An Annotated Bibliography of Printed and Online Primary Sources for the Middle Ages
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The types of published primary sources available for the study of medieval Ireland has been shaped by both destruction of the Irish Public Records Office during shelling in 1921 and the changing priorities of scholars of Ireland over the 19th and 20th centuries.
Before Irish independence, some Irish documents were included in the major British document series, such as the Camden Society texts, the Rolls Series, and the calendars published by the Public Record Office. Since independence, the Irish Manuscripts Commission, often in conjunction with the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, has continued the work of publishing Irish documents. The Mediaeval and Modern Irish Series, begun by the Irish Stationery Office in the 1930s and continued by the Irish Manuscript Commission and Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, contains dozens of medieval volumes of medieval Irish texts, few of which have been translated into English; about 10 of the c. 25 medieval texts in the series have been entered. The Scriptores Latini Hiberniae series currently contains 14 volumes (10 of which are entered into the database thus far) of Latin texts written by early medieval Irish authors, with English translations. The Early Irish Law series, begun in 1983, currently contains 4 volumes focusing on Old Irish law tracts with English translations; two are in the database. Periodicals which regularly publish primary sources related to medieval Ireland include the Transactions/Proceedings of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland; Collectanea Hibernica; and Analecta Hibernica. Local record societies and antiquary societies, cultural organizations, and religious societies have also published medieval source materials from Ireland. We, have, however, only begun to enter primary sources printed in these series into the database.
The Irish entries in the database are focused on Latin-language or translated sources, although there are a significant number of Irish Language sources as well. We have tried to enter first those items which are most easily availablefor example, texts published in popular series or available online through CELT, the Corpus of Electronic Texts at University College, Cork; 25 of the over 100 medieval texts included there (many of them in Old Irish) are entered into the database Bibliography.
In Phase I of the project, the Irish sources entered into the database are heavily weighted towards annals and translated earlier Irish language literary sources, saints lives, and treatises; a selection of the most widely available later high medieval, Latin sources are also included (i.e. those published by major text societies or part of collections such as the Rolls Series). To a great extent, the availability of the texts in most college libraries has dictated which were selected for entry into the database Bibliography.
Annals remain one of the most valuable sources for Irish history; written in Latin and/or Irish by monks, these annals often cover political, military, and natural events in Ireland over centuries. Most annals that currently exist are later medieval or early modern compilations of earlier documents, some as early as the 8th century. Irish monks were also famous for their Latin theological, philosophical, and natural science treatises; many treatises from the 8th through 10th centuries have survived and been published, as have many Latin and Irish poems and saints lives from the same period and milieu. Irish monks also recorded and adapted Irish secular legal traditions and mythological and folk literature, such as the Ulster cycle. The arrival of Anglo-Norman/English settlers, administrators, and institutions in the late 12th century produced new types of documents. Ecclesiastical documents from this period include some bishops registers, which consist primarily of letters, and monastic registers, which contain items such as obits which record deaths of patrons of a monastery or cathedral, wills, charters and acts pertaining to the monasterys property, and other miscellaneous documents. Royal and parliamentary documents provide information on the laws, courts, tax collection, financial outlays, and military organization of Ireland. Finally, in the later medieval period, cross-cultural influence and changing conditions prompted Gaelic and Anglo-Irish lords and merchants to patronize Irish-language bardic poetry, to commission genealogies, and to sponsor translations of theological, medical, and literary documents into Irish. For people who read Irish, these translations are an opportunity to learn specialized Irish vocabulary or to interrogate the types of changes made in the process of translation.
All Irish texts list Ireland as their location, and very few have a secondary, regional location designated. Since there are relatively few Irish sources compared to the number available for England, France, and other medieval countries, and since many sources cover a wide geographic area, its best to do a location search for Ireland and narrow down texts from there.
--J. Gundacker, October, 2004