About Corpus Grammaticorum Hibernicorum

About the project
RCN

This web service presents digital monotypic editions of Auraicept na nÉces. This is the main output of ‘A Digital Edition and Analysis of Auraicept na nÉces’ (2021–2024), funded by a NOK 3,8 million grant (FRIPRO). Several manuscript copies are presented here for the first time. These are the Great Book of Lecan, John Beaton's Broad Book, and the Book of Uí Mhaine.

The research
The research, including the transcription of the manuscript sources and the technical production of this web service (server and database), is carried out by Dr. Nicolai Egjar Engesland (ORCID ID) in the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo (Norway). Engesland was a Moore Institute Visiting Researcher in Ancient Classics, University of Galway (Ireland), for the first two years of the project (2022–2023).

The name of the catalogue

The name of this pilot project is an homage to Anders Ahlqvist (1945–2018), a scholar who greatly contributed to our understanding of the history of linguistics in Ireland, both in his seminal edition of the so-called ‘canonical core’ of Auraicept na nÉces and in his many articles on this text and related material. Ahlqvist recognised the difficulty of establishing a critical text of Auraicept na nÉces and the need for access to the uncorrected text of all preserved manuscript sources:

“It seems likely, and to me at any rate, desirable that it [sc. a critical edition of Auraicept na nÉces] will be preceded by the publication, either in facsimile or diplomatically, of all known Irish grammatical and similar materials, so as to make available to scholars a Corpus Grammaticorum Hibernicorum, that would render to the historian of Irish linguistics the same services that the Corpus Iuris Hibernici has begun, since its publication in 1978, to give to students of early Irish Law.”

—Anders Ahlqvist, Introduction to The Early Irish Linguist, Helsinki (1983)

The corpus described by Ahlqvist here does not yet exist. Presenting much new material, it is hoped that this website will be a stepping stone to creating a comprehensive collection of monoptic editions of medieval Irish grammatical literature that may inform textual scholarship and serve as a basis for critical editions.

About the editions

The semi-diplomatic editions are accompanied by images of the manuscript sources, hosted by Irish Script on Screen and delivered through the International Image Interoperability Framework. The codices themselves are kept in the following libraries: