The Latin tradition

The Latin tradition (Antiquity to Middle Ages)

Including: manuscript transmission; Hiberno-Latin; Latin education; scientific texts; glosses, glossaries and scholia.

Our staff share many research interests in the continuity of the Latin tradition, through the Classical and Late Antique periods to the early Middle Ages and beyond. We specialise in issues concerning transmission (especially manuscript transmission) and reception, with a strong interest in Hiberno-Latin texts, both from Ireland and by Irish scholars on the Continent.

Staff areas of focus include:

• Dr Jacopo Bisagni: the transmission of computistical and exegetical texts between Ireland, Brittany and Francia in the Carolingian age.
• Prof. Michael Clarke: continuity and reception, with special reference to the Christian Middle Ages in general and the Insular worlds of Britain and Ireland in particular.
• Dr Pádraic Moran: Latin education and scholarship, including grammars, glosses, glossaries and scholia.

Current researchers

Postdoctoral researchers:

• Dr Colleen Curran: palaeographic analysis of early medieval manuscripts attributed to Brittany.
  
• Dr Vittorio Danovi: the Philargyrian corpus and its medieval reception.
• Dr Jasmim Drigo: loanwords in the Old Irish glosses.
• Dr Christian Schweizer: editing the ninth-century Irish intellectual Dicuil.
  
• Dr Mary Sweeney: the medieval glossing tradition of the sixth-century Latin grammar of Priscian.

PhD researchers:

• Chiara Corongiu: glossed Latin texts in early Irish manuscripts.
• Darcy Ireland: the sources of Pauca problesmata de enigmatibus ex tomis canonicis.
• Elena Nordio: Latinity in seventh-century Spain.

Completed research

Postdoctoral researchers:

• Dr Ciaran Arthur: "divine speech" in early English texts.
  
• Dr Sarah Corrigan: biblical exegesis in early medieval Brittany. (Dr Corrigan also undertook PhD research on sea imagery in Hiberno-Latin texts. In 2023, she took up a lectureship in Classics at the University of Melbourne.)
  

PhD researchers:

• Dr Grace Attwood: the literary context of the Hisperica Famina genre.
• Dr Francesca Bezzone: fifth-century Latin hagiography.
  
• Dr Charles Doyle: Latin Christian reception of early Greek materialism.
• Dr Noémi Farkas: the construction of authority in Sedulius Scottus' De rectoribus Christianis.
• Dr Francesca Guido: the sources of Charisius' Latin grammar.
• Dr Paula Harrison: the Hiberno-Latin element in Carolingian computistical compilations
• Dr Peter Kelly: cosmogony and the material structure of the universe in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. (In 2022, Dr Kelly took up a lecturership in Classics at Princeton University.)
• Dr Maria Chiara Marzolla: the sources on music in the early Irish church.
• Dr Jason O'Rorke: the treatment of diathesis (voice) in ancient grammar.