Texts
Additamenta in the Book of Armagh
Incoming data
The catalogue entry for this text has not been published as yet. Until then, a selection of data is made available below.
A collection of charter-like records in Latin and Old Irish relating the activities of St Patrick in Ireland and the lands that were granted to him and his church. The collection can be divided into three parts: (1) a text about the foundation of Trim (Co. Meath), including an account of the conversion of Feidlimid son of Lóegaire mac Néill, king of Leinster; (2) a group of six records concerning churches in northern Connacht; and (3) a group of four records concerning churches in Leinster.
Manuscript witnesses
Sources
Primary sources Text editions and/or modern translations – in whole or in part – along with publications containing additions and corrections, if known. Diplomatic editions, facsimiles and digital image reproductions of the manuscripts are not always listed here but may be found in entries for the relevant manuscripts. For historical purposes, early editions, transcriptions and translations are not excluded, even if their reliability does not meet modern standards.
[ed.] [tr.] Bieler, Ludwig [ed. and tr.], The Patrician texts in the Book of Armagh, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae, 10, Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1979.
166–179
[ed.] Lash, Elliott, POMIC: The parsed Old and Middle Irish corpus. Version 0.1, Online: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, School of Celtic Studies, 2014–present. URL: <https://www.dias.ie/celt/celt-publications-2/celt-the-parsed-old-and-middle-irish-corpus-pomic/>.
Secondary sources (select)
Rabin, Andrew, “Preventive law in early Ireland. Rereading the Additamenta in the Book of Armagh”, North American Journal of Celtic Studies 2:1 (2018): 37–55.
abstract:
This article argues that the so-called Additamenta, found on ff. 16r–18v of the Book of Armagh, may have functioned as a form of preventive law. Reading the Additamenta in this fashion suggests that the evidence they adduce to legitimize Armagh's property rights reflects those categories of claims thought most likely to prevail should the foundation's landholdings fall into dispute. As an archive of documents that both preserved and shaped institutional memory, they provided a historical frame that limited the possibility of challenges to Armagh's standing or, if those challenges did come to trial, shaped the court's perception to the foundation's benefit. Consequently, even if these documents do not necessarily reflect an ongoing charter tradition, we may still use them as case studies revealing one way in which early Irish landowners—especially those associated with ecclesiastical foundations like Armagh—utilized text and narrative to influence the progress of legal disputes.
Bronner, Dagmar, and Nathanael Busch, “Written apart and written together: placing spaces in Old Irish and Old High German”, in: Nievergelt Andreas, Rudolf Gamper, Marina Bernasconi Reusser, Birgit Ebersperger, and Ernst Tremp (eds), Scriptorium. Wesen – Funktion – Eigenheiten: Comité international de paléographie latine, XVIII. Kolloquium, St. Gallen 11.-14. September 2013, Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2015. 519–531.
