This is collection of documents relating to the early Irish church compiled on the holy island of Lindisfarne. The purpose for this compilation is unclear, but it does cite several early Irish synods that we would otherwise know very little about. Moreover, some of these canons would be copied and help form the foundation of the English church in centuries to come.

This scholarly study of the formation of the Irish literary canon in the first half of the twentieth century provides fascinating and often surprising insights into the ways in which different educational institutions responded to the political and historical changes taking place as Ireland moved from colonial to postcolonial status. Dr Wei H. Kao discusses not only what was included on school and university curriculum but also writers who were excluded, in particular women writers who appeared to interrogate a male nationalist agenda for the representation of Ireland.– Emeritus Professor C.L. Innes The writers discussed include Daniel Corkery, J.G. Farrell, Denis Johnston, Mary Lavin, Iris Murdoch, Kate O’Brien, Frank O’Connor, Liam O’Flaherty, and James Plunkett.

The Hibernensis is the longest and most comprehensive canon-law text to have circulated in Carolingian Europe. Compiled in Ireland in the late seventh or early eighth century, it exerted a strong and long-lasting influence on the development of European canon law. The present edition offers—for the first time—a complete text of the Hibernensis combining the two main branches of its manuscript transmission. This is accompanied by an English translation and a commentary that is both historical and philological. The Hibernensis is an invaluable source for those interested in church history, the history of canon law, social-economic history, as well as intellectual history, and the history of the book. Widely recognized as the single most important source for the history of the church in early medieval Ireland, the Hibernensis is also our best index for knowing what books were available in Ireland at the time of its compilation: it consists of excerpted material from the Bible, Church Fathers and doctors, hagiography, church histories, chronicles, wisdom texts, and insular normative material unattested elsewhere. This in addition to the staple sources of canonical collections, comprising the acta of church councils and papal letters. Altogether there are forty-two cited authors and 135 cited texts. But unlike previous canonical collections, the contents of the Hibernensis are not simply derivative: they have been modified and systematically organised, offering an important insight into the manner in which contemporary clerical scholars attempted to define, interpret, and codify law for the use of a growing Christian society.

Although the most numerous and widespread of all the religious orders in medieval Ireland, the regular canons and canonesses have been somewhat neglected in Irish historiography. This collection, the proceedings of the 2017 Glenstal History Conference, examines the role of the canonical movement (those who followed the rule of St Augustine) in Ireland from its emergence as an expression of the Vita Apostolica in the twelfth century, through the dissolution of the monasteries in the Tudor period until its eventual disappearance in the early nineteenth century. This volume combines the evidence for the archaeology, architecture and history of the movement with that relating to its cultural, economic, liturgical, intellectual and pastoral activities. Between them, the contributors provide fascinating insights on a neglected aspect of Irish monastic history while situating it in a broader European ecclesial context.

‘This book makes an important intervention into debates about influence and contemporary Irish poetry. Supported throughout by incisive reflections upon allusion, word choice, and formal structure, Keating brings to the discussion a range of new and lesser known voices which decisively complicate and illuminate its pronounced concerns with inheritance, history, and the Irish poetic canon.’ — Steven Matthews, Professor of English Literature, University of Reading, UK, and author of Irish Poetry: Politics, History, Negotiation and Yeats As Precursor This book is about the way that contemporary Irish poetry is dominated and shaped by criticism. It argues that critical practices tend to construct reductive, singular and static understandings of poetic texts, identities, careers, and maps of the development of modern Irish poetry. This study challenges the attempt present within such criticism to arrest, stabilize, and diffuse the threat multiple alternative histories and understandings of texts would pose to the formation of any singular pyramidal canon. Offered here are detailed close readings of the recent work of some of the most established and high-profile Irish poets, such as Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian, along with emerging poets, to foreground an alternative critical methodology which undermines the traditional canonical pursuit of singular meaning and definition through embracing the troubling indeterminacy and multiplicity to be found within contemporary Irish poetry.

Thomas Wentworth landed in Ireland in 1633 - almost 100 years after Henry VIII had begun his break with Rome. The majority of the people were still Catholic. William Laud had just been elevated to Canterbury. A Yorkshire cleric, John Bramhall, followed the new viceroy and became, in less than one year, Bishop of Derry. This 2007 study, which is centred on Bramhall, examines how these three men embarked on a policy for the established Church which represented not only a break with a century of reforming tradition but which also sought to make the tiny Irish Church a model for the other Stuart kingdoms. Dr McCafferty shows how accompanying canonical changes were explicitly implemented for notice and eventual adoption in England and Scotland. However within eight years the experiment was blown apart and reconstruction denounced as subversive. Wentworth, Laud and Bramhall faced consequent disgrace, trial, death or exile.