British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

BA PDF Symposium 2004: Abstracts

21 April 2004

Dr Sharon Arbuthnot

The Medieval Magpie: a Twelfth-Century(?) Irish Compiler and His Sources

Compilation is a largely self-explanatory term. In a medieval literary context, it refers to the extraction of material from a variety of pre-existing sources and its re-assembly to produce ‘new’ texts. Learned Irishmen of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were enthusiastic compilers. Although the reasons for the upsurge in activity in this period are not yet clear, by identifying the sources used in the creation of a compiled text and collating the derived material with the original (as far as this can be established), we gain a valuable insight into the means by which the compiler in question adapted extant material for his own purposes, his errors of understanding and his approach to resource management. This paper is a case study of the sources and methods behind one particular compiled text – the short recension of Cóir Anmann (‘The Fitness of Names’).

Dr Sharon Arbuthnot was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Celtic, University of Aberdeen, from October 2000 to July 2002. Prior to this, she was employed as a Lecturer in Medieval and Modern Irish at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth; currently, she lectures in Celtic at the University of Aberdeen. Dr Arbuthnot is joint leader of the AHRB-funded ‘Gaelic Manuscripts of Scotland’ project and author of a number of articles, mainly on medieval Irish compilations, the compilatory process and manuscript studies. Her editions of Cóir Anmann are soon to be published by the Irish Texts Society.