Trinity College Library, Dublin, yesterday acquired the first book printed in Irish. This book, Abidil gaoidheilge & caiticiosma (ABC &catechism), printed in 1571, is only the sixth item known to have beenprinted in Ireland and was purchased for £48,000. Only four copies ofthe book are recorded and that purchased by TCD was the only one … Read more
A new edition of the Dictionary of National Biography is in preparationat the University of Oxford with general support from the BritishAcademy and Oxford University Press. All entries in the old DNB will berevised or rewritten and 12,000 new articles will be added. It is aparticular priority to improve the coverage of groups who wererelatively … Read more
In the early summer of 1795 Russell, Neilson, Simms, McCracken and one or two more of us, on thesummit of McArt’s Fort, took a solemn obligation—never to desist in ourefforts until we had subverted the authority of England over ourcountry. Tone, Autobiography. The Society of United Irishmen Commemoration Committee is organising aguided walk to McArt’s … Read more
The letters of Irish emigrants in Australia (featured in the ‘sources’section of HI Winter 1994), steeped in local idiom and nuance, deserveto be heard as well as seen. A ninety-minute cassette, based on aseries of radio programmes produced by Cathal Póirtéir, has beenreleased in conjunction with David Fitzpatrick’s Oceans of Consolation:Personal Accounts of Irish Migration … Read more
Yale Center for British Art, Pennsylvania State University and theSpenser Society of America will host an interdisciplinary symposium onThe Faerie Queene in the World, 1596-1996 on 27-28 September 1996. Theorganisers welcome papers on Spenser’s works and life, on violence andrebellion, on Reformation theology, on visual history and iconology, onthe history of political thought, on the … Read more