Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in Houghton Library, Harvard University

The first full account of North America's largest collection of traditional Irish-language manuscripts.

Harvard University has the largest collection of Irish-language codices in North America, held in Houghton Library, its rare book repository. The manuscripts are a part of the age-old heritage of Irish book production, dating to the early Middle Ages. Handwritten works in Houghton contain versions of medieval poetry and sagas, recopied in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to which period most of the library's documents belong. Contemporary writings from that time, as well as ones by the post-Famine Irish immigrant community in the United States are included. This catalogue describes the collection in full for the first time and will be an invaluable aid to research on Irish and Irish American cultural and literary output. The author's introduction examines how the collection was formed. This untold story is an important chapter in America's intellectual history, reflecting a phase of unprecedented expansion in Harvard University's scholarship and teaching during the early twentieth century when the institution's program of studies began to accommodate an increasing range of European languages and literatures and their sources. This indispensable guide to a major repository's records of the Irish past, and of America's Irish diaspora, will interest specialists in early and post-medieval codices. It should prove of relevance as well to scholars and students of comparative literature, cultural studies, and Irish and Irish American history.

Ireland is celebrated for its early illuminated codices, and especially for ornate copies of Latin Gospels. Another dimension to the country's manuscript tradition may be less well known. That element is production of handwritten compilations in Gaelic, the island's indigenous vernacular. This resulted in a complex, extensive and long-lasting strand of documentary output. Sustained examination of it has been under way since the late 1700s, because of the importance attaching to tracing basic data, in all relevant languages, for various facets of the Irish past. The present monograph forms part of such ongoing investigation. One may note greater effort was expended during recent decades in tracking down material, not only within Ireland, but also throughout regions of the globe where substantial numbers of Irish people settled, after the mid-1800s especially. The latter enquiry highlights cultural artefacts emigrants brought with them from their homeland, or which host countries looked to acquire, arising from growing fascination with evidence of its kind. Accordingly, when seeking to fulfil a principal role of guide to the contents of one particular holding, this report keeps context in mind. Different aspects of America's social and intellectual life underlie the establishment, growth and maintenance of the resource at issue. These call for commentary on the circumstances in which its components were received in the United States, by whom, and to what effect. While remaining essentially specific in purpose, therefore, the work broadens out, of necessity, in its reach.