Find manuscripts (beta)

Lost Irish manuscript of unknown date which according to later colophons, contained a text of Betha Findchua that was copied into the ‘Short book of Ó Buadhacháin’, also lost, and on the basis of the latter, into other manuscripts, including the Book of Lismore.

Irish and Latin variants of the title ‘the Book of Sligo’ are attested in a number of sources from the 15th and 17th centuries. Its identity cannot be established beyond doubt nor is it necessarily true that the references are all to the same manuscript. Pádraig Ó Riain (CGSH, p. lii) has shown that those at least that can be dated to the 17th century refer to the Book of Lecan (Co. Sligo): these are James Ussher’s quotation of a triad about ‘St Patrick’s three Wednesdays’ and a Latin note added (by Ussher?) to a copy of the Vita sancti Declani which credits the Liber Sligunt as the source for a copy of the genealogies of Irish saints. There are two 15th-century mentions by the Irish title Leabhar Sligigh: one by the scribe of Aided Díarmata meic Cerbaill (first recension) in Egerton 1782, who acknowledges the Leabhar Sligig as having been the exemplar of his text; and an honourable co-mention, with Saltair Caisil, in a poem on the king of Tír Conaill, beg. Dimghach do Chonall Clann Dálaigh. Aided Díarmata is not found in the Book of Lecan, at least in the form in which it survives today. Ó Riain allows for the possibility that ‘the Book of Sligo’ “is indeed a lost codex whose name was mistakenly applied in the seventeenth century, perhaps by Ussher, to the well-known Book of Lecan”.

Lost Irish manuscript whose prior existence is known from a reference in the Lebor na hUidre (RIA MS 23 E 25).

Latin text of Welsh law, which was known to lawyers active in Gwynedd during the 13th century. This text or a related one may have provided the basis for the Latin text in London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian E xi, which refers to matters relating to both Gwynedd and south-west Wales. It has been suggested that the Llyfr y Tŷ Gwyn text became known in Gwynedd through the agency of Cadwgan, bishop of Bangor (1215-1236) and abbot of Whitland before that.

One of the earliest copies of the Navigatio sancti Brendani, albeit one that is marred by many scribal errors. In the explicit, the text is called a Vita.

Early English manuscript containing a Latin Life of St Ælfheah of Cantebury written by the monk Osbern, together with a narrative text about the translation of his remains.

Miscellany of late antique and early medieval Latin texts. It contains the earliest extant copy of the Historia Brittonum together with a text of the Annales Cambriae and a set of Welsh genealogies, which were both interpolated into the Historia after the section occasionally referred to as the ‘northern history’. A text of possible Irish interest is that of the Cosmographia of Aethicus Ister.

A mutilated double leaf written in Anglo-Saxon script, possibly from Fulda. It preserves fragments of a Latin commentary on the Song of Songs, whose text has been identified as being essentially the Veri amoris, an abridged text of Apponius’s commentary. Bischoff suggested that the exemplar was Irish.

9th-century manuscript of Bobbio provenance containing a copy of the Ars Ambrosiana, which is a commentary on the second book of Donatus’ Ars maior. On f. 8r, there is an Old Irish gloss embedded within the text, which seems to have been copied from the exemplar of the manuscript.

Manuscript containing a text of Cath Finntrága.

The manuscript preserves a Latin commentary (a glossa or catena) on the Psalms, arrranged by lemma, and is accompanied by glosses in both Old Irish (25) and Northumbrian Old English (5). For the entry on the text, see Glossa in Psalmos.

Continental manuscript containing a copy of the A-text of the Hisperica famina.

Distinct manuscript section described by Tommaso Mari as a “[codicologically] autonomous section, written by a different scribe from the rest of the MS and preserving some grammatical texts generally attributed to insular authors, such as Smaragdus’ Liber in partibus Donati [...] and part of the compilation entitled Pauca de barbarismo [...]”, as well as a text of Consentius’ De barbarismis et metaplasmis.