue for pursuing their intellectual and literary ambitions to the service of God and country (O Cleirigh 1985: 34). One of these was Flaithri O Maolchonaire (1560-1620), a native of Cloonahee, Roscommon, and the grandson of the same Muirghius O Maolchonaire who penned the extant copy of the Book of Fenagh. After studies in Louvain and Salamanca he was ordained a Franciscan friar in 1584. In 1607 he opened the Irish College of St. Anthony of Padua in Louvain, an institution which was to become the most important European centre for Irish-language learning and printing throughout the seventeenth century.3 Numerous Irish manuscripts were brought to Louvain, and historical and hagiographical projects were initiated there which involved their collection, collation and examination. The standard literary form of Irish was taught there as well and grammars in manuscript form were produced for the use of students.
Two Gaelic manuscripts produced in Flanders are of particular importance and have a connection with Louvain. Both of them were produced for Somhairle Mac Domhnaill, a native of Antrim who was a prominent captain in the army of the Spanish Lowlands. The first of these manuscripts, written in 1626-27, contains an important compilation of heroic 'Ossianic' verse known as Duanaire Finn ('Fionn [Mac Cuhaill's] Poem-book'). The second is the 'Book of
3 For a recent collection of pertinent essays, see P. Breatnach, C. Breatnach, M. Ni Urdail, The Louvain Manuscript Heritage (Dublin: National University of Ireland, 2007).
the O'Connor Don', a large collection of bardic verse compiled from on-hand sources by the scribe Aodh O Dochartaigh in 1631. Most of the verse in this collection was composed in the period 1200-1600, and indeed, as Prof O Cuiv has observed, most of the extant bardic poetry from that period owes its survival to manuscripts as late as this (O Cuiv 1984: 96, 100).
At home in Ireland, formal training in languages and history was still available to the sons of prominent families in the late sixteenth-and early seventeenth. In Galway, for example, a 'Free School' open to Catholics had been established in 1580. Within a quarter of a century, in 1608, there were 1200 students attending school there. The Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas was
another important centre in Galway where notable scholars gathered and trained students. Like the Irish College in Louvain, centres such as these would be of tremendous importance for the formation scholars and scribes in the course of the next half-century.
The three most important works of Irish historiography produced in the seventeenth century were dependent on a high degree of manuscript skills. The first of these was the fruit a project conceived in Louvain by Brother Micheal O Cleirgh, himself the member of a family that had provided historians for the O'Donnells of Donegal. The object was to compile a 'master chronicle' of Irish history from all the available annals that were scattered in houses and monastic libraries throughout the country. Using the Franciscan Monastery of Bundrowse, Co. Donegal, as his base of operations, O Cleirigh employed three other scholars (Cu Coigcriche O Cleirigh, Cu Coigcriche O Duibhgheannain, and Fearfeasa O Maolchonaire) who, like himself, came from families of professional historians. The result was Annala Rioghdhachta Eireann ('The Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland'), popularly known as the 'Annals of the Four Masters', a history of Ireland from earliest times down until 1616. Two manuscript copies of three volumes each were produced: one for the project's patron, Fearghal O Gadhra, Lord of Coolavin, Co. Sligo; the second for the Franciscans back in Louvain who wished to publish it from their press. Unfortunately, this was split up and partially lost before printing was possible.
The second of these historical works was produced by Geoffrey Keating, a secular priest from Tipperary, who had spent some years studying in Rheims before returning as a parish priest to his native county. For as Feasa ar Eirinn ('A Foundation for the History of Ireland') is a history of Ireland, from ancient times to the Anglo-Norman conquest, arranged on the basis of regnal lists and
containing digests of traditional peudo-history and saga material. In searching for manuscript sources, Keating travelled extensively and received assistance from various circles of traditional historians, most notably, the О Duibhgheannains and the Co. Clare branch of the О Maolchonaire family. He found access to several of the most important extant medieval manuscripts, including some, like the Psalter of Cashel, which have since been lost (О Cuiv 1984: 62). In the introduction to Foras Feasa, the importance Keating attaches to these sources is made clear as he deplores the 'reproach and blame' heaped upon the Irish by foreign historians with no knowledge of Gaelic manuscripts. In subsequent years Keating's history became the single most-copied book within the period we are considering.
The third of these historical compilations is Leabhar Mor na nGenealach ('The Great Book of Genealogies'), compiled by Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh (1600-1771), a lay scholar and a member of the same hereditary family of historians in Co. Sligo who produced who produced the Book of Lecan and the Yellow Book of Lecan between 1397 and 1420. Mac Fhirbhisigh appears to have received some of his formal education in the Free School of Galway and it is in that city that he completed this massive compilation around the year 1650. In later years Mac Fhirbhisigh was sought out by Sir James Ware (1594-1666), the Dublin-born antiquarian historian, and between 1665 and 1666 he supplied the latter with important historical manuscript materials and translations.
There was considerable interest in Gaelic manuscripts on the part of the English colonial community in Ireland. Even Sir George Carew (1555-1629), the President of Munster who played a major part in subduing Irish insurgents of the Nine Years War, was an assiduous collector of Gaelic manuscripts. Among these are Laud misc. 610 and Laud misc. 615, two of the most important collections of historical tracts and old Irish verse in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Of course, some of Keating's Protestant contemporaries also had an interest in ancient Gaelic manuscripts for upholding their own claims regarding the independence of insular Christianity from the authority of Rome. The most notable of these was James Ussher (1581-1656), Bishop of Armagh from 1625, whose Discourse on the Religion Anciently Professed by the Irish and British was published in Dublin in 1631.
The Confederate/Cromwellian and Williamite upheavals of the mid- and late seventeenth century cleared the way for a new breed of manuscript scholars who came not from hereditary learned families themselves, but rather from the families of former lords and patrons.
One of these was Sean O Gadhra (1648-1720) of Knockgrawer, Co, Sligo, a member of the same sept that provided Micheal O Cleirigh with a patron. Having come down in the world, O Gadhra supported himself as a farmer and schoolmaster4. Among his own contemporaries and colleagues was Ruaidhri O Flaithbheartaigh (Roderick O'Flaherty, 1648-1718), son of Aodh ('Captain of the nation of the O'Flahertys'), of Moycullen, Co. Galway (Ni Mhurchu, Breatnach 2001: 141). He was the author of an annals-based history of Ireland published (in Latin) under the title Ogygia (London, 1685). He was famously described in his old age by Sir Thomas Moyneaux who visited him in 1709: 'I expected to have seen here some old Irish manuscripts, but his ill fortune has stripped him of these as well as his other goods, so that he has nothing left now but some few pieces of his own writing, and a few old rummish books of history, printed'. Another of O Gadhra's compatriots was Tadhg O Rodaighe^ (16451706) of Fenagh, Co. Leitrim, whose direct ancestor, Tadhg O Roda-chain employed Muirghius O Maolchonaire to make a copy of the Book of Fenagh. In a very interesting poem entitled 'Tuireadh na Gaedhilge' ('A lament for the irish language) O Gadhra counts himself, along with these respected associates, as one of the last of Ireland's native scholars.
Is i gConnacht bhi an chuideachta dheidheanach
bhi cumasach i dtuigse na Gaedhilge,
Do chruinnigh gan tuirse gach saethar,
Is do scrudaigh na hughdair go freamha :
Ruaidhri O Flaithbheartaigh scafaire an leighinn
Tadhg O Roduighe,scoluidhe treitheach,
is Sean O Gadhra nar sharuigh eanstair
I Laidin i Scoitic iona i mBearla (Mac Domhnaill 1955: 14).
In Connacht was the last company
capable of understanding Irish,
Who tirelessly collected every work
and examined the sources to their roots :
Roderick O'Flaherty, a hearty fellow of learning,
Tadhg O'Roddy, the gifted scholar,
and Sean O'Gara who was never stumped by a history
in Latin, Irish, or English.
4 'No one is a real Irishman unless he can write, read, and understand Irish, no more than a muley bull without the beauty of his horns or a tree in an orchard without the fair comely fruit that is natural for it' (from 'Tuireadh na Gaedhilge agus Teastas na hEireann', Mac Domhnaill, p. 11).
All three were still active in 1699-1700 when Edward Lhuyd (1660-1709), Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and associate of the Dublin Philosophical Society, went to Ireland in search of manuscript materials for his own linguistic studies. Lhuyd made contact with Ó Flaithbheartaigh and Ó Rodaighe and eventually assembled an extraordinary collection of Irish manuscripts (including the Book of Leinster, the Book of Lecan) which were bestowed in later years to the library of Trinity College, Dublin.
Until now, most of our discussion has centred around historians and historical manuscripts. In the province of Munster, manuscript skills were fostered by an important circle of poets north of the city of Cork, in in Blarney and Carrignavar. These included Diarmaid Mac Carthaigh (1632-1705), Dáibhidh Ó Bruadair (1625-98), Eoghan Ó Caoimh (1656-1726), and the tavern-keeper Uilliam Mac Cairteáin an Dúna (1668-1724). The leadership of this group was passed on in later years to the poets Uilliam Ruadh Mac Coitir (1690-1738) and Seán Ó Murchadha na Ráithíneach (1700-62). These men were highly trained and it is clear that they, like the Connacht historians mentioned above, nourished continuity with the older scholarly traditions. Dáibhidh Ó Bruadair, for example, appears to have studied under Seán Mac Criagáin, a bardic poet of the old school who had switched to popular accentual poetry in response to the dire political situation of the mid-seventeenth century. There is also some evidence that members of this group, in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, were among the first poets to organise a 'court of poetry' (cúirt éigse) (Ó Conchúir 1982: 56). Courts of poetry were local poetic associations organized to give training in the use of Irish, to vet poets, to to confer qualifications, to blacklist incompetent upstarts, to transcribe and disseminate new compositions, and to collect, repair, and copy old manuscripts. As an institution, the courts spread throughout all of Munster and survived into the nineteenth century.
Urban centres, too, were homes to manuscript activity. In the early eighteenth-century, for example, there was in Dublin an extraordinary coterie of about thirty Irish scholars whose senior member and leader was Seán Ó Neachtain (1640-1729), a poet and prose-writer from County Roscommon. Other notables included Ó Neachtain's son Tadhg (1671-1749), the poet and grammarian Aodh Buidhe Mac Cruitín (1680-1755), the prolific scribe Risteard Tuibear (fl. 710-30), and the historian Charles O'Conor Don of Belanagare, Co. Roscommon (1710-95), whose own manuscript collection included the Stowe Missal, the Annals of Ulster, the
Annals of Tigernach, and Fearghal O Gadhra's copy of Annala Rioghachta na hEireann. As Prof. O Cuiv points out, the scribal activity of this circle (which had ties with several Anglo-Irish scholars working at Trinity College) was a factor in the establishment of the Royal Irish Academy in 1782 (O Cuiv 1984: 107).
The most prolific group of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scribes were the members of one family: the O'Longans (O Longain) of Limerick and (after 1764) Carrignavar, Co. Cork. They do not appear to have had connections with any of the great 'learned families' of medieval Ireland, but they do seem to have been supplied wardens for the church of Ard Padraig, Co. Limerick, and to have acted as rent-receivers for the local Fitzgerald lords in the sixteenth century (№ Urdail 2000: 32). This latter function was inherited by Micheal O Longain (1693-1770), the first of three generations to ply their pens in the service of the Irish language and its literature. His son Micheal Og (1766-1837), who made his living as a schoolteacher and from commissioned scribal work, was also a celebrated poet. His compositions, several of which commemmorate the events of the Uprising of 1798, are evidence of the extent to which the Irish language had become became cultural-political cause (Ni Urdail 2000: 230). He had three sons, Peter, Paul, and Joseph, and the latter two provided scribal services for the Royal Irish Academy between 1854 and 1880.
Something should be said about the contents of these manuscripts, especially those that are not found in manuscripts of earlier periods. Among the categories we might list there are: heroic (Ossia-nic) verse and prose tales, village poetry, political and national poetry, love songs, satirical and parodical verse, ribald verse, religious verse, devotional prose and catechetical material, mock legal documents, charms, enigmas, and music. The manuscripts are also filled with informative colophons and scribal remarks that reveal much about the writer's situation and point of view. In a manuscript of 1830, for example, at the height of the time when Catholic farmers were staging violent demonstrations against the enforced payment of tithes to the Church of Ireland, a Co. Limerick scribe, James Tierney, writes the following colophon (here translated) to a copy of an old prayer to St. Patrick: Pray to God, Dear Beloved Reader, to strengthen the true faith and to release it from the oppression of our enemies so that the proper, godly church to which we belong might again be established in Ireland, just as our first apostle Patrick left it. Written by James Tierney from the Co. Limerick on the 18th day of April, in the year of our Lord, 1830, and my prayer for the reader, [signed] James Tierney (Mahon 2007: 39).
Throughout the eighteenth century, literacy in Irish had diminished as language-shift occurred and the acquisition of English became the primary concern in the 'hedge-schools' no less than in officially approved schools. By the onset of the nineteenth century it is clear from manuscripts - in spite of their abundance - that the general standard of scribal work had deteriorated. Well-trained scribes, such as O'Longans, had become the exception rather than the rule. Fortunately, the names of better scribes were generally known to the various antiquarian and literary 'Celtic societies' who required transcriptions. These included the Gaelic Society of Dublin (1807), the Irish Achaeological Society (1840), and the Ossianic Society (1853). The latter society, in particular, did much to locate scribes and manuscripts and to thus to commence the task of recovering Ireland's Gaelic literary inheritance (a task that is still far from complete). The scribal tradition - as it turns out - had just managed to survive to the point when a new interest in printing Irish material was emerging. By the mid-nineteenth century, some scribes were even providing small bits of Irish-language material for newspapers and journals at home and abroad.
'On the ground', as it were - among the common people of certain localities - there were still enough Irish-speakers to create a demand for village manuscripts with purely local content. In East Galway, for example, in the region known as Clare-Galway, there were of group of scribes busily transcribing local verse from the 1820s down until the 1860s. It is due to their efforts that the topical songs of poets such as Antaine Raiftearai (1779-1835) have come down to us, works which are invaluable sources of social history in addition to being well-made popular compositions. (Many of these, in fact, are still to be heard in the Irish-speaking districts of Cona-mara). Some of these nineteenth-century East Galway manuscripts were written in conventional Irish orthography, but most of them in fact used a phonetic script based on English. Consequently, they provide a great deal of information on the phonological history of the dialect. Some copies of these manuscripts, it appears, were made for friends and relations who would soon be emigrating to America. (This broaches an issue which has not, until recent decades, received serious attention: the extent to which Irish manuscripts were brought overseas by emigrants and a scribal tradition maintained by them)5.
5 The School of Celtic Studies (D.I.A.S.), for example, has published Cornelius Buttimer's Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the University of
Speaking of Ireland's scribal tradition, Prof. Ó Cuív said: 'We are fortunate that the "backward look" was so much a part of the scribal tradition, for it has left us with a literature spanning more than thirteen centuries6. This is certainly true when one considers some of the treasures that have been preserved for us in late manuscripts7. In recent years, however, there had been an increasing interest in the active editorial and ideological dimensions of scribal practice. In his discussion of late copies of saga material, for instance, Caoimhín Breatnach has pointed out that within scribal practice, texts are manipulated 'to meet contemporary demands'8. In a pioneering study of scribal practice centred around the history of the O'Longan scribes, Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail has likewise stressed the synchronic orientation in the process of manuscript creation:
... synchronic in its intention to incorporate not only a process of conscious transmission .. .but also a selection of what is to be transmitted. For not only is the scribe the 'inheritor of tradition', he is its carrier, its interpreter, its selector and its transmitter. Each of these dimensions, the diachronic and the synchronic, do not remain at the level of text, whether
Wisconsin-Madison (1989) and my own Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in Villanova University, Pennsylvania (2007). Catalogues for the Harvard University and Boston College collections are in preparation.
6 O Cuiv 1984: 89. A Backward Look was the subtitled theme of Frank O'Connor's Short History of Irish Literature (1967) in which the author describes the post-1100 scribes as 'the bad compilers of the post-Norse period' and 'ignorant transcribers' who totally 'mishandled' the texts they were copying. (p. 4). After this period - in his view - the tradition was no longer a 'creative force' (italics mine).
7 (a) 'The Book of the O'Byrnes' (Lebhar Branach), a compilation of the late sixteenth-century bardic poetry written for the O'Byrne chiefs of Glenmalure, Co. Wicklow, originally made in 1622 but now surviving, in its earliest copy, in a manuscript of 1726. (b) NLI MS G50, produced by an O Luinin scribe ca. 1630 and containing a copy of 'Amra Coluim Chille'(possibly the earliest known Irish poem) and a unique copy of the eighth-century religious poetry of Blathmacc son of Cu Brettan. (c) RIA MS. C vi 3, seventeenth-century, the earliest surviving manuscript of Tain Bo Cualinge, Recension IIb (= Cecile O'Rahilly's 'Stowe Version', an enlargement and modernisation of a version related to that in the Book of Leinster. (d) TCD MS H 2. 15B, containing the earliest continuous copy, in the hand of Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh, of the eighth-century legal tract Bretha Nemed Dedanach.
8 Caoimhin Breatnach, Patronage, Politics and Prose (Maynooth: An Sagart, 1996), p. 2.
it is oral or written. The context also of scribal activity is included (Ní Úrdail 2000: 23).
In conclusion, it is this meeting of the diachronic and synchronic in the activity of the scribes that makes their manuscripts, the records of their activity, so valuable and revealing. Unlike printed records, which are free-floating entities when released from the press, these late manuscripts tend to be rough and individual statements. They reflect personalities. They are marked and worn with the editorial jottings and self-referential comments of their handlers. The contexts for these features lie within our grasp because they are closer to us in time. At the same time, they are able to lead us back to the brink of the middle-ages. By partaking in a study of scribal practice from a later period - from the early nineteenth century, let us say - and moving backwards in time, from decade to decade, from copy to exemplum, we can achieve incrementally a reliable intuition for the meaning of this practice in older periods. Like Ariadne's thread, successive copies lead us to the beginning on surer ground.
Bibliography
Hayes 1965 - R. J. Hayes. Manuscript Sources for the History of Irish
Civilization. Vol. 11. Mac Domhnaill 1955 - Mac Domhnaill. Dánta agus Amhráin Sheáin Uí
Ghadhra. Baile Átha Cliath: Oifig an tSoláthair. Lynch 1848 - John Lynch. Cambrensis Eversus. Vol. 1. Mahon 2007 - William Mahon. Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in Villanova
University, Pennsylvania. Dublin: School of Celtic Studies. Ní Mhurchú, Breatnach 2001 - Máire Ní Mhurchú and Diarmuid Breatnach.
Beathaisnéis [7], 1560-1781. Baile Átha Cliath, An Clóchomhar Tta. Ní Úrdail 2000 - Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail. The Scribe in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Motivations and Milieu. Münster: Nodus Publikation.
Ó Cléirigh 1985 - Tomás ó Cléirigh. Aodh Mac Aingil agus an Scoil Nua-
Ghaeilge i Lobháin 1935. Baile Átha Cliath: An Gúm. Ó Conchúir 1982 - Breandán Ó Conchúir. Scríobhaithe Chorcaí, 17001850. Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar. Ó Cuív 1984 - Brian Ó Cuív. Ireland's manuscript heritage // Éire-Ireland.
Vol. 19. P. 87 -110. Ó Cuív 1994 - Brian Ó Cuív. Abidil Gaoidheilge & Caiticiosma; Seaán Ó Cearnaigh's Irish Primer of Religion published in 1571. Dublin: School of Celtic Studies [D.I.A.S.].
