Hayden, Deborah
(2011)
Poetic Law and the Medieval Irish
Linguist: Contextualizing the Vices
and Virtues of Verse Composition in
Auraicept na nÉces.
Language and History, 54 (1).
pp. 1-34.
ISSN 1759-7536
Abstract
Doctrine concerning the faults and correctives of poetic composition in
the medieval Irish grammatical treatise Auraicept na nÉces, ‘The Scholars’
Primer’, illuminates not only our understanding of the Auraicept’s complex
textual transmission, but also aspects of the relationship between linguistic
and legal learning in early Ireland. This contribution examines parallels
between the Auraicept’s stylistic teaching and similar material found in
other texts from the medieval Irish literary canon, and considers the significance
of this doctrine in relation to the literary portrayal of satire as a
potential regulatory force in society. Against this background, it compares
the arrangement of material pertaining to stylistic devices in two distinct
manuscript copies of the Auraicept that have previously been identified as
belonging to separate recensions. It is argued that such a preliminary investigation
may serve as a useful diagnostic to highlight some of the issues
involved in a larger-scale study of the Auraicept’s textual transmission.
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