Noel Kissane (ed.)
(Boyne Valley Honey Company, £9.95 PB)
The appearance of this book is something of a milestone in the current revival of the fortunes of the National Library. The companion volume to an exhibition, it presents a beautifully-illustrated account of 100 items chosen by the Library’s various keepers as an example of the riches among its diverse holdings. While the National Library as presently constituted owes its existence to an act of parliament passed in 1877, the nucleus of its collection was formed by the incorporation of the library of the Royal Dublin Society, which included the valuable Joly library. The Library remained at Leinster House until construction began upon Thomas Deane’s distinctive Kildare Street building in 1890. Unfortunately, and unlike the British Library, no copyright privilege was extended to the Dublin institution. This situation was partly remedied in 1927, when the Library acquired copyright powers within the twenty-six counties of the Free State. Despite this disadvantage, its stocks have been enriched by the acquisition of many important collections of manuscripts, books and photographs. The Library was given responsibility for the Genealogical Office in 1943, several of whose manuscripts feature in the present volume. With over a million printed books and countless manuscripts of great historical worth in its possession, the National Library is the pre-eminent bibliographical and research centre for Irish studies.
Specialist and non-specialist alike will find much of interest throughout the books’s ten chapters, all of which have been written and compiled by an expert from the Library’s staff. Each chapter consists of a selection of items, which are elegantly reproduced with an accompanying commentary. Such obvious categories as printed books and manuscripts figure among the chapter headings, other subjects covered include photographs, maps and official publications. Not all the items featured are of purely Irish interest. For example, Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopedie, which appeared in a series of 28 volumes in Paris between 1751 and 1772, has been included among the treasures. This key text of the Enlightenment was first acquired by the RDS, from whom it passed to the National Library. While the Library has obtained material from a variety of sources, including an extensive hoard of provincial newspapers from the defunct Chief Secretary’s office in 1922, two collections netted particularly valuable material. The purchase of a large number of books from the Shirley Library, Lough Fea, Co. Monaghan, in 1924 resulted in the acquisition of such treasures as a work on St Patrick’s Purgatory, published at Ulm in 1483, and Bonaventura O hEodhusa’s Irish catechism which appeared at Antwerp in 1611. A second great windfall was the purchase in 1931 of 178 manuscript volumes of Gaelic provenance from the ]ibrary assembled at Cheltenham by Sir Thomas Phillipps. Among the materials obtained were medieval vellum manuscripts, and a variety of mythological, medical and legal texts. The Library has also been fortunate in the number of estate paper collections which have come its way, including material from the Ormond, Lismore, Inchiquin, Clonbrock, Coolattin, Fingal and Monteagle estates. Such papers are a mine of information on life and work in the great Irish demesnes, especially from the seventeenth-century onwards.
The Library possesses a fine collection of Gaelic manuscripts, which numbers around 1,200 items. Most of these are bound volurnes containing a large range of material representative of the Gaelic literary tradition. The manuscripts date from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries. The contents, in some cases, predate the fourteenth century. For example, a seventeenth-century manuscript includes the poems of the eight-century monk Blathmac. The poems, written in the language of the period, provide a rare instance of a continuous text from the early stages of the development of Irish. The Library’s Gaelic manuscripts are rich in examples of bardic poetry and of popular prose and poetry from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. These manuscripts are of unique importance in the delineation of the cultural history of Ireland. As historical source material they have hardly been touched, and still largely await interpretors capable of using them to reconstruct the obscured pattems of Gaelic mentalites. Robert Damton’s masterly interpretation of folktales to outline aspects of eighteenth-century French cultural history highlights the historical potential of such evidence and suggests possible lines of investigation for historians of Irish culture.
In a brief review, it is hardly possible to do justice to the scope and richness of this volume. A personal selection of three treasures by this reviewer, while tending to the idiosyncratic, illustrates the breadth of artistic, intellectual and cultural endeavour documented in this book. My first such treasure is a delightfully-illustrated copy of Edith Somerville’s The Story of the Discontented Little Elephant, published in London in 1912, and a superb example of the robust morality imparted to children at the time. My second choice, a drawing (c.1790s) by James Gandon showing his design for the dairy at Abbeville, Malahide, is characterised by its elegance and classicism. While Gandon’s buildings are in the first rank of eighteenth-century architecture, the Georgian style which they epitomize is still an integral physical feature of both the urban and rural landscapes in Ireland. This drawing may be said to evoke something of the flavour of eighteenth-century Irish architecture and design. My third choice is a map (c.1598) of the lands leased by Henry Pyne from Walter Raleigh in Mogeely, Co. Cork. This document, the earliest Irish estate map known, exemplifies colonial attitudes by its indifference to existing place-lore, and by its ‘English’ interpretation of the Irish countryside. The items reproduced in this book are an eloquent testimony to the varied strands of Irish history. Both the National Library and their sponsors and publishers in this venture, Boyne Valley Honey Company, are to be congratulated for making available to the public a book as attractive and informative as Treasures from the National Library of Ireland.
Marc Caball works for the Ireland Literature Exchange, Dublin.