The Irish Chronicles as Sources for Monastic Literacy

The central function of monasteries in the formation of the literate elites can be traced in two main ways – through an examination of the writings produced in them and through an identification of the writers. The former is less problematic than the latter, despite the usual difficulties of linguistic and historical contextualisation. As the last chapter showed, written sources offer insights into the nature of the literate elites, the socio-political environments in which they flourished and their responses to social and political change. Thus, the different genres produced by Irish writers – literary, legal and genealogical – partially map their world and the communal identities created for it. However, the authors of very many surviving texts, particularly in the vernacular, are unknown, leaving scholars with unanswered questions. There is a large body of anonymous writings, frequently dateable in only the most general terms. Other texts are given obviously legendary authorial credits, which tell us more about the importance of citing traditional sources of authoritative knowledge than about individual authorship. But we are not without directions: these point towards a distribution of learning which can locate named individuals who were part of the learned elite. The monasteries are the lodestone, for although it is often impossible to make an absolute identity between a specific church, an individual and a text, it is easier to match a named person with a particular church and to broadly identify the type of learning to which he contributed.