In 1626, around four centuries ago, an otherwise unknown young man quietly left Ireland for the Continent, bound for an Augustinian friary to continue his formal education. Like many Irish religious during the Penal era, William Tirry departed because Ireland was not permitted to educate or sustain Catholic clergy openly. Despite the landscape of shattered…
Ireland is often described as a land unusually rich in the art of written memory, with a wealth of books, illuminated manuscripts, and a deep tradition of scholastic learning. From the early Middle Ages, its monasteries produced a vast array of annals, genealogies, saints’ vitae, and legal texts in seemingly unprecedented quantities. The Irish monasteries…
Tracing Ireland’s forgotten desert saint The antiquity of the Irish church is a historic curiosity. We truly know very little about how and when Christianity arrived on the shores of Ireland. But arrive it did, and we are left with a few highly stylised legends about how this came to be. One of our…