‘A Miracle of Learning’

Studies in Manuscripts and Irish Learning: Essays in Honour of William O’Sullivan

Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, Toby Barnard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351963220
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume celebrates the work of William O'Sullivan, the first keeper of manuscripts at Trinity College, Dublin, who preserved, made more accessible and elucidated the documents in his care. The manuscripts throw new light on the society of Ireland, the place of the learned and literate in that world, and its relations with Britain, Europe and America. Some of these essays clarify technical problems in the making of famous manuscripts, and bring out for the first time their indebtedness to or influence over other manuscripts. Others provide unexpected new information about the reigns of Edward I and James I, Irish provincial society, the process and progress of religious change and the links between settlements in Ireland and North American colonization.

Chapter One
The earliest dry-point glosses in Codex Usserianus Primus

Pádraig Ó Néill

Readers who have consulted Codex Usserianus Primus in Dublin, Trinity College library MS 55, may have noticed on the inside front cover of its modem binding a note in pencil listing certain ‘folios with style writing’. Unlike the manuscript itself, this note has a readily identifiable locus, tempus and persona - the long tenure of William O’ Sullivan as Keeper of Manuscripts at Trinity College. And the causa scribendi must surely be his lifelong interest, both as curator and scholar, in Ireland’s oldest manuscripts.¹

Although now in fragmentary condition, Codex Usserianus Primus (hereafter referred to as ‘Uss. i’) recognizably belongs to a type of gospel book common in the Latin West during the period AD 400-650, marked by formal script, austere decoration and lack of prefatory matter.² These characteristics and its dimensions (written space 175 x 120-30 mm)³ set it apart from the two main types of gospel book current in early medieval Ireland, the smaller pocket gospel book such as the Mulling and Dimma Gospels⁴ and, on the other hand, the much larger, luxuriously decorated gospels such as Durrow and Kells.

Uss. i is unique on at least two other accounts: its script and its text of the gospels. The script was described by Lowe as ‘a peculiar angular type of Irish majuscule verging on minuscule, or better, an Irish adaptation of half-uncial’, and dated by him ‘saec. vn in.⁵ On the place of origin Lowe was more circumspect: ‘written in an Irish centre, hardly at Bobbio, despite Roman cursive influences in the script, the manner of denoting an omission, the kind of parchment used and the similarity to two other Bobbio MSS’.

Lowe’s qualifiers may not be as problematic as they seem. The Roman cursive influences in the script have been linked by T.J. Brown to a text of established Irish origin, the Springmount Bog wax tablets, both (he argues) deriving from Roman cursive half-uncial of Late Antiquity.⁶ The presence of the letters h.d. to mark an omission in the text, with a corresponding h.s. in the margins (now lost), represents the symbol found in the oldest Latin manuscripts whatever their origin;⁷ its use in Uss. i may well indicate Irish dependence on late antique models before the insular system of symbols and signes de renvoi was developed during the seventh century. Lowe’s claim about the type of parchment used - sheepskin rather than calfskin (the normal material of early Irish manuscripts) - can hardly be decisive, even if correct, since at least two other fragments of manuscripts of Irish origins (the Rufinus-Eusebius and the St Gallen Isidore fragments) seem to be parchment.⁸ Finally, the similarity in script with two seventh-century Bobbio manuscripts of Basilius and Orosius⁹ could be explained by the common origins of all three in Irish scribal tradition.

Positive evidence about the origins of Uss. i is present in its Old Latin text,¹⁰ a unique witness among Irish gospels to the version which circulated in western Europe and north Africa before the introduction of Jerome’s Vulgate. More specifically, as shown by Alban Dold and Bonifatius Fischer,¹¹ the Old Latin text of Uss. i is close to the version used by Hilary of Poitiers and found still surviving in a Gallican sacramentary from southern France dated c. 700. This conclusion leads them to reject the possibility of influence from Bobbio,¹² where a different biblical text was in use, and instead to explain the Old Latin text in Uss. i as a product of Gallican influence (especially liturgical) on the Irish Church during the late sixth and early seventh century.¹³

Viewed from an Irish perspective, Uss. i has significant textual affiliations with a number of early Irish gospel and liturgical texts. Thus, the Book of Durrow has the same chapter lists (as do the Books of Kells and Armagh) and, before Luke’s Gospel, the same table of Hebrew names with explanations;¹⁴ the Durham Gospel Fragment (A.n.10), although in the main a witness to the Vulgate, provides for Mk 2:12-6:6 a text almost identical with that of Uss. i;¹⁵ the Book of Mulling has the Old Latin chapter divisions found in Uss. i and for Lk 4—5 a closely related text, as well as similar Old Latin readings (subsequently emended to bring them into line with the Vulgate);¹⁶ likewise Usserianus n (TCD, MS 56) frequently accords with its earlier namesake, especially in Matthew;¹⁷ and the Office for the Dead in an eighth-century Irish sacramentary (St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 1395), a text of the Lazarus episode (Jn 11:14-44), is virtually identical with that of Uss. i.¹⁸ All of this evidence suggests that far from being an isolated witness to Bobbio influences, Uss. i represents the Old Latin text of the Gospels which was current in Ireland before the Vulgate.¹⁹

Into this manuscript was entered a series of dry-point glosses by a scribe using a metal stylus.^19a Although primarily intended as an instrument for writing on wax-tablets, the stylus was also used for dry-point ruling of folios (as in Uss. i), a practice which may have led to its application to writing. The importance and widespread use of dry-point glossing in early medieval manuscripts was pointed out by Bernhard Bischoff many years ago.²⁰ Such glosses are well attested in Old English and Old High German; and recently some 500 Latin glosses from the Carolingian period were discovered in a Late Antique manuscript of Vergil.²¹ Whether dry-point glossing was as widely practised by Irish scribes remains to be seen. A preliminary survey yields the following evidence: in addition to the present set of dry-point glosses, there are others in Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS F.iv.24, fol.93;²² in St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 904 (Priscian)²³ and in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Auct. F.3.15.²⁴ The broad chronological span of almost five centuries implicit in these witnesses suggests an unbroken tradition and gives promise that other Irish witnesses to dry-point glossing remain to be identified.

Glossing in dry-point has the advantage over ink of preserving the neatness and maintaining the primacy of the main text, since a reader might not even be aware of the glosses and certainly would not be visually distracted by them. However, it brings its own problems. For the glossator the parchment could be a difficult medium, one which resisted the pressure of a metal stylus, as evidently happened in Uss. i where the scars of the struggle are still visible. Indeed, one might well characterize the glossator’s work by the verb craxaré²⁵ rather than scribere. Frequently he had to cut or scratch letters (usually the vertical parts) into the parchment; in the case of rounded letters he sometimes resorted to the technique of forming an outline of the desired letter in dots, which he then joined together.²⁶

For the modem reader dry-point glosses present another set of problems. Virtually invisible in artificial light, they seem to require for their decipherment a combination of natural light and an oblique angle of viewing that can be difficult to achieve.^26a Exacerbating this problem is the poor physical condition of Uss. i: its surviving leaves are badly damaged and disfigured by wear around the edges and by heavy brown and green stains²⁷ (the latter present especially in the upper part of the leaf).²⁸ In addition some marginal text was covered over on one side of each page when the leaves were mounted in the nineteenth century, though it does not appear that any dry-point glosses or letters were thereby lost. Yet the most pernicious problem is not physical but psychological: the desire to make sense of poorly defined shapes that seem to change at each viewing can easily lead to desperate attempts to find combinations of letters that translate into meaningful words.

Script

Given the unusual nature of the writing in Uss. i, certain caveats are in order. The resistance of the parchment and the straitened writing space may well have distorted the scribe’s normal script, encouraging compression and angularity. Possible symptoms of these restrictions in Uss. i are the general absence of the finial at the top of the downstroke of vertical letters and the misshapen forms of traditionally rounded letters such as c and t. On the other hand, because he was writing for his own eyes only,²⁹ the glossator of Uss. i was freed from the conventions imposed by a formal script. It seems reasonable to assume that his script reflects informal usage, what he would have used for ordinary, practical purposes.

Three features of the script strike the reader. First, it is large, sometimes as large or even larger than the main script,³⁰ giving it the general appearance, if not always the specific forms, of semi-uncial. Second, the letters are etched...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• William O’Sullivan: four appreciations
• Chapter One The earliest dry-point glosses in Codex Usserianus Primus
• Chapter Two The Book of Kells and the Corbie Psalter (with a note on Harley 2788)
• Chapter Three Lebar buide meic murchada
• Chapter Four The travels of Irish manuscripts: from the Continent to Ireland
• Chapter Five Lebor Gabála in the Book of Lecan
• Chapter Six Codex Salmanticensis: a provenance inter Anglos or inter Hibernos?
• Chapter Seven Two previously unprinted chronicles of the reign of Edward I
• Chapter Eight English Carthusian books not yet linked with a charterhouse
• Chapter Nine Reforming the Holy Isle: Parr Lane and the conversion of the Irish
• Chapter Ten Preliminaries to the Massachusetts Bay Colony: the Irish ventures of Emanuel Downing and John Winthrop Sr
• Chapter Eleven The hagiography of William Bedell
• Chapter Twelve Learning, the learned and literacy in Ireland, c. 1660-1760
• Chapter Thirteen A description of County Mayo c. 1684 by R. Downing
• Chapter Fourteen Charles Lynegar, the Ó Luinin family and the study of Seanchas
• A select bibliography of William O’Sullivan
• Index