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During the early medieval period (c. AD 400–1200), the Baltinglass landscape in eastern Ireland may be interpreted as a major central place connected with important regional dynasties like the Uí Cheinnselaig and latterly the Uí Máil. Its significance is recorded in sources such as the Bórama Laigen and Fingal Rónáin, as well as a number of annal entries, which refer to an important royal fortress in the area known as Dún Bolg. This fortress has been linked with a complex of enclosures on Spinans Hill, including a massive fort of some 131ha, located a few kilometres to the east of Baltinglass. This, along with a number of previously unrecognised early medieval sites, reveals a heavily mythologised landscape that was instrumental to dynasties emerging from the shadows of the Iron Age in central Leinster. This paper attempts to assess the rich textual evidence alongside the archaeological evidence to elucidate the broader importance of the Baltinglass landscape during the early medieval period.
Sir Charles Haliday's collection of Tracts, Pamphlets and Broadsides was willed by his widow to the Library of the Royal Irish Academy in 1867. Known as the Haliday Collection, it is most appreciated for its wealth of material from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However it also contains many written and illustrated sources appertaining to the years before the 1641 insurrection in Ireland and the outbreak of civil conflict in England in 1642. This paper explains how this corpus of printed material provides key insights into historical developments in the 'three kingdoms' of England, Scotland and Ireland during the lead-up to these cataclysmic events.
(1) the full collation of a hitherto unstudied text, the fragments of an Irish Hebraicum Psalter in MS. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) fr. 2452 (tenth century), fols 75-84, which on analysis is revealed as an early representative of the typical Irish recension of the Hebraicum (AKI—the sigla for the psalter text of the three MSS Amiatinus, Florence, Biblioteca Mediceo-Laurenziana Amiatino I; Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, Aug. perg. 38; Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale 24 [A. 41]);
(2) a more detailed examination of the Psalter of Cormac (thirteenth century);
and (3) of the so-called Psalter of Caimin (c. 1100).
With these, two comments on two other psalters are also given (that in the 'Reference Bible' and the Double Psalter of St-Ouen) while a preliminary section treats of texts having a bearing on the understanding of the psalter in Ireland (the Tituli psalmorum attributed to Bede; psalm prologues and biblical canticles and psalm prayers).
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