evangelization from 1571, although the venture was
not seriously persevered with. Both Protestant and
Catholic Reformations gave momentum to new ped-
agogical developments in later Tudor Ireland. The
former pioneered diocesan grammar schools as well
as the university at Dublin, while the latter fostered
its own education, as at Limerick under the Louvain-
educated Richard Creagh and at Kilkenny under the
Oxford-trained Peter White. Graduates of these acad-
emies proceeded to participate in the foundation of
Irish colleges on the continent from the end of the
century.
By that time, Irish scholars were participating in a
range of later Renaissance learned pursuits. The doyen
was the Dublin-born Richard Stanihurst, who became
the first Irish humanist in print with his London pub-
lication on Aristotelian dialectics in 1570 and whose
later scholarship included Irish history and topography,
a translation of the Aeneidinto English hexameters, a
treatise on alchemy, and devotional tracts. The gener-
ation produced by the Renaissance schoolmen of the
earlier Elizabethan period flourished in the fin de siècle
years, mostly in exile, and included William Bathe,
Stephen White, Peter Lombard, and David Rothe,
while James Ussher was the most notable product of
the Anglican educational system in Ireland.
COLM LENNON
References and Further Reading
Bradshaw, Brendan. “Manus ‘the Magnificent’: O’Donnell as
Renaissance Prince.” In Studies in Irish History Presented
to R. Dudley Edwards, edited by Art Cosgrove and Donal
McCartney. Dublin: University College Press, 1979.
Lennon, Colm. Richard Stanihurst the Dubliner, 1547− 1618.
Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1981.
Silke, John J. “Irish Scholarship and the Renaissance, 1580−
1673.” In Studies in the Renaissance20 (1973): 169−206.
Walsh, Katherine. “In the Wake of Reformation and Counter-
Reformation: Ireland’s Belated Reception of Renaissance
Humanism?” In Die Renaissance im Blick der Nationen
Europas, edited by Georg Kauffmann. Wiesbaden: Otto
Harrassowitz, 1991.
See alsoArchitecture
RHETORIC
The principles of rhetoric, the second of the three
artes liberales, were certainly known to the Irish,
although not as much explicit evidence of its study,
as opposed to practice, survives as does for Anglo-
Saxon England. The Irish were well aware of the use
of rhetorical embellishments in the early Christian
tradition: the best of their surviving Latin composi-
tions show that they understood the Augustinian doc-
trine that Christian rhetoric must reveal the truth of
Scripture, make it pleasing, and move the reader/
hearer. Almost certainly they had access to hand-
books of rhetoric, not just Augustine De doctrina
Christiana, the standard manual for teachers and
preachers throughout the Middle Ages, and Cas-
siodorus’ Institutionesbut also Martianus’s De nuptiis
Philologiae et Mercurii, one of the standard text-
books on the liberal arts in the Middle Ages, and
perhaps the compositions of Victorinus and the Latin
panegyrists. However, the only tract on rhetoric of
Irish composition that we know by name is the Retho-
rica Alerani,written probably by Ailerán, lector of
Clonard (d. 665). Although no trace of it survives, it
was still in the monastic library of St. Florian, near
Linz, up to the twelfth century.
The epistles and sermons of Columbanus (d. 615)
are our earliest evidence of a developed form of Latin
rhetoric. They are marked by a complex clausular
structure, prose rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, and
other rhetorical devicesthat presuppose an education
in quite advanced rhetoric, which he would have re-
ceived at home. The sustained use of rhyming prose
is very evident in the seventh-century moral-theological
treatiseDe XII abusiuisand in other homiletic and
exegetical pieces of the seventh and eighth centuries.
The style of extravagant Latin composition known as
hispericcontains a great many rhetorical devices and
may have been inspired by the rhetorical style of
Gaulish Latin authors of the fifth and sixth centuries.
The Irish were also addicted to learned word play and
the interweaving of their sources, biblical and patris-
tic, into complex mosaic patternsthat can be seen in
abundance in seventh-century exegetical and homi-
letic material.
There are rhetorical forms in Old Irish, used in saga
texts especially, known as roscadathat contain pas-
sages in rhyming prose with obscure vocabulary and
strings of alliterative nouns or adjectives and nouns.
Evidence of rhetorical practice in the epistolary style
in Irish does not survive before the twelfth century.
The earliest example is a letter written to Áed mac
Crimthaind in about 1150 by Finn mac Gormáin,
bishop of Kildare (d. 1160), which has the usual parts
of a rhetorical epistle: the salutatiogreeting him, the
captatio benevolentiae praising him for his learning as
“chief historian of Leinster in wisdom and knowl-
edge.” The petitio(request) asks that the tale Cath
Maige being dictated to his scribe by Finn be com-
pleted by Áed, who apparently had access to a better
or fuller copy, a quatrain in praise of Áed, and a request
that a copy of the duanaire (poem book) of Mac
Lonáin be sent him. It concludes with a pious subsal-
utation. This is rhetoric in the Latin mode, very effec-
tively transposed into Irish idiom.
A. BREENRENAISSANCE