#Black book records professional#

Bardic, medical and legal schools sprang up to cater for the new scholarly classes, which were marked by a strong sense of professional cohesiveness and united by their cultivation of Gaelic literacy. While literary activity up to this point had been closely associated with the monasteries, which had also functioned as centres of artistic patronage with strong lay connections, Church reforms and the introduction of the Continental monastic orders in the Norman period led to a split between ecclesiastical and literary culture, and a system of laicised learned families sprang up, under the secular patronage of kings and lords rather than abbots and bishops. Literature collected in these MSS belongs to the Old and Middle Gaelic (or Irish) period.

No such Gaelic writings have survived directly from the heyday of the great illuminated Gospel Books of the pre-Viking era but copies of all these categories of native literature can be found in MSS belonging to a later phase of creative, editorial and antiquarian activity in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. There are strong indications that poetry and tales, laws and genealogies and other forms of Gaelic literature began to be written down at around those times, probably in a monastic context. The earliest surviving Gaelic writings are found in glosses and commentaries on Latin biblical and exegetical texts from the seventh and eighth century AD. It is appropriate to add a word here about Gaelic manuscripts in general. Although Christopher does not sign his name in the Black Book his handwriting is distinctive, and was positively identified by John Bannerman some years ago. Christopher may have been employed as a tutor, or similar, in a family of the Antrim branch of the Clan Donald. The Black Book was compiled by several hands, most importantly by Christopher Beaton, a member of another famous Gaelic learned family - one that had provided medical services to the Macleans and several other Gaelic ruling families, but which also included a number of members who joined other professions, including the Church and literature. His hand is recognisable from a number of MSS he wrote, and his signature is visible on p. More specifically, the Red Book was compiled by Niall MacMhuirich, a member of the learned family that had provided generations of poets and chroniclers to the Clan Donald and Clanranald chiefs, and resided in South Uist. Neither manuscript is physically imposing, but both contain matter of unique interest and importance to Gaelic literature and to Clan Donald.

They were written in the Gaelic script and used a conservative form of the Gaelic language, a literary dialect which we call 'Classical Gaelic', and which was used as a lingua franca by the literati - and to a certain extent by their patrons - at a time when the vernacular Gaelic dialects of Ireland and Scotland were becoming ever more divergent. If we start by asking simply what the Red Book and the Black Book are, they are paper manuscripts written at the beginning of the eighteenth century by members of the aristocracy of Gaelic letters - the professional literati who served as poets and historians to the old Highland nobility. Although the Red Book and the Black Book were written long after the disappearance of the Lordship, they are part of a literary tradition that began centuries earlier, and they contain material which was certainly composed and put into written form well within the period of the Lordship. Munro, and partly of the literary productions of their learned poets and historians, a small but significant portion of which have survived in manuscript form.

This written record consists partly of the charters and acts of the Lords of the Isles, which have been well edited and annotated by Jean and R. Without the testimony of the written word it would be hard to demonstrate the self-confident, widely connected, well-ordered culture which is tantalisingly hinted at by the architectural remains and monumental sculpture. Given the deliberate and systematic destruction, in the troubled years following the forfeiture of the Lordship in 1493, of much of the physical heritage of the Lordship of the Isles, and the dismemberment of the territory which had previously been ruled and administered by the Lords of the Isles, their cultural legacy, a tradition of literacy and written literature, becomes especially important to the modern student. Clan Donald Society Conference: The Legacy of the Lords of the Isles The Red Book and Black Book of Clanranald

Black book records