This open-access volume explores the reception of Graeco-Romano culture from Ireland’s earliest medieval scholars such as Columbanus and John Scottus Eriugena to later writers including James Joyce, Seamus Heaney and Colm Tóibín. Migrations and classical antiquity have played a key interconnected role for successive centuries in the experiences of the Irish diaspora, in the articulations of those experiences, as well as in the influences of Irish classicism abroad. Throughout subsequent centuries ancient Greece and Rome were repeatedly evoked in literature, art, and historiographies associated with migrations as vehicles for the expression of varied political and cultural positions.
The chapters in this collection explore how the early Irish peregrini left their mark on continental scholarship; how the model of ancient Rome was coopted for political purposes; the ways in which Protestant writers adopted the notion of ancient Romanitas as a key to the British imperial project; and, finally, how the Catholics perceived ancient Rome as being subsumed into the universalism of the Roman Catholic Church. As such, this collection, the first of its kind, seeks to create a holistic overview of the distinctive cultural classical in Irish culture throughout the ages. What we learn is how deep articulations of migration through classical media have penetrated Ireland’s diasporic culture.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council.
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Introduction: Migration, Irish Identity, and Classical Antiquity: Introduction (Isabelle Torrance, Aarhus University, Denmark)
Part One: Medieval Ireland: Historiographical Migrations and Transfers of Knowledge
1. ‘Late Antique historiography and the Irish migrations in Lebor Gabála Érenn (Book of Invasions)’ (Paula Blanco Ríos, Cambridge University, UK)
2. ‘Medieval Irish identity, experiences of migration, and models from Graeco-Roman antiquity’ (Maxim Fomin, Ulster University, Northern Ireland)
3. ‘Calypso reimagined: Graeco-Roman mythology and Hiberno-Latin scholarship in the pre-Carolingian and Carolingian periods’ (Jason O’Rorke, Independent Scholar, Ireland)
4. ‘Druide the names of those people, and Druis the name of their city’: The Migration of Knowledge (Translatio Studii) in the Medieval Irish Version of Lucan’s Bellum Civile’ (Brigid Ehrmantraut, Cambridge University, UK)
Part Two: Early Modern Ireland: Politics of Travel and Exile
5. “In Argo’s ship went the Greek heroes”: wanderings and homecomings in Early Modern Gaelic political verse’ (Gregory Darwin, Uppsala University, Sweden)
6. ‘The Ius Communicandi (Right to Travel) and the Irish Franciscans in the Seventeenth Century’ (Ian Campbell, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland)
7. ‘Treading on the Dust of the Ancients: Irish Latin Writers in Exile c.1580-1700’ (Jason Harris, University College Cork, Ireland)
Part Three: Eighteenth-Century Voyages, Real and Imagined
8. ‘A Trip to the Moon by Mr. Murtagh McDermot (1728): Lucian, Swift, Migration Satire and Irish Politics’ (Isabelle Torrance, Aarhus University, Denmark)
9. ‘Donncha Rua as Aeneas: Voyages real and imagined to the Underworld and the New World’ (Pádraig Ó Liatháin, Dublin City University, Ireland)
Part Four: Irish Migrations and Material Culture
10. ‘Visualising the Classics: Migration, Media, and Irish Manuscripts’ (Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh, University of Aberystwyth, Wales)
11. ‘they live on the Tiber and the Thames’: Irish Classically-Influenced Sculpture and Migration, c.1820-70’ (Ciarán Rua O’Neill, Aarhus University, Denmark)
Part Five: Sexuality, Gender, and Migration
12. ‘Mixed Metaphors: Male Same-Sex Desire, Irish Migration, and Late-Victorian Hellenism’ Michael Lawrence (Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland)
13. ‘Eavan Boland’s ‘Loneliness of the Mythical’: Orpheus, Eurydice, and Recognition’ (Rosie Lavan, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
Part Six: Twentieth-Century Irish Odysseys
14. ‘An Irish Odyssey: Autofiction and Tradition in Padraig de Brún’s An Odaisé’ (Richard Martin, Stanford University, USA)
15. ‘Missionary to Europe: Writing Migration in James Joyce’s Ulysses’ (Ronan Crowley, Aarhus University, Denmark)
Part Seven: Irish Classicism and the World Stage
16. ‘The Global Afterlives of Joycean Classicism: Case Studies from Argentine, Indian, and Zimbabwean Writers’ (Kiron Ward, University of St. Andrew’s, UK)
17. ‘Migrancy and Poetic Redress in Seamus Heaney’s Virgilian Pastoral’ (Rachel Falconer, University of Lausanne, Switzerland)
18. ‘Marina Carr and Colm Tóibín on Troy, Displacement, and Contemporary Warfare’ (Isabelle Torrance, Aarhus University, Denmark)
Envoi (Isabelle Torrance, Aarhus University, Denmark)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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