An eighteenth-century Gaelic scribe's private library: Muiris Ó Gormáin's books

Abstract:The transcription and teaching career of the Gaelic scribe Muiris Ó Gormáin spanned three-quarters of the eighteenth century. From the 1750s onwards he became one of the most sought after scribes as he was employed by many of the leading Irish antiquarians, both Protestant and Catholic, to copy and translate Gaelic manuscripts. During the 1760s and 1770s he compiled detailed catalogues of the contents of books and manuscripts in his possession, together with his estimation of their value. Not only do these catalogues provide an important insight into the type of material he considered worth collecting but they also point towards the fact that he functioned as a book-dealer. The bilingual nature of these catalogues, and the large number of books in the English language they contained, challenge the argument first put forward by Daniel Corkery in the 1920s that the worlds of the Gaelic-speaking Irish and the English-speaking Protestant élite were divided from one another with little interaction between them, and Joep Leerssen's contention more recently that Gaelic Ireland was isolated from print culture in English.