Manuscripts

Cambridge, Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Ir 6 Transcript of Leabhar Branach

Irish
c. 1726-1728
Irish manuscripts
paper

Manuscript containing a transcript of Leabhar Branach, the Book of the O’Byrnes, from an early 17th-century exemplar.

Identifiers

Location

United States Cambridge, Harvard University, Houghton Library

Collection: MSS Ir

Shelfmark

Ir 6

Type

duanairí

Provenance and related aspects

Language

Irish

Date

c. 1726-1728

c. 1726-1728.

Hands, scribes

Hands indexed:

Hand (Ó Broin)

Mícheál Ó Broin of Ballinakill, Co. Wicklow.

Mícheál Ó BroinÓ Broin (Mícheál)

Entry reserved for but not yet available from the subject index.

Codicological information

Material

paper

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 :

- 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.
- 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.
- 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.

Irish manuscripts

Sources

Primary sources This section typically includes references to diplomatic editions, facsimiles and photographic reproductions, notably digital image archives, of at least a major portion of the manuscript. For editions of individual texts, see their separate entries.

[dig. img.] Digital medieval manuscripts at Houghton Library, Online: Harvard University, Houghton Library, ?–present. URL: <http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton/collections/early_manuscripts/>.

Digital facsimile direct link

[ed.] Mac Airt, Seán [ed.], Leabhar Branach: The book of the O’Byrnes, Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1944.

Secondary sources (select)

Buttimer, Cornelius G., Catalogue of Irish manuscripts in Houghton Library, Harvard University, University of Notre Dame Press, 2022. 432 pp.

abstract:

Harvard University has the largest collection of Irish-language codices in North America, held in Houghton Library, its rare book repository. The manuscripts are a part of the age-old heritage of Irish book production, dating to the early Middle Ages. Handwritten works in Houghton contain versions of medieval poetry and sagas, recopied in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to which period most of the library’s documents belong. Contemporary writings from that time, as well as ones by the post-Famine Irish immigrant community in the United States, are included. This catalogue describes the collection in full for the first time and will be an invaluable aid to research on Irish and Irish American cultural and literary output. The author’s introduction examines how the collection was formed. This untold story is an important chapter in America’s intellectual history, reflecting a phase of unprecedented expansion in Harvard University’s scholarship and teaching during the early twentieth century when the institution’s program of studies began to accommodate an increasing range of European languages and literatures and their sources. This indispensable guide to a major repository’s records of the Irish past, and of America’s Irish diaspora, will interest specialists in early and post-medieval codices. It should prove of relevance as well to scholars and students of comparative literature, cultural studies, and Irish and Irish American history.