Manuscripts

Armagh, Robinson Library, MS A

  • Early Modern English, Irish
  • 1660
  • Irish manuscripts
  • paper
Earliest extant copy of the Annals of Clonmacnoise.
Identifiers
Location
Shelfmark
A
Type
Irish annals
Provenance and related aspects
Language
Early Modern English Secondary: Irish
Date
1660
c. 1660
Origin, provenance
Origin: Ireland
Ireland
No short description available

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Later provenance: Ireland
Ireland
No short description available

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ass. with O'Flaherty (Roderic)
O'Flaherty (Roderic)
(1627/30–1716/18)
Roderic(k) O'Flaherty / Ruaidhrí (Óg) Ó Flaithbheartaigh, Irish nobleman, historian and collector of manuscripts; author of Ogygia seu rerum Hibernicarum chronologia (1685).

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Later owners or keepers of the manuscript include Roderic O’Flaherty (d. c. 1718), who added various notes in the margins.
Later provenance: Ireland
Ireland
No short description available

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ass. with Harris (Walter)
Harris (Walter)
(1686–1761)
Irish historian.

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The manuscript later passed into the possession of Walter Harris (d. 1761).
Hands, scribes
The manuscript is written by a single copyist whose identity is unknown. Sarah Sanderlin (1982) distinguishes between several later hands which provided annotations such as notes, corrections, explanations and dates.
Hands indexed:
Hand of the copyist Anonymous copyist who wrote in or around 1660: a note at the end of the first section (f. 18v, bottom) records the date of 18 April 1660; another one on f. 63v (bottom) that of 15 May 1660. According to Sarah Sanderlin (1982), this scribe “appears to have understood both the Irish and the English of his exemplar [...] The writing of the marginals is in Irish (for Irish notes), English script (for English notes), and English printing (for Latin notes and some English words)”. Anonymous [scribe of Armagh, Robinson Library, MS A]Anonymous ... scribe of Armagh, Robinson Library, MS A
Entry reserved for but not yet available from the subject index.

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Annotator L1 An “old hand” in brown ink supplied some marginal notes and dates, for example on f. 24r. Sanderlin suggested these annotations may have preceded those of O'Flaherty. Annotations in this hand were copied into TCD MS 673 (dated to 1685).
Annotator L2 A more modern hand in black ink. Notes in this hand were copied into TCD MS 673 (dated to 1685).
Annotator L3 Hand in brown ink. Annotations in this hand are absent from the copy of TCD MS 673 (dated to 1685) and are likely to postdate that manuscript.
Annotator NB Later hand in faint grey ink. Annotations in this hand are absent from the copy of TCD MS 673 (dated to 1685) and are likely to postdate that manuscript.
Annotator RO The hand of a most active annotator who can be identified as Roderic O'Flaherty. Roderic O'FlahertyO'Flaherty (Roderic)
(1627/30–1716/18)
Ó Flaithbheartaigh (Ruaidhrí Óg)
Roderic(k) O'Flaherty / Ruaidhrí (Óg) Ó Flaithbheartaigh, Irish nobleman, historian and collector of manuscripts; author of Ogygia seu rerum Hibernicarum chronologia (1685).
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Codicological information
Material
paper
Dimensions
11.75 ″ × 7.5 ″
Distinct units
Armagh, Robinson Library,…  Supplement

Supplement written in the first half of the 18th century by the second hand of NLI MS 767 to compensate for the loss of ff. 36-38 (AD 779-840). Before these folia went missing, NLI MS 767 was itself copied from the Armagh manuscript and had received annotations by two hands.

Table of contents
Legend
Texts

Links to texts use a standardised title for the catalogue and so may or may not reflect what is in the manuscript itself, hence the square brackets. Their appearance comes in three basic varieties, which are signalled through colour coding and the use of icons, , and :

  1. - If a catalogue entry is both available and accessible, a direct link will be made. Such links are blue-ish green and marked by a bookmark icon.
  2. - When a catalogue entry does not exist yet, a desert brown link with a different icon will take you to a page on which relevant information is aggregated, such as relevant publications and other manuscript witnesses if available.
  3. - When a text has been ‘captured’, that is, a catalogue entry exists but is still awaiting publication, the same behaviour applies and a crossed eye icon is added.

The above method of differentiating between links has not been applied yet to texts or citations from texts which are included in the context of other texts, commonly verses.

Locus

While it is not a reality yet, CODECS seeks consistency in formatting references to locations of texts and other items of interest in manuscripts. Our preferences may be best explained with some examples:

  • f. 23ra.34: meaning folio 23 recto, first column, line 34
  • f. 96vb.m: meaning folio 96, verso, second column, middle of the page (s = top, m = middle, i = bottom)
    • Note that marg. = marginalia, while m = middle.
  • p. 67b.23: meaning page 67, second column, line 23
The list below has been collated from the table of contents, if available on this page,Progress in this area is being made piecemeal. Full and partial tables of contents are available for a small number of manuscripts. and incoming annotations for individual texts (again, if available).Whenever catalogue entries about texts are annotated with information about particular manuscript witnesses, these manuscripts can be queried for the texts that are linked to them.

Sources

Secondary sources (select)

Mc Carthy, Daniel P., The Irish annals: their genesis, evolution and history, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008.  
comments: Contents: Chronicles and annals: origins, compilation, taxonomy and nomenclature (p. 1); Witnesses to the annals: the primary manuscripts (18); Annalistic literature (61); World history in Insular chronicles (118); The Iona chronicle (153); The Moville and Clonmacnoise chronicles (168); Liber Cuanach and its descendants (198); The Armagh and Derry chronicles (223); The Connacht and Fermanagh chronicles (245); The Regnal-canon chronicles (271); Final compilation stages (304); Reliable annalistic chronology (342); Epilogue (355); Twelve centuries of Irish chronicling: from Bethlehem to Bundrowes (355); Necessity for a comprehensive analysis of chronicle features (357); Outstanding chronicle compilations (358); Manuscript witnesses to the annals (361); Survey of annalistic verse up to A.D. 1000 (364); The regnal-canon (368); Bibliography (375) and index (393).
53–56
Sanderlin, Sarah, “The manuscripts of the annals of Clonmacnois”, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 81 C (1982): 111–123.
Dean, James, Catalogue of the manuscripts in the Public Library of Armagh, Dundalk: W. Tempest, 1928.
Armagh Robinson Library website – PDF: <link>
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Contributors
Dennis Groenewegen
Page created
February 2014, last updated: August 2023