ABSTRACT
The title given to the chief historical work of a small team of scribes and historians under the leadership of the Franciscan friar Mícheál (Tadhg) Ó Cléirigh, these annals were compiled in two stages between 1632 and 1636 in the “place of refuge” of the Donegal Franciscan community at Bundrowse on the Donegal/Leitrim border. Known to its compilers and patron as Annála Ríoghachta Éireann (The Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland), its more popular (if inaccurate) title The Annals of the Four Masters first appears in 1645 in the introduction to the Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae (Deeds of the Saints of Ireland) of the Franciscan hagiologist John Colgan, who adapted the phrase from a thirteenth-century commentary on the Franciscan rule. The Annals form part of the remarkable historical, doctrinal, catechetical, and hagiographical publishing program undertaken by the exiled Irish Franciscan community in Louvain (Belgium) in the first half of the seventeenth century. From their arrival in Louvain in 1607, the friars labored to produce Irish language material for their missionary work in Ireland and Scotland and for circulation among exiled Irish Catholics on the continent. In 1614, they acquired their own printing press and in 1617 moved to their permanent site at St. Anthony’s College. Important publications included Bonaventure (Giolla Brighde) Ó hEoghasa’s An Teagasg Críosdaidhe (Antwerp 1611, Louvain 1614), the first catechism to be printed in Irish; Flaithrí Ó Maoilchonaire’s translation of a Catalan devotional text Desiderius (1616); and Aodh Mac Aingil’s Sgáthán Shacramuinte na hAithridhe (Mirror of the Sacrament of Penance, 1618).
