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.
Autorentext
Cornelius G. Buttimer is a senior lecturer in the Department of Modern Irish, School of Irish Learning, University College Cork. He is the author and co-editor of a number of books, including Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Inhalt
Introduction
1. Accentual verse
2. Ogham; accentual verse
3. Ossianic verse; tale
4. Manuscript and book catalogues
5. Accentual verse; prophecies; anecdotes
6. Book of the O'Byrnes
7. Ossianic and accentual verse
8. Lecture to Philo-Celtic Society
9. Accentual verse; tale
10. Ossianic and accentual verse
11. Grammar; accentual verse
12. Tales
13. Accentual verse
14. Ossianic verse; tale
15. Life of St Finbarr
16. Tales
17. Accentual verse; tale
18. Folktales
19. Tale; Ossianic and accentual verse
20. Genealogies
21. Tales; accentual and Ossianic verse
22. Ossianic and accentual verse; tale
23. Religious prose; devotional and Ossianic verse
24. Reserved number
25. O'Clery's Glossary
26. Trinity College, Dublin, Ms. H.3.18 (part) (photostat)
27. Drama of Christ's Birth
28. Religious prose; syllabic and accentual verse
29. Royal Irish Academy, Ms. 23 A 46 (photostat)
30. Royal Irish Academy, Ms. 23 A 47 (photostat)
31. Royal Irish Academy, Ms. 23 A 33 (photostat)
32. Royal Irish Academy, Ms. 23 B 3 (photostat)
33. Maclean Manuscript (photostat)
34. Proverbs
35. Accentual verse; anecdote
36. Oidhche Sheanchais (documentary film)
37. Ridire an Chlóca Uaithne
38. Religious prose; verse
39. Trompa na bhFlaitheas
40. Accentual and Ossianic verse
41. Tale; accentual verse
42. Ossianic and accentual verse; tales
43. Frontier prose and verse
44. Frontier verse
45. Dictionary
46. Bibliography
47. Texts from Leabhar Breac