An NUI Galway conference will hear how Irish monks who roamed Europe during the Dark Ages were experts in the humanities and science, writes Dick Ahlstrom.
There were no divisions between art and science, mathematics and music in the centuries during the Dark Ages when Irish monks wandered the Continent. They were Europe's "consultant experts" when it came to astronomy, time-reckoning and Latin grammar.
A three-day international conference opening tomorrow at NUI Galway will hear about the Irish monks who left behind them a wealth of learned texts and proof of their leadership in scientific knowledge.
"They were certainly as good as but in certain areas better than the rest of Europe," states Prof Dáibhí Ó Cróinín. "They left behind them manuscripts which are now found in every country in Europe."
Ó Cróinín is the director of the "Foundations of Irish Culture Project" a five-year Higher Education Authority-funded effort to study and catalogue these manuscripts and understand the significant role played by the Irish monks or Scotti peregrini (wandering scholars) who led Europe in the study of mathematics and astronomy.
The project is being conducted within the Centre for the Study of Human Settlement and Historical Change in NUI Galway's Department of History.
The conference, entitled The Science of Computus in Ireland & Europe, AD 500-800, brings together for the first time Europe's leading experts in the study of these manuscripts, many of which deal with computus ecclesiasticus, the complex mathematical process used to calculate the date of Easter, explains Ó Cróinín.
Deciding the date of Easter is a deceptively simple thing, he says. It is reckoned to be the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. This was no simple matter to calculate in the centuries following the collapse of Rome, Ó Cróinín points out. For one thing, the fall of Easter is based on the lunar cycle which follows a 354-day pattern before repeating itself. This mismatches by 11 days the 365-day solar cycle. "The mathematics involved in computus is how do you deal this 11-day gap," says Ó Cróinín.
It was also necessary to produce a table of Easter dates, not just one or two. Groups across western Europe followed their own tables and the inconsistencies between them raised claim and counter claim about heretical practices.
"The matter required you to calculate the date of Easter over a cycle," says Ó Cróinín. "The Irish in the Carolingian Age (about AD800) were referred to as the ones who should be consulted on these things."
The wandering Irish scholars became known across Europe from Northumbria to Vienna, travelling as pilgrims, missionaries and educators.
Columbanus travelled to Gaul in the late sixth century and founded more than 40 communities on the Continent.
They became expert in key subjects including the Bible, Latin grammar and computus, says Ó Cróinín. They also excelled in mathematics and astronomy in the period from 500 through 850. The monasteries produced important manuscripts that are now found in public collections in most western European countries.
Schools in the early Middle Ages made no distinction between science and general culture, regarding the two as essential aspects of the one educational system, he explains.
"The modern dichotomy between these two areas of knowledge would have been incomprehensible to Irish and European scholars of that time, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the science of computistics," says Ó Cróinín.
When Charlemagne asked his schoolmaster Alcuin to explain the appearance of two eclipses in the year AD 810, Alcuin turned to an Irishman, Dungal for an expert view.
The skills of these Irish experts reached their peak by the end of the ninth century, in scholars such as the poet Sedulis Scottus and the philosopher John Scottus Eriugena, explains Ó Cróinín.
His Foundations project has three parts. It is cataloguing all the Irish manuscripts scattered across Europe and dated from AD 600-850. It is also detailing all the texts with a scientific content produced by the Irish scholars. It is also involved in a joint effort with University College Cork using laser scanners to produce images of all known stones here with Latin letter inscriptions. There are 750 of these associated with the monastic settlement at Clonmacnoise alone, he says. Many of these stones are heavily worn and difficult to read. "The idea is to try to use three-D laser scanning with a view to cleaning up the texts and possibly reproducing them."