This short film is a fun introduction to the Library, its services and resources, so sit back, relax and Lego!

The works of Sarah Purser have hung on the walls at Academy House for over one hundred years. Her portraits of past presidents of the Academy silently bear witness to the day to day goings-on of Academy business meetings, lectures, seminars, workshops and book launches. How often do we return their collective gaze as we pursue the business of the day?

Sarah Henrietta Purser was born on 22 March 1848 at Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire) and was brought up in Dungarvan, County Waterford. Born into a middle class family, she was sent to Switzerland to be educated, returning to Ireland at the age of fifteen. By 1873 the Purser family business was in financial difficulty and Purser knew she would need to finance her own life, so she focused on becoming a professional artist. She studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art and joined the Dublin Sketching Club. Purser was a competent artist and her works were exhibited. However, she knew she needed to hone her talents and improve her artistic skills to a professional standard. As in most professional fields, women artists did not have the opportunities of their male counterparts; there were few places women could study art to a higher level. The leading art society, the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), did exhibit works by women but they were excluded from full membership until 1924. As a result Purser looked further afield. In 1878 she borrowed £30 from her brothers and set off to Paris to attend the ‘ladies section’ of the Académie Julian. This turned out to be a good investment on behalf of the Purser brothers as Sarah went on to become one of the leading portrait artists of her generation, the first woman to be elected to the RHA, a champion and advocate of Irish art and through astute investments, very wealthy. Her family background enabled her to move in Irish society and be introduced to people who could further her career by commissioning works.

Purser had a long and successful career and left a lasting legacy on the Irish art world. This blog post does not attempt to examine her full career but instead focuses on the portraits by Sarah Purser that hang in Academy House. All of the portraits are oil on canvas. At some point before 1915 they were sent to a local restorer for cleaning and were damaged, resulting in their original colour and vibrancy being compromised.

Sir Samuel Ferguson, MRIA, 1810-86
Poet and antiquary
Academy President, 1882-86

This posthumous portrait was commissioned by the RIA Ferguson Memorial Committee and was presented on behalf of the subscribers in 1888. Purser was often commissioned to paint posthumous portraits, which she referred irreverently to as ‘deaders’. John Kells Ingram, MRIA, was impressed with the portrait and wrote to Purser on 2 March 1888:

‘I must write a few lines to congratualte you on the production of that admirable work – you have not only given the picture the characteristic pose of the figure and the other externals perfectly but you appear to have marvelously caught and perpetuated on that canvas, the soul of the face in fact, the whole man as we knew him. …’[i]

Rev. Samuel Haughton, MRIA, 1821-97
Mathematician, geologist and scientist
Academy President, 1886-91

In 1883 Trinity College Dublin paid sixty guineas for a three-quarter length portrait of Samuel Haughton which was exhibited at the RHA to much acclaim. On viewing his likeness Haughton reportedly said to Purser ‘Sarah you have caught me exactly. You can almost see the lies dripping from my lips!’[ii] Haughton liked the look of himself so much he commissioned a smaller bust sized portrait which he presented to the RIA in 1889.

Rev. Charles Graves, MRIA, 1812-99
Bishop of Limerick
Mathematician
Academy President, 1861-66

Rev. William Reeves, MRIA, 1815-92
Bishop of Down, Connor and Dromore
Antiquary
Academy President, 1891-92

Rev. Charles Graves, MRIA, 1812-99 Rev. William Reeves, MRIA, 1815-92 ©RIA

This three-quarter length portrait depicts Graves seated, wearing clerical dress and a fez-type hat. The work was completed by December 1892 and presented to the Academy by Graves in 1893. The portrait of Reeves, also of three-quarter length, was commissioned by the RIA and presented by Samuel Haughton, MRIA, on behalf of the subscribers in the same year. The composition of the work is a replica in reverse of the Charles Graves portrait. They hang along side each other in the Moore Library at Academy House.

Rev. James Henthorn Todd, MRIA, 1805-69
Gaelic scholar, Trinity College Dublin
Academy President, 1856-61

Rev. James Henthorn Todd, MRIA, 1805-69 (detail) ©RIA

This portrait was painted many years after the subject’s death and was presented to the RIA by his brother Charles H. Todd in 1893. Like the others, this portrait was damaged during conservation c. 1915, resulting in the darkness of the painting, so much so that Todd’s clerical clothing blends into the background.

Sir William Rowan Hamilton, MRIA, 1805-65
Mathematician
Academy President, 1837-46

Sir William Rowan Hamilton, MRIA, 1805-65 (detail) ©RIA

William Rowan Hamilton is perhaps one of the more recognisable figures associated with the Academy. The portrait was commissioned almost thirty years after Hamilton’s death and was donated to the RIA by John Rowan Hamilton O’Regan. Despite being a ‘deader’ the portrait was lauded by then President of the Academy, John Kells Ingram, as being a very good likeness.

Sir Robert Kane, MRIA, 1809-90
Scientist
Academy President, 1877-82

Sir Robert Kane, MRIA, 1809-90 (detail) ©RIA

Another posthumous portrait commissioned on behalf of the Academy by subscription. It was officially presented to the Academy in 1896 by his son Judge Robert Kane. Judge Kane and John Kells Ingram, visited Purser’s studio at Harcourt Terrace, Dublin, to the view the portrait; both were pleased with the likeness. Ingram later wrote a letter to the artist expressing his thoughts that the painting is ‘decidedly successful, indeed wonderfully so, when it is remembered that you had never seen him.’[iii]

John Kells Ingram, MRIA, 1823-1907
Poet, economist and librarian
Professor of Oratory, Trinity College, Dublin
Composer of the ballad ‘Who fears to speak of 98’
Academy President, 1892-96

John Kells Ingram, MRIA, 1823-1907 (detail) ©RIA

This portrait was presented to the Academy in 1897 by Ingram’s friends and colleagues in commemoration of his presidency. Ingram was asked to choose the artist himself and he chose Purser. This was the seventh portrait she had been commissioned to paint for the Academy and so Ingram was familiar with her work. Purser’s studio on Harcourt Terrace, and later Mespil House on the Grand Canal, became a regular meeting place for writers, artists and intellectuals. Ingram may also have been acquainted with Purser through these soirées and most certainly visited her studio.

Robert Atkinson, MRIA, 1839-1908
Gaelic scholar
Academy Librarian, 1876-78, Academy President 1901-06

Robert Atkinson, MRIA, 1839-1908 (detail) ©RIA

Atkinson’s health was in decline when he sat for this portrait and he died the following year. Atkinson was an exceptionally gifted linguist and became the first editor of the Academy’s Dictionary of the Irish Language. When he retired he began to compile a Chinese dictionary. A vase of flowers sits on a table in the background of the portrait, a possible nod to his interest in botany. His other interests, namely playing the violin and ju-jitsu, are not depicted!

Sarah Purser was a prolific artist much in demand by the ‘great and the good.’ In her own words she ‘went through the British aristocracy like the measles.’[i] We could say for almost twenty years she went through Academy presidents like a severe bout of flu! Next time you are in Academy House take a look around the walls and learn a little more about our past presidents and members.

The Royal Irish Academy library is well known for its collection of manuscripts in the Irish language – the largest such collection in the world. Alongside these treasures, the library’s holdings of printed books in Irish continues to grow, reflecting the strong growth in Irish language publications in recent times. Our collection includes some modern fiction and poetry in Irish, but it is essentially an academic research collection, specialising in editions of texts, research monographs and essay collections, together with linguistic and philological studies. The library has also received important bequests of specialist collections, a particularly significant one being the library of Osborn J. Bergin, MRIA (1873-1950).

Learned societies in the nineteenth century

The publication of books in the Irish language was extremely rare before the mid nineteenth century, and some early academic titles emerged out of the antiquarian interests of scholars associated with the Academy. Dual-language editions of texts were necessary to ensure the availability of the authentic Irish texts while increasing their accessibility to readers with little knowledge of Irish but with an interest in the sources for the history of medieval Ireland. Out of this cultural context there emerged the publications of the Irish Archaeological Society in the 1840s (including many editions by John O’Donovan), and the Celtic Society. These two later merged to become the Irish Archaeological and Celtic Society. The Ossianic Society began publishing in 1853, with an emphasis on sagas and tales rather than historical texts. The Royal Irish Academy’s own Todd Lecture Series commenced publication in 1889, and continued irregularly until 1965. The Irish Texts Society, a London-based organisation, commenced publishing scholarly editions of Irish texts with English translations in 1899 in a series that is still in progress. The library has comprehensive holdings of all these series. In addition, the Academy’s online shop sells the publications of the Irish Texts Society.

https://www.ria.ie/bookshop/category/irish-texts-society-main-series-1009/type/publication

Twentieth-century publishers

The Library holds many of the publications of societies formed to promote the Irish language, most notably Conradh na Gaeilge (Gaelic League), first established in 1893. Editions of texts in Irish published in the twentieth century include a ‘Leabhair ó Láimhsgríbhnibh’ series, edited by Gerard Murphy, and the publications of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, School of Celtic Studies from 1942 to the present.

Twentieth-century government-sponsored publications in the Irish language bearing the imprint of the Stationery Office (Oifig an tSolatháir / Oifig Díolta Foilseacháin Rialtias) are well represented, along with the output of the various commercial companies specialising in academic books in Irish. These include Foilseacháin Náisiúnta Teo (FNT), M.H. Gill, Coiscéim, Clóchomhar, Cló Iar-Chonnachta. Former publishers of textbooks in Irish including Sáirséal agus Dill, and the Christian Brothers, as well as the government-sponsored publisher An Gúm, are also represented in the Academy’s holdings. Regional publications, including imprints associated with the universities, most notably the An Sagart imprint of St Patrick’s College Maynooth, also feature strongly.

Periodicals in Irish

The library’s holdings of periodicals in Irish range from the late nineteenth-century Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge (1882-1909) to current titles such as Léachtaí Cholm Cille. The library also holds a variety of academic periodicals with Irish subject matter containing articles in either Irish or English. Among the current titles in this latter category are Béaloideas, Celtica, Éigse, Ériu, Journal of Celtic Studies, Studia Hibernica and Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie. In general, the library does not collect newspapers and magazines, but does hold some current Irish monthly publications including Comhar and Feasta.

Bibliographies of Irish language and literature

Work towards a comprehensive, up-to-date bibliography of books and articles on Irish language and literature is in progress at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, School of Celtic Studies, and can be accessed online. https://bill.celt.dias.ie/. This effectively supersedes the older printed bibliographies:

R. I. Best. Bibliography of Irish philology and manuscript literature: publications 1913-1941. Dublin 1969.
R. I. Best. Bibliography of Irish philology and of printed Irish literature, to 1912. Dublin, 1913.
Rolf Baumgarten. Bibliography of Irish linguistics and literature 1942-1971. Dublin, 1986.

Many periodical articles published prior to 1966 are also listed in the sources database created by the National Library of Ireland. http://sources.nli.ie/. This was originally published as: R.J. Hayes. Sources for the history if Irish civilization: articles in Irish periodicals. 9 vols. Boston, 1970.

Risteárd De Hae. Clár litríocht na Nua-Ghaedhilge: 1850-1936. 3 vols. Dublin, 1938-40 is still useful for tracing older literary works.

Check our holdings online

The library’s holdings of books and periodicals in Irish are itemised on our online catalogues. Books and periodicals are available for consultation by registered readers in the Library Reading Room.

https://catalogues.ria.ie/Presto/home/home.aspx

Bernadette Cunningham
Deputy Librarian

Françoise Henry was the foremost exponent of early medieval Christian art in Ireland in the twentieth century. She was, however, not Irish, but was born in France in 1902, and studied under famous medieval experts, particularly Henri Focillon and Henri Hubert in Paris, who furthered her career by getting her a position in the French Museum of National Antiquities in Saint-Germain-en-Laye outside the French capital.

Portrait of Françoise Henry by Vera Klute (RIA)

She first came to Ireland in 1926, and her fascination with the stone High Crosses at Ahenny and elsewhere in Tipperary and Kilkenny encouraged her to do a doctoral thesis on Irish Early Christian stonework which was published in two volumes in Paris in 1933. That was the first of her many major contributions with which she adorned her research on early medieval art in Ireland. At first her articles appeared in important French journals and in the French language, but throughout her life she was able to write in an imaginative and masterly fashion in both French and English. In 1932 she joined the French Department in University College, Dublin, whose President,Denis Coffey, invited her two years later to establish a course on European painting in the ‘Purser Griffith lectures’, during which she was able to fill in a sorely-felt gap in Irish third-level education and establish herself as a young voice that deserved to be heard more loudly.

Henry’s own pencil drawings of capital letters from the Cathach – arguably the Academy’s greatest treasure (RIA)

Initially, it was the West of Ireland which grabbed her attention, for it was there that she found ‘Celtic’ designs on stone pillars which she probably envisaged as the last outpost of the so-called La Tène art which had largely died the death on the Continent with Caesar’s invasion of Gaul. While her heart was in Ireland during the 1930s, it was the threat of German invasion of France late in the decade which brought her to take leave of absence from her job in UCD and lured her back to work on behalf of her homeland. She was heavily involved in transporting movable antiquities from Saint-Germain to a castle in the Loire Valley in 1939, and she subsequently became an ambulance driver while, at the same time, working with the Vaucher Commission set up to safeguard the cultural heritage of France – and Europe – as a consequence of the ravages of war. Despite the carrot potentially dangled before her of becoming the Director of the Museum (a plum which World War II had denied her), she decided to leave the French Museum in 1946, and came to spend the rest of her working life in Ireland. She was integrated again into UCD in 1948, but only in a subsidiary role in the Department of Archaeology, and it was not until 1965 that she was finally granted a Department of her own, specialising in the history of European art. Thereafter she spent many valuable years teaching a nest of students before she retired in 1974, and returned to Burgundy where she died in 1982.

The ‘dolphin’ stone on Caher Island, Co. Mayo, chalked in by Françoise Henry to bring out the details (RIA)

One of Françoise Henry’s finest photographs – the Crucifixion pillar on the Island of Duvillaun Mór off the Mullet peninsula in county Mayo. (RIA)

Her publications on Irish art, archaeology and architecture span more than half a century from 1928 to 1980, all of which have been usefully summarised in the recently-published Volume 117 of the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, bearing a copy of her portrait on the front cover. Her earliest work was in French, discussing the iconography of Irish High Crosses, and was followed by two books, one on early Irish sculpture and the other on prehistoric tombs close to the area where she grew up in Burgundy. Further studies in French and English covered the European use of enamel decoration on metalwork, which brought her to examine the same motifs which she found on stones in the West of Ireland. It was this interest which led her to start excavating on the Mayo island of Inishkea North in 1938, photos from which are illustrated here.

Excavations in progress on Inishkea North, Co. Mayo, with workmen clearing sand around the stele in the foreground before Françoise Henry had it transported to the National Museum in Dublin in 1938. The stone in the background is still in situ. (RIA)

The only decorated stone on Inishkea South, Co. Mayo, as seen (left) complete in the Françoise Henry photograph of 1937 (RIA) and (right) half-damaged as seen by David Cabot in 1961 (reproduced with his permission). It is now sadly just a collection of fragments lying recumbent on the ground. A pity she didn’t send it with two others from Inishkea North to Dublin in 1938!

Françoise Henry’s map of a part of Inishkea North, Co. Mayo, marking various items of archaeological interest on the island (RIA)

Two years later, the London blitz didn’t prevent the appearance of her first important book in English, Irish Art in the Early Christian Period. In it, she brought out the interaction between metalwork, manuscripts and stonework, which formed the basis of much of her subsequent publications. The most important of these were the three volumes on Early Irish Art, which were first published in French in 1963-64, and later in English in 1965-70. Where earlier she had had to content herself with black-and-white illustrations, here she could luxuriate also in beautiful colour plates, lovingly created by her French Benedictine publisher, the Zodiaque series. This trio of volumes, particularly when translated into English, cemented the reputation of Françoise Henry as the leading authority in the broad fields of early Irish art ad architecture, and it was appropriate that the appearance of the first of the English-language volumes coincided with her being given her own Department of the History of European art in UCD.

In addition to a number of smaller volumes on various Irish topics, which came out in the 1950s and 1960s, her last magnum opus was The Book of Kells, where she worked out the different hands that went into the making of Ireland’s greatest painted masterpiece, and prepared her own notes and line drawings for it. Again, it is one of the coincidences of her career that in the year when her Kells volume appeared, she was not only presented with a Festschrift, a series of essays in her honour in the Jesuit magazine Studies, but also the year she retired from UCD to return to her native France to spend the remainder of her life in her Burgundian homeland.

Françoise Henry’s house in Lindry in Burgundy where she died in 1982 (RIA)

Françoise Henry’s excavations and publications on the island of Inishkea became the subject of renewed interest six years ago, when two versions of her diary – one in French edited by Barbara Wright, the other in English edited by Janet Marquardt – gave her elegantly-written private thoughts on her experience of digging on the island. They certainly help to keep the memory of her work alive, as do also the three volumes of her collected essays assembled by the Pindar Press in London between 1983 and 1985.

A page from Françoise Henry’s private diary in French describing a violent storm on the Mayo Island of Inishkea North on June 27th 1937 (RIA)

Main image above: The Crucifixion slab on the Bailey Mór of Inishkea North before Françoise Henry’s excavation revealed the whole stone – one of County Mayo’s major contributions to the art of early medieval Ireland (RIA)

Dr Peter Harbison, MRIA

Our exhibition Françoise Henry and the history of Irish art will run until 29 June 2018.

Irish Script on Screen (ISOS)

For more than 15 years the Royal Irish Academy library has been an active partner in a highly successful digital partnership with the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Established by Professor Pádraig Ó Macháin, the Irish Script on Screen initiative has made hundreds of Irish manuscripts accessible online. These include almost all of the Academy’s medieval Irish language treasures.

ISOS Camera

The actual work of digitisation is currently done by Anne Marie O’Brien of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Anne Marie works in the Academy for a month or two each year. The collaborative use of expensive photographic equipment and technical expertise makes it possible to digitise special manuscripts regardless of the resources of the repository in which they are held. But that is just the process. What about the impact?

Once they have been published online, rare Irish manuscripts of exceptional importance become accessible to scholars worldwide. Distance from Dublin is no longer a barrier to research on the major medieval manuscripts in the Academy collections. Researchers no longer need to spend long periods of time handling fragile original items. Most researchers, though, will seek to examine the original manuscript at some point during their studies. As with artworks, so also with manuscripts, a surrogate image never offers quite as complete an experience as seeing the original.

Digitisation allows palaeographers attempting to identify different scribal hands an opportunity to examine letter forms in detail, and to make comparisons with other manuscripts. Some exciting results of this type of painstaking research are among the new studies of our medieval manuscripts currently being published.

Lebor na hUidre (‘Book of the Dun Cow’), MS 23 E 25, p 12

Studies on Irish Manuscripts (Codices Hibernenses Eximii)

Since 2012 the RIA Library has hosted three international seminars on individual medieval manuscripts in its collections. It is no coincidence that these are taking place following the digitisation of the manuscripts concerned. The first of these seminars, in November 2012, concentrated on Lebor na hUidre (RIA MS 23 E 25). Popularly known as the Book of the Dun Cow, Lebor na hUidre is the oldest surviving manuscript entirely written in the Irish language. In addition to the digital images available on Irish Script on Screen, a published edition of the text is available in print and is also available in searchable format on the CELT website at University College Cork.

Drawing on the freely available digital versions of the manuscript, conference participants were able to undertake a fresh examination of the history, palaeography, and language of the manuscript and the texts it contains. Nine papers from the seminar have now been published in the conference proceedings edited by Professor Ruairí Ó hUiginn.

Lebor na hUidre (Codices Hibernenses Eximii, 1), a collection of essays edited by Ruairi Ó hUiginn, published 2015

In spring 2015, a second international seminar, this time on the Book of Ballymote (RIA MS 23 P 12), was a sell-out success. A photographic facsimile edition of this manuscript published 130 years ago, in 1887, is now a rare collectors’ item. There is no doubt that the digitisation of the manuscript in 2003 allowed research to move to a new level. Research papers presented at this two-day seminar will be published as the second volume of Studies on Irish Manuscripts (Codices Hibernenses Eximii) in spring 2018, edited by Ruairí Ó hUiginn.

Book of Ballymote, MS 23 P 12, fol 43r.

In March 2017, a third seminar in this series saw a capacity audience hear the results of new research on the Book of Uí Mhaine, sometimes known as the Book of the O’Kellys (RIA MS D ii 1). This large, fourteenth-century vellum manuscript from County Galway had not previously received the level of study and analysis it deserves. It has been in the Academy since 1883, having been presented by the British Government following the purchase of the Stowe/Ashburnham collection of manuscripts in that year. Again, there is no doubt but that digitisation has facilitated much new and original research on the manuscript. The seminar proceedings will be published in due course as the third volume in the series of Studies on Irish Manuscripts (Codices Hibernenses Eximii). In the meantime, podcasts of many of the seminar presentations are currently available online. As previously, the seminar was organised in collaboration with the Department of Early Irish, Maynooth University, and the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, to whom we extend our thanks.

Professors Ruairí Ó hUiginn and Nollaig Ó Muraíle viewing Book of Uí Mhaine, March 2017

We are delighted that the permanent scholarly record of these international seminars will be made available in printed form, in the Academy’s time-honoured manner of supporting humanities research. But it is the online digital initiative of Irish Script on Screen (ISOS) that has been the catalyst for the new research that has made these seminars possible. Phase 20 of our digital collaboration will take place in January 2018.

Group photo of speakers from Uí Mhaine conference, March 2017

Bernadette Cunningham
Deputy Librarian

Further reading:

Lebor na hUidre (Codices Hibernenses Eximii, 1), edited by Ruairí Ó hUiginn (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2015)

Book of Ballymote (Codices Hibernenses Eximii, 2), edited by Ruairí Ó hUiginn (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2018)

Irish Script on Screen (ISOS) www.isos.dias.ie

Corpus of Electronic Texts (CELT) www.ucc.ie/celt

Listen back to:

Book of Uí Mhaine Conference

Book of Ballymote Conference

Lebor na hUidre Conference

“A Brief Guide to Table Turning:

Materials:

One small to medium sized wooden table
Two or more friends (four-five people is optimum)
One quiet room with dimmed lights
One sense of adventure / open mind

Method:

Sit around the table
Place hands on the table fingers spread
Ensure the room is quiet
Concentrate your mind on the answers you seek from the ‘other world’
Ask the spirits a question
Wait
The spirits should move or tilt the table
The tilting and moving should address the questions asked.”

‘Americans – that strange people, always fond of novelty.’[1]

Table turning also known as table-tilting or table-moving is a type of seance that became popular in America and Europe as a result of the actions of the soon to be notorious Fox sisters. In 1848 Kate and Margaret Fox, of Hydesville, New York, claimed they could communicate with spirits. This communication took the form of the spirits rapping or knocking. Typically one rap for yes and two raps for no in answer to a question and a series of raps to indicate letters of the alphabet.

The Fox sisters and their rappings soon became a local sensation and in 1849 they publicly demonstrated this phenomenon at the Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York. This event played an important role in the creation of the Spiritualist movement. The use of a table worked in a similar way to a planchette on a Ouija board and became the conduit of choice for many people hoping to talk to those beyond the grave.

By 1852 the phenomenon had travelled beyond the afterlife and across the Atlantic to the tables of Europe. For the next few years it was practised in grand living-rooms, middle class parlours and humble kitchens. This sensation also came to the attention of scientists, doctors and clergymen who sought to investigate and explain the cause of these mysterious occurrences. Was there anybody there? Was it old aunt Mary communing from beyond the grave? Was it the work of the Devil? Or could it all be explained away by mere science?

These questions and investigations resulted in a flurry of pamphlets, books and newspaper articles, some of which survive in the RIA Library.

Practical instructions in Table-Turning

An 1853 pamphlet entitled Practical instructions in table-moving, with physical demonstrations begins with the origins of table-turning and the Spiritualist movement, calling it ‘the mysteries of a new religion.’[2] The author (‘A Physician’) then goes on to describe his experiments, detailing the optimum conditions needed for a successful session of table turning. His experiments brought him to the conclusion that persons with ‘a nervous constitution, coinciding with a perfect state of health is most favourable to table-moving.’[3] He also suggests a mix of genders as ‘The exquisite sensibility of woman joined with the strong will of man, constitutes one of the most favourable circumstances for the rapid manifestation of the phenomenon.’[4]

The author theorises that the phenomenon works as a result of a fluid, not yet discovered by science, and that it can not be compared to either ‘electricity, nor terrestrial magnetism.’[5] From a practical perspective he cautions that partaking in table-turning is not without its dangers as formerly inanimate furniture had sometimes fallen on the feet of the participants or been propelled across the room and made ladies faint.

Practical instructions in table-moving, frontispiece (HP 2139/11)

Table-moving tested and proved to be the result of Satanic agency

Revd Nathaniel Stedman Godfrey of Wortley, Leeds, also took an interest in this sensation but, as a God-fearing gentleman, he turned to the Bible for answers. ‘Table-moving tested and proved to be the result of Satanic agency’[6] is one of a number of pamphlets on the subject written by the Revd Godfrey between 1853 and 1854. At quarter past nine on a Thursday night in June, the Revd Godfrey his wife and his curate sat down at a three-legged round mahogany table, about 12 inches in diameter. At ten o’clock the table began to move.

The household’s two maids and the National Schoolmaster were summoned to witness the event. The Revd Godfrey had begun his experiment with an air of scepticism and seemed surprised by the outcome. His detailed description of the session describes him asking questions of the table and the table answering via tilts and turns. The encounter ends when a Bible is produced and set upon the wayward table. He concludes that the movement of the table is not a manifestation of communion with the deceased nor the effects of electricity but is rather the work of the Devil. Having read the title of his pamphlet, his conclusion should come as no great surprise.

In reply to Revd Godfrey’s pamphlet, a number of clergymen published their own interpretations, arguing that Godfrey’s scriptural evidence was inconsistent and that there was no proof that Satan had the power of working miracles.

Table -turning not diabolical / By Rev. F. Close (HP 2139/13) Table-moving tested and proved to be the result of Satanic agency / by the Rev. N. S. Godfrey (HP 2139/12)
‘Table-turning’ and ‘Table-moving’ pamphlets were frequently reprinted

Faraday Investigates

Scientists were quick to question this unexplained phenomenon, some attributing the movement of the tables to electricity or magnetism. Due to his work in this area, the opinion of the renowned physicist Michael Faraday was sought. In 1853 Faraday conducted his own experiments and concluded that this was a physical phenomenon not a supernatural one. That the participants were unconsciously moving the table themselves by means of an ‘ideomotor response’. He made his findings and opinions public by writing a letter to The Times (London). ‘The first test apparatus: Faraday on table-turning’ was printed in the paper on 30 June 1853 and reprinted in various newspapers across the country and also in Ireland. Faraday’s letter was printed just as the Revd Godfrey was finalising his pamphlet. Undeterred by Faraday’s conclusions Godfrey added the following note at the end of his pamphlet:

‘While correcting this for the press, Professor Faraday’s letter was put into my hands. I merely notice it, to say that it has not the remotest bearing upon my experiments: … as I am already in possession of independent testimony to its truth.’[7]

Portrait of Michael Faraday taken from Faraday as a discoverer / by John Tyndall, MRIA (London, 1868)

A true believer

John Ashburner was a respected doctor who had studied and practised in England, Ireland and Scotland. In 1815 he was elected as an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy and for sometime lived on Frederick Street in Dublin. Later in his life he devoted his time to the study and practice of Mesmerism for healing purposes. He also became an enthusiastic proponent of Spiritualism and believed participants were truly communicating with spirits during table-turning sessions. In 1854 Ashburner became a writing medium (automatic writing) and claimed he had received messages from his father who had died in Bombay in 1808. Ashburner strongly disagreed with Faraday’s opinions on table-turning. Having met the scientist in London, Ashburner was not impressed, as is evident from the following scathing attack on Faraday’s character and intellect:

‘I was much struck with the want of philosophical acumen in Mr Faraday. I found him a vain man, with somewhat of a supercilious temper. His language, and the tone of his general bearing did not convey the idea of a man of enlarged mind.’[8]

In 1888 the Fox sisters admitted that it was all a hoax. They confirmed that the sensation that piqued the interest of Michael Faraday and sent tables spinning and rapping across two continents was in fact predicated on a lie. Yet the culture and practice of spiritualism survives confirming the fact that we really don’t know if there is ‘anybody there?’

Sophie Evans
Assistant Librarian

The Library of the Royal Irish Academy houses the greatest collection of watercolour drawings by the Dutch-born artist Gabriel Beranger (c.1729-1817). His adult years spent in Ireland provide us with the most extensive treasury of eighteenth-century coloured views of the country’s ancient monuments. These are found in one large volume (3 C 30), and two smaller post-card-size albums (3 C 31-32), as well as a few separate strays which, together, open up for us a delightful world of the past which is full of pleasant surprises.

Beranger himself was not just an artist, he also had a warehouse full of artist’s supplies in Dublin’s South Great George’s Street, and when patronage of his work declined in the 1780s, his friends were able to get him a job as assistant ledger-keeper in the Exchequer Office ‒ until he married a well-off wife who was able to keep him for the rest of his life in a style to which he would doubtless always like to have been accustomed.

Lithograph portrait of Beranger (JRSAI, Vol. II, 1870-1)

After his death in 1817, he was forgotten about, as his drawings were in private collections unknown to the public. But one man who rescued him from oblivion was none other than the great antiquarian polymath physician Sir William Wilde (1815-1876) whose talents ‒ listed on a plaque on the outside of his former home at No. 1 Merrion Square ‒ went far beyond his parenting of the poet-playwright Oscar. Wilde was only two years old when Beranger died, and therefore never met him, but he encountered people who did, and was able to give a lively description of the artist, as follows:

‘The good old Dutchman was spare in person, of middle height, his natural hair powdered and gathered into a queue; he had a sharp well-cut brow and good bushy eyebrows; a clear, observant, square-ended nose, that sniffed humbug and took in fun … Well-shaven, no shirt to be seen, but his neck surrounded with a voluminous neckcloth, fringed at the ends, a drab, rather Quaker-cut coat and vest for household purposes, and when out on sketching excursions he had on a long scarlet frock-coat, yellow breeches, top boots, a three-cocked hat, and held in his hand a tall staff and measuring tape’ [Wilde’s Memoir of Beranger (1880), 28]

Gentleman, possibly Beranger, sketching Three Rock Mountain, Co. Dublin (MS 3 C 30/76)

Wilde was quite right in pointing out Beranger’s pleasure in portraying himself, usually from behind, and in various poses ‒ sitting down on a bank reposing with his measuring stick and accompanied by his often present mongrelly dog in front of Athlumney Castle, Co. Meath, gesticulating to fishermen in the shadow of the Ormond Castle of Carrick-on-Suir, Co. Tipperary, or out hunting with his gun and faithful hound at Carrigrohane Castle, Co. Cork. He took particular pride in showing himself off as he stands in awe of dolmens in the environs of Dublin, at Loughlinstown or Mount Venus, and admiring a pair of well-dressed friends who are measuring the dolmen at Kiltiernan, the trio (as also at Loughlinstown) straight out of a Mozart opera, with which they were contemporary.

Athlumney Castle, Co. Meath (MS 3 C 30/7)

Carrigrohane Castle, Co. Cork (MS 3 C 30/34)

Cromlech, on the lands of Loughlin’s town, 7 m[iles] from Dublin (MS 3 C 30/84)

Cromlech on the south side of Kilternan hill, 2 miles from Killgobbin (MS 3 C 30/45)

Beranger also shows himself at work sketching an open landscape on top of the Three Rock Mountain in the hills south of Dublin, or at Rathcroghan, the famous Roscommon home of the mythical Queen Medhbh, the instigator of the Cattle Raid of Cooley. But he was also something of a ladies’ man, and he does occasionally represent himself chatting to charming young women (chaperoned by his dog), as he admires the Tempietto at Templeoge, for instance. But lest he be accused of flouting the Sixth Commandment, he also paints himself pointing out to the lady’s husband the beauties of their fine Dublin suburban home.

View at Temple-oge (MS 3 C 31/1)

There is one atmospheric view of the Grand Canal in Dublin where he introduced a man, woman and child going for a stroll along the bank, but this is unlikely to be Beranger himself as he is dogless and ‒ as far as we know ‒ never had any children. Beside Carrick Castle, in Co. Meath, he portrays two women, one holding a baby, and beside them a man with a stick accompanied by what looks like a child, but the absence of the identifying canine probably precludes us from recognising the figure as Beranger himself. In one or two instances, he accompanies himself with a basket, perhaps for his picnic which would probably have involved a bottle of wine, of the kind he produced one day when it started to rain on an outing to Glendalough.

View of the Grand Canal, taken between the first bridge and the first lock looking towards Dublin (MS 3 C 31/4)

View of the castle of Carrick on the river Boyne, county of E[ast] Meath (MS 3 C 31/17)

Beranger may not always have worn the three-cornered hat prescribed by Dr Wilde. Other characters, some of whom may conceivably be himself, wear a round hat of one sort or another. It is Sir William’s wife, better known as the poetess ‘Speranza’, who gives us the best description of the other people who Beranger brings in as ‘accessories’ as she calls them (even when he is adding them to pictures copied from the work of other artists) :

Gentlemen in the long-skirted scarlet coat, and ladies with the slim trailing gowns and the large hats and feathers of the period; peasant women also, in the red petticoat, blue over-skirt, and white headkerchief… which costume has probably remained unchanged in Ireland for centuries. These figures give life and spirit to Beranger’s sketches [Wilde’s Memoir of Beranger (1880), 143-4].

She also adds the haughtily amusing comment that the animals which Beranger occasionally adds to his pictures ‘are of a deplorable kind, quite unworthy of modern cattle shows and competition prizes’!

View of two more of Dalkey’s castles, the old church and church yard (MS 3 C 31/22)

It may be mentioned en passant that no oil paintings by Beranger survive, though he was asked to do one of Westport House in Co. Mayo which, if he did, hasn’t survived. But his sketching of Ireland’s antiquities in the 1770s and 1780s carried out at the behest of his great patron William Burton Conyngham who, incidentally, was the Academy’s first Treasurer, was very much in keeping with the plein air habit of oil-painters of the period who began illustrating Ireland in the 1770s, men like Thomas Roberts and Jonathan Fisher, as revealed by William Laffan in an article in the September 2007 issue of the English art journal Apollo.

Dr Peter Harbison, MRIA

View our online exhbition : ‘Beranger’s Ireland: eighteenth-century watercolours by Gabriel Beranger, c.1729-1817′

A scribe’s resources

The high-quality hand-made paper used by Irish scribes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was expensive. When making new manuscripts, scribes were careful not to waste valuable materials. Irish scribes routinely used abbreviations and contractions in their writing so that they could transcribe texts more quickly and use less space. Their work was influenced by a long tradition of manuscript-making using costly raw materials. The vellum (calf-skin) used to make medieval manuscripts had been even more expensive and scribes devised strategies to economise. Indeed, they couldn’t afford to waste faulty vellum leaves, and worked around flaws in the skin, as seen in the Book of Fermoy example illustrated here.

Book of Fermoy, RIA, MS 23 E 29, detail from p. 102

The Book of O’Loghlen (1727)

By the early eighteenth century, literacy in Irish had expanded beyond the professional learned class. It then became necessary to explain the standard scribal shorthand for the benefit of all who wished to learn to read Irish. The Book of O’Loghlen (RIA MS E iv 3) provides a good example of this process. The manuscript was compiled in 1727 by Aindrias Mac Cruitín (d.1738). He was a well-known teacher, poet and scribe. Together with his younger relative, Aodh Buí Mac Cruitín (Hugh McCurtin, d.1755), they were regarded as among the last hereditary scholars of their time. The Book of O’Loghlen was made for a member of the O’Loghlen family, long associated with the Burren, in County Clare. It contains poems in praise of members of the O’Loghlen family, some living, others from preceding generations. It is one of the last family poem-books to survive in the Gaelic tradition. It also contains other popular poems, and some prose tales, notably from the Ulster Cycle and Fiannaíocht literary tradition. These tales were considered to be part of the story of the ancestry of the O’Loghlens.

Opening stanzas of poem beginning ‘Maith bhur bhfíor catha, a chlann Róigh’ by Tuileagna Ó Maolchonaire, transcribed by Aindrias Mac Cruitín in Book of O’Loghlen, RIA MS E iv 3, p. 65

Explaining the text

The person to whom the manuscript was presented was Brian O’Loghlen, a medical doctor living near Ennis, in County Clare. A later insertion records the births of his three children, Terence, Brian and Mary. These family notes are in English, a reminder that eighteenth-century Ireland saw a process of significant language change.

Family notes in English at the back of the Book of O’Loghlen, RIA MS E iv 3

Brian O’Loghlen may have valued his Gaelic heritage, but his skill in reading Irish was probably limited. This may explain why the scribe, Aindrias Mac Cruitín, included a guide to reading Irish at the beginning of the manuscript. Mac Cruitín also included a convenient table of the more common abbreviations that he used. His list still has value for students learning to read Irish manuscripts dating from the eighteenth or earlier centuries. Just like some of the more creative shorthand used in text messages, the meaning of these contractions was not always immediately obvious. Indeed, much of the scribal shorthand was of Roman origin, adapted from Latin manuscripts. Some locally devised terms required ingenuity to decipher. The two ‘ll’s used as the abbreviation of the word ‘Dáil’ is one to puzzle 2moro.

The Book of O’Loghlen manuscript has recently been digitised by the Irish Script On Screen project. You can test for yourself whether the list of scribal abbreviations supplied by Aindrias Mac Cruitín almost 300 years ago is an adequate guide to reading the manuscript.

‘Clár athchumaire nó noduighiachta san Ghaoidhilg’ [=List of abbreviations or notations in Irish], as explained by Aindrias Mac Cruitín in Book of O’Loghlen, 1727

Elements of the Irish Language (1728)

Coincidentally, in the year after this manuscript was written, Hugh McCurtin’s book on The Elements of the Irish Language grammatically explained in English was published at Louvain (1728). Clearly, there was a perceived demand both at home and abroad for guides to learning Irish, even though the language was in decline. The Mac Cruitín scholars aimed to cater for this demand, whether in customised manuscripts for individual patrons or in dual-language printed books for a wider market.

Hugh McCurtin explained in his book that he had spent 40 years studying the Irish language. Writing in 1728 he believed it was ‘now in its decay and almost in darkness, even to the natives themselves’. Referring to those who were abandoning the language, he wrote ‘I could heartily wish such persons would look back and reflect … how strange it seems to the world that any people should scorn the language, wherein the whole treasure of their antiquity and profound sciences lie in obscurity’. (McCurtin, Elements of the Irish language, 1728, sig. A.2)

Bernadette Cunningham
Deputy Librarian

Further reading

www.isos.dias.ie Digital editions of Academy manuscripts, including the Book of O’Loghlen (RIA, MS E iv 3)

Bernadette Cunningham, ‘The Book of O’Loghlen: an unwanted wedding gift?’ in R. Gillespie and R. F. Foster (eds), Irish provincial cultures in the long eighteenth century: making the middle sort (Dublin: Four Courts, 2012), pp 181-97

Vincent Morley, An Crann os coill: Aodh Buí Mac Cruitín, c.1680-1755 (Baile Átha Cliath: Coiscéim, 1995)

Main image: Muckinish castle, Burren by Thomas J. Westropp, MRIA, 1860-1922. (Westropp Collection, 3 A 47 / 60.

The Battle of Passchendaele

The Battle of Passchendaele (also known as the Third Battle of Ypres), an allied offensive in western Flanders, commenced on 31 July 1917 ending on 6 November. Even today, General Haig’s decision to press on at Passchendaele, despite huge losses in a veritable quagmire caused by prolonged heavy rains and incessant shelling, is deeply controversial.

Francis Ledwidge

Present at Passchendaele on the first day of the offensive was a young Irish poet, Francis Ledwidge, from Slane, Co. Meath. Born in 1887 to an impoverished family of Anglo-Norman descent, Ledwidge was acquainted with hardship from his earliest days. The death of his father in 1892 forced Ledwidge’s mother, Anne, to take on various jobs in order to supplement the meagre family income. Francis had to leave school at 13 to work as a farm hand. Well-read and a lover of poetry, he began to write around this time. His verse was rooted in his local environment, the fields and streams of Meath, the Boyne Valley, Skreen crossroads. He shared a love of natural history with his friend, printer’s apprentice, Matty McGoona and they regularly walked the banks of the Boyne observing the flora and fauna, the insect life etc. It is poignant that the only volume of Ledwidge’s poetry published in his lifetime was entitled Songs of the fields (1916).

Frances E. Ledwidge circa 1914 Bain News Service

Literary circles and War

The poet was encouraged in his literary endeavours and later supported financially by a fellow Meathman, Lord Dunsany, soldier and poet, who introduced the younger poet to literary circles in Dublin where he met Yeats, Katherine Tynan and Thomas MacDonagh among others. Ledwidge was a member of the Irish Volunteers but early in the War he enlisted with the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, Dunsany’s regiment, and saw service at Gallipoli and in Serbia. In Greece, Ledwidge observed nature as acutely as he had in Ireland. The final stanza of ‘The Coming of the Sheep’ is particularly visual ―

Before the early stars are bright

Cormorants and sea-gulls call.

And the moon comes large and white

Filling with a lovely light

The ferny curtained waterfall.

Then sleep raps every bell up tight

And the climbing moon grows small.

Easter Rising, Dublin, 1916

Recuperating in Manchester from a back injury he heard news of the Easter Rising at Dublin and of the executions of Connolly and of MacDonagh, the subject of his well-known lament ―

He shall not hear the bittern cry

In the wild sky, where he is lain …

Thomas MacDonagh, RIA MS 12 K 44(2)

― and another poem, ‘O’Connell Street’ reflects on the Rising:

A noble failure is not vain,

But hath a victory its own …

O’Connell Street, RIA MS 12 K 44(1)

Court Martial

Court-martialled for insubordinate talk and overstaying his leave, Ledwidge’s poem ‘After Court Martial’ is revealing of his state of mind at this time ―

My mind is not my mind, therefore,

I take no heed of what men say,

I lived ten thousand years before

God cursed the town of Nineveh.

The Present is a dream I see

Of horror and loud sufferings …

Ledwidge was posted to Amiens in December 1916. In 1917 he sent several poems from the Front back to Ireland. These were donated to the Academy in January 1954 by their owner, Lil, Bean Ui Thuama ─ RIA MS 23 K 44. Included are a version of the aforementioned ‘O’Connell Street’, and the wistful ‘Stanley Hill’―

On Stanley Hill the bees are loud

And loud a river wild,

And there, as wayward as a cloud,

I was a little child.

I knew not how mistrustful heart

Could lure with hidden wile,

And wound it in a fateful part

With dark and sudden guile.

And yet for all I’ve known and seen

Of Youth and Truth reviled,

On Stanley Hill the grass is green

And I am still a child.

A Soldier’s Death

Francis Ledwidge’s war ended at Paesschendaele on 31 July 1917. He was buried in Artillery Wood cemetery at Boezinge.

And where the earth was soft for flowers we made

A grave for him that he might better rest.

So, Spring shall come and leave it sweet arrayed,

And there the lark shall turn her dewy nest.[ii]

Siobhán Fitzpatrick, 27 July 2017

Blog opening image: Ledwidge Cottage Museum, Slane, County Meath where Francis lived and grew up as a young poet.

Eugene O’Curry (1796-1862)

The Academy’s chief cataloguer of manuscripts in the 1840s was Eugene O’Curry. He was also employed as a scribe, making copies of valuable manuscripts still in private hands. He worked by candle light in a cold building, and would have liked a few creature comforts.

Eugene O’Curry (1796-1862)

The Academy

During the 1830s and 1840s the Royal Irish Academy rapidly gained a reputation as the premier archival repository for manuscript material in the Irish language. Decades before the creation of a national library for Ireland, the Academy Library fulfilled that role from its base at Navigation House, 114 Grafton Street, across the road from the Provost’s House of Trinity College, Dublin. Even before the Academy’s new library and museum building opened at 19 Dawson Street, beside the Mansion House, in the 1850s, specialist scholars were hard at work cataloguing the Academy collections of Irish manuscripts.

Navigation House, from Dublin Penny Journal, 1835

Scribe and cataloguer

The chief cataloguer was Eugene O’Curry (Eoghan Ó Comhraí, 1794-1862). Commencing in 1842, he worked for two years on a detailed descriptive catalogue of the Irish manuscripts that the Academy had acquired up to that date. His hand-written catalogues still survive, and are still available for consultation by registered readers. They were in regular use for a hundred years, as the key to the Academy’s manuscript collections. His work was later continued by J. O’Beirne Crowe and was supplemented in the early twentieth century by notes and observations by other scholars including W. J. Purton, J. H. Lloyd, J. J. MacSweeney, P. S. Dinneen, and E. J. Gwynn, in a series of 186 notebooks (Now bound in 31 volumes, [SR] 67 M 1-17; 67 N 1-14).

O’Curry’s catalogues only began to be superseded from the 1920s by the publication of a new multi-fascicule Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the Royal Irish Academy, the work of T. F. O’Rahilly, Kathleen Mulchrone and others. O’Curry’s descriptions of manuscripts are still of interest to specialist scholars. Since February 2017 the online catalogue of the Academy’s manuscripts provides cross-references to the relevant volume and page-numbers of O’Curry handwritten catalogues.

O’Curry was frequently able to use his personal knowledge to identify the scribes of unattributed manuscripts. His thorough knowledge of the Irish manuscript collections acquired by the Academy emerges time and again in his descriptions of individual manuscripts. By the time he was employed as an archivist and scribe in the Academy in the early 1840s, he was a very experienced scholar. He had worked as a researcher on the Ordnance Survey project from 1835 to 1842, during which time it is estimated that he had consulted some 30,000 pages of manuscript (DIB).

Some years before O’Curry was employed as a cataloguer, he had worked for the Academy as a scribe. In 1836 he was employed to transcribe Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh’s Book of Genealogies. This was a major seventeenth-century source for the pedigrees of the leading families in Irish society. Three years later, in 1839, he transcribed the Book of Lismore, a late medieval vellum manuscript miscellany still in private hands. He was paid £50 for his transcript of the Book of Lismore. In 1840, at the request of J. H. Todd, he transcribed the Annals of Ulster from the sixteenth-century manuscript in Trinity College, Dublin. Later, in 1848, he transcribed the entire contents of the Book of the O’Conor Don (1631), which preserves unique copies of many classical modern Irish poems.
He worked in the evenings by candle light. Gas light had begun to be installed in Dublin in the 1820s, but had not yet come to Navigation House. The Academy’s premises on Grafton Street, where O’Curry made his transcripts, could be cold and dark.

In a twist of fate, because of his various roles as scribe and cataloguer, O’Curry had the opportunity of writing catalogue entries describing his own earlier transcripts of manuscripts. Still working with nothing but the light of a candle, in the early 1840s he wrote the catalogue entry for his transcript of Mac Fhirbhisigh’s book of Genealogies. Rather than describing the manuscript in detail, he observed:
‘Under any circumstances it is difficult to make a facsimile of an ancient much defaced manuscript of nearly a thousand pages, but the circumstances under which I made this transcript were particularly unfavourable. The entire book was written by candle light after hours, and the person who was at that time in charge of the Academy having compelled me to write by the light of one small candle, and often without a fire, and submitted me to many other vexatious obstructions, the transcript is, consequently, in some places uneven and inelegant. It is however always correct.’ (RIA, O’Curry Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts, 1st series, vol. 3, p. 1072 (RR/67/E/11)

Title page of O’Curry’s catalogue of the Academy collection of manuscripts from one of RR 67 E 9-11

The remainder of his catalogue entry for the item (now RIA, MS 23 P 1) replicated George Petrie’s observations on the historical value of Mac Fhirbhisigh’s genealogies.

It was probably while examining his own transcript with a view to cataloguing it that O’Curry decided to make a small addition to the manuscript. He added a phrase to his own scribal colophon on the final page of his copy of the Book of Genealogies. He had originally written:

‘Ar na sgríobhadh re hEoghan Óg mac Eogain Mhóir Ui Chomhraidhe, ó Dhúnatha, an iarthar Tuadh Mhumhan san mbliadhan d’aois Mheic Dé 1836. A n-Aithcliath Laighean.’
[Written by Eoghan Óg son of Eoghan Mór O’Curry, from Dunaha, in west Thomond in the year of the son of God 1836. In Dublin Leinster]
He later added: ‘& do sgriobhas e go huile do sholus coinnle, mar aon is Leabhar Leasa Móir.’ [and I wrote it all by candle light, along with the Book of Lismore.]

Scribal colophon at the end of Book of Genealogies (RIA, MS 23 P 1). O’Curry noted that he copied the manuscript by candle light.

A polite, retiring man, O’Curry was perhaps not as assertive as he might be in his daily life. But his skill with pen and ink knew no bounds and, in his catalogue description of his own manuscript, he had his revenge on the miserly administrator who would not give him a second candle, as he strove to make painstakingly accurate transcripts of some of Ireland’s great cultural artefacts.

Eugene O’Curry was elected to membership of the Royal Irish Academy in 1853. In the following year he was invited to take up the position of professor of Irish history and archaeology at the newly established Catholic University in Dublin. He taught there for the last eight years of his life. His lectures at the new university drew on a lifetime’s research on Irish manuscript materials. Among his audience was John Henry Newman who personally sanctioned funding to allow for the publication of O’Curry’s Lectures on the manuscript materials of ancient Irish history (1861). Further collections of his lectures at the Catholic University were posthumously published in three volumes as Lectures on the manners and customs of the ancient Irish (1873). These publications allowed O’Curry share his vast knowledge of Irish manuscripts with a wide readership. Drawing on his years of close scrutiny of the Academy’s Irish manuscripts, both as a cataloguer and as a scribe, his lectures helped bring Ireland’s medieval manuscript heritage from darkness into light. His published work was particularly influential in setting the agenda for the cultural revival of the late nineteenth century.

Eugene O’Curry died 155 years ago on 30 July 1862, and was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, where a large Celtic cross marks his grave.

Bernadette Cunningham
Deputy Librarian

Further reading:

• Diarmaid Ó Catháin (2009), ‘O’Curry (Curry, Ó Comhraí, Eugene (Eoghan)’, in Dictionary of Irish Biography.
• Pádraig Ó Fiannachta (ed.) (1995), Eoghan Ó Comhrai, saol agus saothar: ómos do Eoghan Ó Comhraí.