Peritia

The study of the one surviving Irish tract on the consecration of churches (eleventh-century) allows us to identify analogies with the Gallican liturgy. The discovery of a dedication scheme contained in the ninth-century Angers manuscript 477 confirms the features of the Irish rite: the writing of a double Latin alphabet on the floor of the church, the use of maledictory psalms, and the circumambulation of the church while reciting gradual psalms.

Unlike Ohthere, whose report on northern geography precedes his own in the Old English Orosius, nothing is known about the ninth-century Wulfstan. However, his account includes tropes that provide evidence of Norse influence on stories circulating in the Baltic Sea area in this period.

An overview of scholarly attempts that have been made to locate the Hiberno-Latin author, Muirchú maccu Machtheni, geographically and chronologically is followed by an explanation of how DMLCS work can be harnessed to analyse aspects of his Vita S. Patricii. An appendix provides a lexical resource for investigating further his place within the Celtic-Latin tradition.

An aetiological legend relates that Cenn Fáelad sapiens (†679) was exposed to légend, fénechas, and filidecht and subsequently authored or ‘renewed’ several surviving texts. The ecclesiastical training of most sapientes is easily identified, but Cenn Fáelad’s is obliquely suggested and only vernacular texts are attributed to him. This essay attempts to discern the nature of Cenn Fáelad’s learning as a sapiens.

The evidence that Asser thought Alfred was born in 849 is too slender to bear the weight that has been hung from it. The systematic dating of events from ad 849, the birthdate of Alfred preserved in the Cotton MS. version of Asser’s Vita Ælfredi, was probably absent from the source of both ‘The Annals of St Neots’ and John of Worcester, and may therefore have been unknown to Asser himself. Asser may have written his Vita soon after 887. The implications for Asser’s contribution to the Alfredian canon, and especially for his account of Alfred’s trip to Rome, are not trivial.

The pre-Early Modern English history of deliberately formed lexical blends is obscure. This article investigates the possible availability of blending as a type of lexical composition in Old English (OE). Blends have special characteristics in both their morphology and their semantics. The importance of this morpho-semantic duality to the OE question emerges in case studies of three words that I argue to be blends or blend-like formations. All three mimic the morphological structure of other compositional types even while exhibiting the phonology-driven opportunism and referential strategies that are diagnostic of blending. A partial explanation for this commonality, and for the implication that individual OE blends were motivated via other compositional processes, may lie in a subtle difference between OE and Present-Day English in another region of the morphological continuum: compounding.

This article offers a codicological examination of the fifteenth-century Book of Lismore and posits that its contents represent the interests of its patron, Finghín Mac Carthaigh Riabhach, supporting his authority on three levels: within the region of Cork, as a Gaelic lord, and within the broader context of Christendom.

The pseudo-historical account of the origins of the Senchas Már claims that Ireland’s most important collection of vernacular legal tracts was written in the fifth century, at a meeting of St Patrick and Lóegaire mac Néill at Tara. Aspects of the description of this episode reflect historical instances of royal legislation in seventh- and eighth-century Ireland. This suggests that the story was intended to depict the Senchas Már as an instance of royal legislation, and to associate its status as national law with the claims of the Uí Néill kings to island-wide authority.

Archaeological evidence suggests a basis in reality for the white linen tunics and purple woollen cloaks worn by the aristocratic protagonists in tales composed in Old and early Middle Irish. Linen is difficult to dye by natural means. The use of the adjective gel suggests that it was bleached. Wool is easier to dye. There is evidence for different types of purple dye.

The first O’Donnell lecture reassessed the role and impact of the Irish on the continent, interrogating previous historiographical biases. The evidence from Anglo-Saxon England provides a useful point of comparison. This second lecture deals with a series of related questions concerning Irish contributions to the spiritual and ecclesiastical worlds on the continent and in Anglo-Saxon England. This paper suggests that the picture was highly complex, with Irish contributions situated within a broader mainstream of practice, one which influenced the Irish as much as the Irish influenced it. They worked within well-established frameworks that were far from moribund.