ABSTRACT
Two things mark out the Irish as different in the Early Middle Ages: their language and their script. Ireland boasts the oldest vernacular literature in western Europe, and the richness and variety of the texts in prose and poetry that have come down to us in Old Irish are without parallel in any other European language.2 Ademar of Chabannes († 1034), a French chronicler, remarked that ‘the Irish have their own language, but use Latin letters’ (propriam linguam sed latinas litteras).3 This is itself remarkable, considering that Ireland was never a part of the Roman Empire and never acquired the language and script of empire through conquest, but acknowledged the greatness of Rome (as Columbanus put it) only in terms of her apostles, not her emperors. Through Christianity, therefore, the Irish acquired their knowledge of the Bible and of Christian Latin letters and they developed a variety of the Latin script that came to be regarded by outsiders as uniquely Irish: libri Scottice scripti ‘books written in the Irish fashion’.4 The flowering of literature and learning in early Ireland is indelibly linked with the rise of Christian monastic schools, which came to prominence from the second half of the sixth century. But the Latin script used in Ireland is clearly a much older development, and the importance of manuscript books as witnesses to social and cultural developments was stressed in a classic statement by the foremost modern authority on the subject:
Scripts are like languages: to understand how they come into being and develop, one must see them against the background of current events which gave rise to them and make their development possible.5
