Madam, – Your Berlin Correspondent, Derek Scally, had a very interesting piece (World News, August 16th) about the emperor Charlemagne and his foundation at Aachen of “one of the most remarkable schools of learning that Europe has ever seen”. He pointed out that one of the first teachers in that school was an (unidentified) Irishman – “Hibernicus exul” – but he was only one of several such Irishmen who “helped lay the foundations for European culture”. Probably the best of them all (“maxime”) was a man known as Master Clemens (“Magister Clemens”), who headed up the Aachen school in its early years. He was described by a contemporary (Spanish) scholar as “learned in all the arts” (“artibus in cunctis ingeniosa”), to whom students came from far and near. He retired to Würzburg, in Franconia, where he went to pay his respects to an earlier Irish exile, Kylian, martyred in 689. There he seems to have died, and it is there that his books are still to be found.
One of these, the famous codex containing the letters of St Paul in Latin, heavily annotated in Old Irish, is the manuscript on which several generations of philologists have based their reconstruction of the oldest written form of that language.
Your readers might like to know that the Würzburg Irish manuscripts will shortly be the subject of a collaborative research project, involving the University of Würzburg, the National University of Ireland, Galway, and the Royal Irish Academy, which will eventually see online digital annotated facsimiles of those famous books available for all to read.
The Irish contribution to the culture of “the first Europe” was greatly prized by Charlemagne and his contemporaries; this project will enable the present generation of Irish people to experience that achievement again at first hand. – Yours, etc,