Ethnohistorical Preservation and Persuasion in Foras Feasa ar Eirinn

Although the title of Geoffrey Keating's Foras Feasa ar Éirinn has often been translated as "The History of Ireland," it more accurately translates as "The Basis of Knowledge about Ireland." The distinction is worth noting because it raises the question: To what extent can we consider Keating's work a history? What constitutes Keating's basis of knowledge about the Irish past--that is, the range of sources he employs--is telling. Because Keating includes a great deal of myth, legend, hagiography, and genealogy shaped by successive generations to suit changing political agendas, the conventional wisdom about FFÉ is that it cannot be relied upon for historical accuracy. ¹ Yet Keating's FFÉ reveals a complicated vision of historical truth that cannot be narrowed to the merely factual. For a better understanding of this vision, I will examine Keating's methodology for choosing and presenting his source materials. This may provide some insight into early developments in Irish historiography. However, my ultimate goal is to present FFÉ as an example of one form of history with very different objectives than modern academic history, but one that is no less contemporary or consequential.

Like an ethnohistorian investigating a recently literate culture, Keating asserts that three types of evidence are valuable in reconstructing the past: "oral traditions of the ancients, old documents, and antique remains, called in Latin monumenta." ² However, Keating tends to privilege written sources over oral traditions and archaeological evidence. As a priest trained on the continent, Keating was influenced by Renaissance historiographic methods, which emphasized the authority of written sources and presupposed chronology to be the organizing principle of history as a narrative genre. Keating cites Italian historian Polydore Vergil (1470-1555?) for the duties of the responsible historian. These include reporting only facts proven by primary sources and never omitting any available fact. Keating also paraphrases Vergil to describe the broad, nearly ethnographic purview of the historian who should "explain the customs and way of life, the counsels, causes, resolves, acts, and development, whether good or bad, of every people who dwell in the country about which he has undertaken to write" (FFÉ i 57). ³

As Joep Leerssen asserts, Keating is "notoriously uncritical of his source-material," ⁴ yet Keating deserves more credit for the amount of scrutiny he brings to bear on the sources he accepts as reliable. Throughout FFÉ Keating is concerned with factuality and is critical, by the standards of his day, of previous histories of Ireland and of his own evidence. In his introduction, Keating attacks several foreign, mostly British, commentators for spreading malicious falsehoods about Ireland by demonstrating how they fail to live up to accepted historiographic principles. For example, Richard Stanihurst must be dismissed because "he was blindly ignorant in the language of the country" and therefore could not access the "ancient records and transactions of the territory" (FFÉ i 43). In his own account of the Irish past, Keating is critical enough of native sources to point out, for example, that the lengthy reigns of pre-Christian kings set down in Réim Ríoghraidhe ("The Role of the Kings") are improbable (FFÉ i 83). He makes a case for more plausible years and blames the mistake on the carelessness of copyists rather than on the ignorance of the original authors (FFÉ i 85). Keating consistently argues that the Irish primary written sources are as reliable as those in any country (FFÉ i 83, iii 35, iii 37). Still, he is critical enough of these sources to note exceptions and to offer competing versions of his evidence along with his reasons for the credibility of one version over another (e.g., FFÉ ii 99).

Keating may privilege written sources, but he is as critical about his oral sources as he is about his written ones. Although of Norman extraction, Keating uses of language that demonstrates his familiarity with the Gaelic bardic tradition, and...