Despite its shortcomings (mostly related to me not being an art historian), this was one of the most enjoyable pieces of academic writing I’ve ever done!
#LámhscríbhinníGaeilge

Classicizing the Gaelic: Visual Classicism, Migration and Irish Manuscript Culture

tinyurl.com/5n7wwccd

Another year, another series of Irish medical manuscripts! The LEIGHEAS project Manuscript of the Month for January 2026 is Dublin, TCD 1357 (H.4.16), written in Co. Mayo in 1563 and containing several texts on uroscopy:

leigheas.maynoothuniversity.ie/leigheas-man...

Ogham stone inscribed with 'Ollscoil Mhá Nuad' in ogham script (foreground) with traditional currach (background) in Garraí na Gaeilge in the Arts Building, Maynooth University

Tá forbairt á déanamh againn ar Gharraí na Gaeilge chun cultúr Scoil an Léinn Cheiltigh, idir sean agus nua, a chur in iúl.

Curach a léiríonn cultúr beo na Gaeltachta agus na Nua-Ghaeilge agus cloch oghaim a léiríonn traidisún ársa na Sean-Ghaeilge.

Féach anseo: buff.ly/UdU2kRa

Logo of the Medieval Irish History podcast.

🌲2️⃣3️⃣🎁
Medieval Irish History Podcast

The staff in the @maynoothuniversity.ie Department of Early Irish have a lot of experience when it comes to the public dissemination of their research, but none more so than Dr Niamh Wycherley. As part of her @researchireland.ie Pathway Grant, she started…
📖

DIAS building, Dublin

2 scoláireacht ar fáil i Scoil an Léinn Cheiltigh
2 scholarships available in the School of Celtic Studies
Sprioc: 5 Eanáir 2026
Deadline: 5 January 2026
www.dias.ie/2025/12/05/v...
@dias.ie

206. Christmas before Christians This week the wonderful Dr Niamh Wycherly from Maynooth University joins us to discuss what medieval Christmas was like in Ireland and whether pagans had similar festivals around the same time of year

📻 Listen back: Dr Niamh Wycherley of the Dept of Early Irish (Sean-Ghaeilge) was on Newstalk's Let Me Explain With Sean Defoe, talking about what medieval Christmas was like in Ireland and whether pagans had similar festivals around the same time of year 🎄

www.goloudplayer.com/episodes/206...

DiⒶgnostic logo.

🌲1️⃣9️⃣🎁
DiⒶgnostic

On 31 August 2023, the very last day of my sabbatical year 2022/3, I was informed by the IRC (@researchireland.ie) of the award of an Advanced Laureate Award for ‘DiⒶgnostic – Tracing Diatopic Variation in a Corpus of Old Irish’. This four-year project started in December 2023.
📖

Thesaurus Inscriptionum Raeticarum, © Stefan Schumacher et al.

🌲2️⃣0️⃣🎁
Cisalpine Celtic literacy

Dr Corinna Salomon (Vienna) is an expert on ancient, pre-Roman writing systems in northern Italy (e.g., www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLwT...). She investigated the origin of the runes and contributed to Thesaurus Inscriptionum Raeticarum (tir.univie.ac.at/wiki/).
📖

Ogham Palaeography+: Katherine Forsyth creating an ogam stick.

🌲2️⃣1️⃣🎁
OPal+

As a spin-off of the OG(H)AM project, our Glasgow colleague Prof Katherine Forsyth secured AHRC @ukri.org follow-on funding for the Digital Humanities study of the neglected palaeography of ogam. Even though strictly speaking a Glasgow project, Maynooth researchers played a central…
📖

Examples of Chantal Kobel’s penmanship from the workshop with Thomas Keyes March 2024.

🌲2️⃣2️⃣🎁
Irish manuscript culture

Dr Chantal Kobel is a leading scholar of the material culture of medieval and early modern Irish manuscripts. Having held positions in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies @scs-dias.bsky.social for seven years, she has been teaching Irish palaeography and…
📖

The image shows a close-up of old manuscript pages with handwritten Gaelic text in dark ink. The text is presented with a decorative capital letter.

The MS of the week is RIA MS D ii 1, the Book of Uí Mhaine.

This late 14th century manuscript contains a late Middle Irish versified form of the 17 Wonders of the Night of Christ’s Birth. This apocryphal tradition includes miracles such as fruiting vines in the middle of winter🍇

The LEIGHEAS project Irish Medical Manuscript of the Month for December 2025 is TCD MS 1435 (E.3.30), containing Irish versions of works by Petrus de Argellata, Bernard of Gordon & John of Gaddesden, as well as this diagram of the 7 tunics of the eye:
leigheas.maynoothuniversity.ie/leigheas-man...

cover of Niamh Wycherley, The Cult of Relics in Early Medieval Ireland [= Studies in the Early Middle Ages 43], Turnhout: Brepols 2016.

🌲1️⃣6️⃣🎁
Power and Patronage

Dr Niamh Wycherley interests lie in the church history, the history of women in medieval Ireland, & patterns of patronage. After having received the @nuimerrionsq.bsky.social Publication Prize in History 2017 for ‘The Cult of Relics in Early Medieval Ireland’, Niamh won…
📖

Sketch of phlebotomy man in London, British Library MS Add. 15582, fo. 61v; MS digitised by the LEIGHEAS project.

🌲1️⃣7️⃣🎁
LEIGHEAS

Prof Deborah Hayden’s research into the history of medieval and early modern Irish medicine continues with her second @researchireland.ie Laureate Award ‘LEIGHEAS – Language, Education and Medical Learning in the Premodern Gaelic World’ 2022. The aim of LEIGHEAS (Irish for ‘remedy’…
📖

website of ‘Developing a Digital Framework for the Medieval Gaelic World’

UK-Ireland Collaboration in the Digital Humanities poster

🌲1️⃣1️⃣🎁
Digital Gaelic

Early 2020, Prof Deborah Hayden, Dr Nora White and I were awarded a UK-Ireland Collaboration in the Digital Humanities Grant by the AHRC (@ukri.org) and IRC (@researchireland.ie) for ‘Developing a Digital Framework for the Medieval Gaelic World’ www.qub.ac.uk/schools/ael/....
📖

Ancient Celtic languages and writing © David Stifter after Uderzo & Goscinny

🌲1️⃣2️⃣🎁
Ancient Celtic languages

The Maynooth Department of Early Irish is not only known for its academic expertise in the cultural heritage of medieval Ireland. My other huge interest for more than 30 years has been the ancient Celtic languages of the Continent (Lepontic, Gaulish, Celtiberian).
📖

OG(H)AM – Harnessing Digital Technologies to Transform Understanding of Ogham Writing, from the 4ᵗʰ Century to the 21ˢᵗ project website

the new Ogham in 3D website (2025)

🌲1️⃣3️⃣🎁
OG(H)AM

The next major international project, short title OG(H)AM, resulted directly from the Digital Gaelic project, again jointly funded by @ukri.org and the IRC (@researchireland.ie). Starting from a collaboration between Dr Nora White (Maynooth) and Prof Katherine Forsyth (Glasgow),…
📖

aonghus.blogspot.com/2024/11/gear...

Nora White, Compert Mongáin and Three Other Early Mongán tales: A Critical Edition with Introduction, Translation, Textual Notes, Bibliography and Vocabulary [= Maynooth Medieval Irish Texts 5], Maynooth: Department of Old and Middle Irish 2006.

🌲1️⃣5️⃣🎁
Latinate Inscriptions

Following her 2006 PhD in Maynooth (an edition of the tales about Mongán mac Fíachnai), Dr Nora White became one of the leading scholar in Ireland for ogam inscriptions. She was the main person behind the development of the Ogham in 3D website (ogham.celt.dias.ie/)...
📖

Meeting Room Royal Irish Aacademy, © KarenRIA - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76382878

🌲🔟🎁
Codices Eximii Hibernenses

When he was Ollamh na Nua-Ghaeilge at @maynoothuniversity.ie, Ruairí Ó hUiginn initiated a conference series dedicated to the most important medieval and early modern manuscripts in the collection of the Royal Irish Academy (@ria.ie @rialibrary.bsky.social).
📖

Ba ag Imbolc 2016, agus é ag caint ar an dtogra seo a chur mé aithne ar @davidstifter.bsky.social agus thosaigh á leanúint i Ríocht an Éin

vimeo.com/179032429?tu...

Tá cáil air i measc na nGael do éacht lasmuigh den Acadamh, i. Iallach a chur ar an Roinn Dlí agus cirt an foirm iarratais ar shaoránacht a chur ar fáil as Gaeilge. Ní gan dua a rinne sé sin.

tuairisc.ie/fearg-fos-ar...

𝗗𝗶Ⓐ𝗴𝗻𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀 22
The first feature that the DiⒶgnostic team investigated as an alleged marker of dialectal variation in Old Irish is the word(s) for ‘self’. The screenshot from eDIL (dil.ie/20990) gives an idea of the enormous proliferation of forms meaning ‘self’ in Old Irish sources.
/1

A great crowd attending the Early Irish Research Seminar, 4 December 2025 © David Stifter.

🌲8️⃣🎁
Research seminars and conferences

Dr Elizabeth Boyle established a series of three research seminars every semester in the Department of Early Irish as a forum for scholarly discourse and outreach in 2014. Since then, she and other colleagues have invited 66 scholars to speak in this series.
📖

cover of Deborah Hayden and Paul Russell (eds.), Grammatica, Gramadach and Gramadeg: Vernacular Grammar and Grammarians in Medieval Ireland and Wales [= Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 125], Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins 2016.

🌲9️⃣🎁
Medical learning

Having originally studied the native grammatical tradition of medieval Ireland, Prof Deborah Hayden became intrigued by the overlap of grammar with medical learning in medieval Irish manuscripts. After joining the Department of Early Irish in 2015, Deborah received a @ria.ie…
📖

Daniel Watson, Philosophy in Early Medieval Ireland: Nature, Hierarchy and Inspiration, PhD thesis, Maynooth 2018.

🌲4️⃣🎁
PhDs

Elizabeth Boyle’s research has attracted many talented postgraduate students to do their PhDs in Maynooth. Daniel Watson (Canada) wrote an extensive study of “Philosophy in Early Medieval Ireland”. Daniel was a Hume Scholar at @maynoothuniversity.ie; after graduating in 2019, his PhD…
📖

Dublin, National Library of Ireland, MS G50, beginning of Blathmac’s Poems, p. 122. © Irish Script on Screen.

🌲3️⃣🎁
Blathmac’s Poems

In 2013, Siobhán Barrett started on a PhD, supported by a @maynoothuniversity.ie Hume Scholarship and then by an IRC GOI Scholarship (@researchireland.ie), with the aim of creating a lexical database of the Poems of Blathmac. This soon turned into something much bigger.
📖

NUI Awards Alumna, Dr Niamh Wycherley, addresses all award recipients on the importance of NUI awards and funding.

The 3rd Stowe Missal Charm © David Stifter 2012, image © Royal Irish Academy and Irish Script on Screen

🌲1️⃣🎁
Medieval Irish charms

When asked for an inaugural lecture as Professor of Old and Middle Irish at @maynoothuniversity.ie (2012), I was desperately looking for a suitable topic. But after some deliberation, I chose one that I had already worked on before, namely Old Irish healing charms.
📖

© Royal Irish Academy, Irish Script on Screen, RIA MS 23 N 10, p. 90, a Middle Irish poem on idolatry.

🌲2️⃣🎁
Church history and Christian learning

In 2013, Dr Elizabeth Boyle joined the Department of Early Irish. One of her chief interests is the religious, cultural and literary history of early medieval Ireland (7ᵗʰ–12ᵗʰ centuries), that is the homilies, law, theological and philosophical texts,…
📖