EDUCATION
of John Scottus Eriugena (an Irish scholar who worked
in the Court of Charles II), especially his De Divisione
Natura, which attempted to reconcile Neoplatonic
ideas of emanation with Christian doctrine related to
creation.
In addition, there can be no doubt that the monastic
schools also taught Irish. As early as 600, Irish appeared
side-by-side with Latin in the form of glosses—remarks,
comments, and additions written by the copyist in the
margins of the manuscript—that often explicate the
Latin text in the Irish language. The Auraicept na nÉces
(the Instruction of the Poets or Scholars), a treatise on
Irish grammar, appeared in the middle of the seventh
century and continued to be worked on by monastic and
lay authors until the eleventh century. The Auraicept
outlines, among other topics, the origins of Gaelic; the
Latin and Irish treatment of semi-vowels; the seven ele-
ments of speech in Irish; and the alphabets of Hebrew,
Greek, and Latin.
During these centuries, students and scholars trav-
eled to Ireland to benefit from Irish monastic education.
Monasteries generally welcomed foreign students
and lay students (those who were not intended for
the church but a civil or military life), and there are
a few records suggesting that women might have
studied in the monasteries. In addition, evidence for
the influence of monastic education on the filidand
the native secular schools is found in the absorption
of Latin into secular instruction and the writing of
the Brehon Laws in the eighth century. At the same
time, Irish scholars such as the famed St. Colum Cille
and St. Columbanus fanned across Europe and
founded monastic schools.
There have been two primary (and opposed) opin-
ions about this period of scholarship in Irish history.
The first, popularized by such writers as Douglas
Hyde, suggests that Irish monastic schools from the
sixth to the end of the ninth century preserved knowl-
edge during the Dark Ages by devoting their cultural
and religious institutions to scholarship and combated
illiteracy and ignorance with the two-handed engine
of classical texts from Greece and Rome and Christian
religious texts. The second opinion argues the other
extremethat classical knowledge in ancient Ireland
was limited, and the famed scholars in Europe such as
John Scottus Eriugena acquired their classical knowl-
edge in exile. Between these two claims resides the
majority of scholarly opinion that might be summa-
rized as follows: Even though there may have been
variations in the quality and standards of education as
well as the number of classical texts available to Irish
scholars, what remains clear is that the texts read and
transcribed, the skill of the Irish monks in writing and
instruction, and their influence over the intellectual life
of Europe were all formidable.
Bardic Schools
When Viking raids began in the last decade of the
eighth century, monastic life was permanently
impacted. The Vikings targeted monasteries because
of their riches and encountered little resistance to their
plundering. Between 775 and 1071 C.E., Glendalough
itself was pillaged on numerous occasions and
destroyed by fire at least nine times. Devastation, how-
ever, was not the only order of the day. Since the
Vikings also settled in many parts of Ireland, their
culture intermingled with the Irish. Evidence for the
increasing internationalization of Irish learning is
found in twelfth-century translations of The Aeneid,
The Pharsalia, and The Thebais. In addition, many
important native histories were written during this
time, including Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib (the War of
the Irish against the Foreigners), written in Munster in
the early twelfth century, and Lebor na hUidre(the
Book of the Dun Cow), a twelfth-century manuscript
traditionally associated with Clonmacnoise.
In the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, with the
monastic schools weakened by Viking attacks, the
bardic schools where the filidtrained began to thrive
again and were to some degree comparable to monastic
centers of learning. Each bardic school was generally
associated with a poetic family such as Ua Dálaigh
inCork and Ua hUiginn in Sligo. Students studied
languages, metrics, mythology, history, genealogy,
dinnshenchas, and, predictably, Latin, learning their
lessons orally from the Latin and Irish manuscripts.
Also, the filidclass began to develop new forms of
poetry, another indication that Irish intellectual life
remained vital in the later Middle Ages. This structure
of education, where an elite family would cultivate
learning, might also have been true for the legal, med-
ical, and musical professions.
By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the con-
tinental monastic orders of the Cistercians, Benedictines,
Dominicans, Franciscans, and Augustinians had moved
into Ireland and superceded the older Irish monasteries.
These orders introduced a pervading movement in edu-
cation toward Aristotelianism, which emphasized logic
over the literary, historical, or mythological study of
classical works. Aristotle continued to dominate Irish
education well into the seventeenth century while the
rest of Europe “rediscovered” the classics of Rome and
Greece during the Renaissance. Despite the influx of
European scholars and educators, Ireland still had no
university and many students traveled to England or
other parts of Europe for advanced studies; it would
take until 1591 for a viable university to be established
in Ireland in the form of Trinity College Dublin. In
sum, from the fourteenth century on, a series of ordi-
nances attempted to suppress the Irish language and