The Franciscan order and UCD have joined forces in a new initiative which will mean that some of Ireland's most priceless manuscripts will become freely available to the public via the Internet.
The project involves moving the Killiney Collection - thousands of Irish manuscripts dating from 1,000 AD to the end of the 18th century - from the Franciscan House of Studies in Killiney, Co Dublin, to Belfield. Here, they will be conserved and stored safely in a controlled environment. The first tranche of documents made their way over to UCD in September. They are, according to Dr John McCafferty who lectures in medieval history, the largest collection of medieval and early modern manuscripts in private hands on this island. "Together," he says, "they represent nine centuries of commentary and reflection of Irish and of Catholic experiences here and in Europe."
The collection was begun in the 17th century when Catholicism was outlawed in Ireland and many Franciscans had fled to the Continent. They saw that the Gaelic civilisation, with which they had strong links, was about to collapse, and they perceived the need to collect documents of Irish interest and write the history of the island. The order, says McCafferty, invented a whole new concept of Irishness - the Ireland of saints and scholars. There had always been a great sense of Ireland as a cultural unit but never, before now, had it been regarded as a political unit. "One of the great shocks of the Reformation and the confiscation of lands was to create an accelerated sense of an Irish nation," McCafferty explains. "It's because of this emerging sense of nationhood that the Killiney papers are so important." The manuscripts are well travelled. Part of the collection gathered at Louvain was moved to Rome in the late eighteenth century, for safe keeping. Other parts of the Louvain collection are to be found in the Biblioteque Royale de Belgique in Brussels. In 1872, when it was feared that the Italian government would seize the papers, the manuscripts in Rome were dispatched to Dublin. One of the most famous manuscripts in the collection is the Annals of the Four Masters - a history of Ireland from creation to the 17th century. It was the brainchild of the Louvain-based Irish Franciscans, who sent Brother Micheal O Cleirigh to Ireland to collect material on the ecclesiastical and civil history of the country. He collaborated with a number of lay scholars and together they became known as the Four Masters. Sadly, during their time in Rome, a portion of the Annals of the Four Masters (and a number of other manuscripts) vanished. Liber Hymnorum, an 11th century book of hymns and the Martyrology of Tallaght, an 11th century list of Irish saints, are other famous manuscripts in the collection. "It's like going through the crown jewels," says McCafferty. Also included in the Killiney papers are two early copies of Geoffrey Keating's book Foras Feasa Ar Eirinn. Keating, a 17th century priest, descended from medieval English settlers, wrote a history of Ireland showing that the most important thing about the Gaelic Irish and Old English was their Catholicism.
"He invented a new word - Eireannaigh - the word for Irishness," McCafferty explains. "Up till this, the Irish had called themselves Gaels. Now, they swapped a racial marker for a geographical one. For the first time, being Irish means living on the island of Ireland." Keating's book was only published in the eighteenth century, and it was, McCaffety notes, one of the last books to be read widely in manuscript form. The UCD lecturer doubts whether there will be any new discoveries among the 67 manuscripts which have already moved to Belfield. "The manuscripts are well known. Discoveries are more likely in the Franciscan's own archives," he says. "Not only have they conserved their material but they have a very long and distinguished scholarly tradition. They have been very significant contributors to the writing of Irish history. Their archive will contain a lot of unpublished research." The Killiney Collection will move to UCD in stages, over the next 10 years. (President Eamon de Valera's personal papers, which were part of the collection, have already moved to UCD in a separate transaction.)
UCD's Micheal O Cleirigh Institute for the Study of Irish History and Civilisation was launched just recently, with McCafferty as its director. The institute will base its teaching and research programmes - at doctoral, post-doctoral and academic research group level - on the ancient Killiney texts.
The documents will also be publicly vailable. "We're going to put the manuscripts on the Web on the grounds that they are national treasures," McCafferty says. Exhibitions, though, are less likely. "The manuscripts are not visually striking - it's their contents that are important," he explains.
