A GROUNDBREAKING new study of Irish Renaissance Latin has been launched by members of the centre for neo-Latin studies at University College Cork.
Foregrounding the research of scholars attached to the centre, the collection of articles edited by Jason Harris and Keith Sidwell, Making Ireland Roman: Irish Neo-Latin Writers and the Republic of Letters (Cork University Press, 2009), examines for the first time a lost continent of Irish intellectual life from the 1500s to the 1700s.
About 1,000 printed books in Latin were written by Irish authors between 1490 and 1750, and a vast manuscript corpus of Latin writing by Irishmen also survives from this period.
Although modern scholars have tended to study English and Irish language sources for the culture of Ireland at this time, much of the intellectual output aimed at an international scholarly community was composed in Latin.
UCC’s neo-Latin studies centre has pioneered new work in this area and Making Ireland Roman is the first book to draw together the research of the centre’s scholars.
Under director Dr Jason Harris, the centre’s school of history has secured funding from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences to study the earliest stages of the transmission of Renaissance ideas into Ireland.
Academics are collaborating on a large-scale survey of Irish writing in Latin c. 1450-1750 which is due to be completed next year.