Franciscan A Manuscripts
The corpus of
sixty-seven Gaelic manuscripts which derive their nomenclature from their
former storage in section A of the Franciscan Library Killiney, were transferred
in November 2000 to the curatorship of UCD Archives under the terms of an
agreement between the university and the Irish Franciscans.
The primary motivation for the transfer of custody of the manuscripts was to
ensure their preservation through the establishment of an extensive programme
of conservation; and to enhance their availability through involvement in the
Irish Script on Screen [ISOS] digitisation project.
The transfer to UCD is the latest in a series of moves to which the collection has been subject since its inception in the great hagiographical enterprise of the Irish Franciscans at Louvain in the early seventeenth century. The initial intention to collect lives of the saints developed into a major historical and genealogical project which involved locating, collecting, and transcribing materials on the secular and ecclesiastical history of Ireland.
Brother Míchéal Ó Cléirigh, the most famous
of the annalists known as the Four Masters, spent eleven years in Ireland,
1626–37, locating and copying manuscripts. MS A 13, Annála Ríoghdhachta Éireann
or the Annals of the Four Masters, is the centrepiece of the collection.
The manuscript shown here, A21 is an account by Tadhg Ó Cianáin
of the Flight of the Earls, the departure from Ireland of the Earls of Tyrone
and Tyrconnel, written in Rome in 1609.
