ABSTRACT
It has been claimed that the body of medieval Irish genealogies is the largest of its kind for any country in Europe-“unique…in its chronological extent and its astonishing detail.” The collections preserved in two manuscripts, Bodleian MS Rawlinson B 502 and the Book of Leinster (from the earlier and later twelfth century respectively), contain the names of some 12,000 persons (mainly men, and from the upper echelons of society), many of whom were historical figures living between the sixth and twelfth centuries. They share over 3,300 personal names and belong to numerous tribes, dynasties or family-groups. (By the early tenth century some had begun to bear surnames.) There is mention of thousands of further individuals in several surviving genealogical collections from the post-Norman period-the greatest of all, Dubhaltach Mac Fhir Bhisigh’s midseventeenth-century Book of Genealogies, lists about 30,500 individuals sharing more than 6,600 personal names.
