The Medieval Manuscripts of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin (review)

The origin of this book lies in a poignant event that took place in 2004, when the surviving medieval manuscripts of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin were reassembled for the first time in almost half a millennium in an exhibition in their original home. The Christ Church archive is unique in Ireland in terms of the chronological range and the diversity of document type, and allows remarkable insights into the changing world in which the books were compiled, and the chief mission—fittingly accomplished—of the seven essays newly written for this volume is to place the collection in its religious, social, and cultural context.

The martyrology and calendar of the Augustinian priory of Holy Trinity at Christ Church survive today in a manuscript dating from the mid-thirteenth century, preserved as Trinity College Dublin MS 576, where they are bound together with the priory’s early-sixteenth-century book of obits and discussed in this volume by Pádraig Ó Riain and Colm Lennon. For sheer beauty these books cannot compare with the cathedral priory’s psalter produced in the mid-fourteenth century, probably under commission in England, for prior Stephen de Derby and now preserved as Rawlinson MS G 185 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Alan Fletcher expertly describes them and includes notices of the material added to the manuscript after it arrived in Dublin, including an interesting account of a battle between the English and Irish near Bray, County Wicklow, on July 11, 1402, and musical notations that, if local, are some of the earliest to survive from Ireland.

More of the medieval material from Christ Church is preserved in two administrative codices, the Liber Niger and the Liber Albus, both fortunately still in the cathedral’s collections. The former (discussed here by Colmán Ó Clabaigh) was begun c. 1300 under prior Henry la Warr and is hugely important as a source for the foundation of the cathedral and the early history of the diocese of Dublin; it has copies of early Christ Church charters and grants of privileges, the otherwise lost text of the famous Irish parliament of 1297, and a valuable set of annals. The Liber Albus (considered here in Fletcher’s second essay in the volume) was assembled under subprior Thomas Fyche in the early-sixteenth century and has a similarly eclectic compendium of material stretching back over the preceding 300 years. One final corpus of cathedral documents—a vast collection of charters, leases, papal privileges, wills and conveyances, rentals, manorial accounts, inquisitions, and more (collectively known as the Christ Church Deeds and surveyed in this volume by Raymond Gillespie)—did not survive the Irish Civil War in 1922, but fortunately the bulk of the corpus was transcribed or calendared before its destruction.

The essays are generally of the solid and reliable—as opposed to virtuoso—variety, although two in particular stand out. Ó Riain, as well as dealing with one specific manuscript, is a font of expert knowledge on monastic “chapter” books in general, discussing their purpose and content (the monastic rule and eponymous chapters, martyrologies, necrologies or books of obits, calendars of feasts, and so on). Fletcher’s analysis of the hands present in the Liber Albus breaks new ground—he estimates a total of at least forty-three scribes—completing a task that the usually indefatigable canon H. J. Lawlor (a successor of Swift as dean of Dublin’s other medieval cathedral, St. Patrick’s) gave up in frustration.

An exercise such as this is always worthwhile, but its true value can be seen from the stimulus to further research and publication that it provides.