The Hisperica famina (‘Western Orations’) (hereafter Hisperica) are a seventh-century collection of fascinating, Latin orations that constitute a school textbook on rhetoric and composition. Similar to several other extant ‘hisperic’ texts written in a unique form of Hiberno-Latin, they invoke neologism and archaic vocabulary, draw on Greek, Hebrew, and Celtic, and employ terms in unique ways. Their influence was widespread, and a number of insular compositions are believed indebted to the hisperic style they demonstrate. For example, Máeldub likely imparted knowledge of the Hisperica to Aldhelm while he was a student at Malmesbury, and their influence is evidenced in his De virginitate, Aenigmata, and epistle to Eahfrid. Due to their gratuitous artificiality, deliberate obscurity, extreme invective, and outlandish style an argument can be made that the Hisperica are evidence of the continuation of the so-called ‘third sophistic’ that developed in the late antique and early medieval west. Or, perhaps they could be placed alongside other hisperic texts in a ‘Celtic’ or ‘Insular’ sophistic in the seventh and eighth centuries. Second Sophistic rhetoric in the Latin ‘Silver Age’ tended towards heightened, superficial style, bombast, and strange vocabulary, including graecism and archaism, and later writers are sometimes identified as part of a third sophistic. Rather than evidence of a decline in literary and rhetorical style, the rhetoric of the second and third sophistic reveal the social and cultural values of the learned classes from which it emerged, and hisperic style reveals much about the stylistic values of the early medieval Irish. Aside from the exemplary studies discussed below, hisperic Latin has in large part escaped the notice of rhetorical studies.

The A-Text of the Hisperica likely dates to the mid-seventh century and is certainly the work of an Irish milieu. As a terminus post quem, Andy Orchard suggests the writings of Isidore, indicating composition in the first half of the seventh century at the earliest, and a terminus ante quem based on the writings of Aldhelm, who appears to imitate them in his fixed patterns of syntax, indicating the late seventh century. Michael Herren also argues that the Hisperica influenced the Lorica of Laidcen (d. 661 CE), providing further evidence for a late seventh-century date. As for the text's Irish provenance, P. Grosjean was the first to note the influence of Irish on some of the faminator's coinages, and most commentators now agree the text is an Irish production.