THE CAMBRIDGE GROUP FOR IRISH STUDIES EASTER TERM 2010

27th April, 8.45 p.m. The Parlour, Magdalene College

Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail

Aspects of Manuscript Transmission in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail is a lecturer at the School of Irish, Celtic Studies, Irish Folklore and Linguistics, at the University College Dublin. Irish manuscript studies in recent years have provided evidence for the canny ability of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scribes to exercise editorial judgements which were not only political in intention, but were guided by an aesthetic sense to fashion and refashion literary narrative itself. This is of relevance to an overall re-appraisal of the role of the scribe as a dynamic transmitter of narrative. Ní Úrdail’s paper will present some evidence based on her forthcoming edition of Cath Cluana Tarbh (The Battle of Clontarf), one of the most popular prose texts to have been transmitted in Irish manuscripts dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.