ABSTRACT
It is equally impossible to write a history of early medieval Ireland - but for the opposite reason. There is too much material available to the historian of the perioo, and the difficulty is to decide which sources are to be used and which are to be passed over. Ideally, of course, everything should be pressed into service, and that is what historians usually pretend to do. But the bewildering array of documentaty and material evidence for the history of Ireland from the fifth century down to the close of the twelfth is almost too much for anyone scholar to draw together, at least in a fonn that would be both coherent and digestible. That is not to say that the attempt should not be made. 1he historical research which has been carried out in the twenty years since the last specialist studies appeared have led to a thorough reappraisal of the period and a wholesale revision of earlier views in such fields as Irish law, the church, the economy, the structure of society, Irish culture, and the beginnings of the Irish language and its literature. But it would be misleading to exaggerate the amount of work that has been done. Although an American scholar of early Irish history, Professor John V. Kelleher, remarked thirty years ago that 'there is work for all, more than enough for every recruit we can enlist, and for the most part it can be work of sound originality',2 the fact is that the numbers of Irish university students progressing to advanced research in the field have been strikingly few, and the numbers abroad fewer still. Early Irish history is not for the faint-hearted, and it is not always easy to explain to students what relevance a study of the period could have to our world in the 1990s, but that said, it is still a rueful fact that Ireland in the early middle ages remains a closed book to all but a few.
