Richard Sharpe 1954–2020

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3318/ERIU.2020.70.9 Ériu LXX (2020) 1–4 Royal Irish Academy RICHARD SHARPE 1954–2020 Richard Sharpe was a giant of scholarship and an extraordinary ­ personality. A proud Yorkshireman, he was trained in Cambridge, first in Classics, then in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (counting Kathleen Hughes among his teachers). His doctoral thesis, completed in 1980, formed the basis of his magisterial Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives, published in 1991. Even in the early stages of his career no-one could have been in doubt of his talent and industry (Raasay: a study in island history—the first volume of his work on Raasay—had appeared in 1977), but in the 1980s it was no easy thing to find a comfortable position in academia, especially in Britain—something he often recalled in more recent times to give comfort and hope to younger academics struggling to establish themselves. Although his early career did not follow the path he might have expected and hoped for, his ravenous curiosity and insatiable appetite for work ensured that wherever he went and whatever he undertook he would deepen his knowledge and make enduring contributions to scholarship. After nearly a decade at the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, he became reader of Diplomatic in Oxford in 1990 and professor in 1998. It is impossible for any one scholar to do justice to Richard’s immense output and the impact of his work in all the fields in which he distinguished himself. Even a survey of his contributions to Irish Studies is a tall order, for few scholars have roamed so widely, worked so thoroughly or thought so Richard Sharpe photographed at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin in 2013, on the occasion of the launch of his book Roderick O’Flaherty’s letters to William Moylneux,Edward Lhywd,and Samuel Moylneux,1696–1709.(Photo: John Ohle) 2 MÍCHEÁL HOYNE critically. Ireland was for him a second home, and he was deeply gratified to become an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2018. Many of Richard’s Irish papers ‘had legs’ . His first contribution to this journal (‘Hiberno-Latin laicus, Irish láech and the Devil’s men’, Ériu 30 (1979), 75–92), is a characteristic piece, displaying the author’s deep familiarity with medieval Irish sources, his control of the languages required to study them, and his determination to think clearly about the problem and follow the evidence wherever it may lead.The importance of this paper may be measured by the subsequent surge of interest in the aristocratic sub-culture of brigandage in early medieval Ireland. Similarly, an article in Peritia in 1984 (‘Some problems concerning the organisation of the Church in early medieval Ireland’, 3 (1984), 230–70) sounded the death-knell of the prevailing orthodoxy and inaugurated a radical reassessment of the character of the medieval Irish Church. Though he remained a medievalist at heart, Richard came increasingly to devote his many skills to the study of early modern Ireland. Among other things this engagement with post-medieval Irish material produced his edition (with exhaustive commentary) of Roderick O’Flaherty’s letters (2013). Richard appreciated, as too few medievalists do, the vagaries of manuscript survival and the crucial role post-medieval Irish scholars played in transmitting medieval material and framing our interpretation of it. In recent years, he published important work on manuscript sales and the formation of manuscript collections in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and he lectured extensively on the topic in Dublin. Regrettably he did not live to complete his Irish manuscript sales, an annotated edition of manuscript sales catalogues, in which he tracked the precarious journeys of hundreds of Irish manuscripts from sale to sale before they reached the comparative safety of modern libraries. While combing through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sales catalogues , Richard had encountered many references to printed works in Irish, along with comments on their comparative rarity, and found himself searching for a satisfactory bibliography of early Irish printing: had anyone, he wondered, actually set out what was printed in Irish, by whom, where, when, and how often, and where the surviving copies were...