Making Ireland Roman: Irish Neo-Latin Writers and the Republic of Letters

This collection of articles by leading scholars focuses on Irish writing in Latin in the Renaissance and aims to rewrite Irish cultural history through recovery and analysis of Latin sources. This book renders accessible for the first time the vastly important Irish contribution to the counter-reformation, to European Renaissance and baroque literature in Latin and to the intellectual culture of European Latinity. The ethnic, cultural and religious divisions within Ireland produced a divided Latin writing and reading community.

The Latin language became the medium in which the Catholic Church operated. When Christianity took root in Ireland so too did Latin. It became one of the principal languages of Ireland for over a thousand years resulting in over one thousand books being published by Irish authors. In order to convey the idiosyncrasies of Gaelic culture in the language of European scholarship to an international audience, Irish authors had to engage in a process of cultural translation. Many were Catholic exiles who attempted to promote an alternative to the English colonial narrative being written by domestic scholars. Some writers felt compelled to defend their country’s reputation as a result of defamatory comments made by other writers.

Articles include a detailed reconstruction of a feud with Scottish historians about the identity of medieval “Scotia” as they claimed that it referred to Scotland rather than Ireland. Other articles include a contextual study of the political epic poem “Ormonius”, an examination of the major Latinist Richard Stanihurst and an evaluation of the literature of Catholic exile.