LEIGHEAS Manuscript of the Month: November 2024

Dublin, Royal Irish Academy MS C iv 2 (466)

Deborah Hayden

View the manuscript online

Fig. 1: Dublin, Royal Irish Academy MS C iv 2, fol. 19v (16th century): cures, charms and a passage on the signs of death

This vellum codex of 44 folios, written in the sixteenth century, comprises four quires that are bound together in no particular order. Three dates are recorded in various places in the manuscript: 1531 (fol. 1r); 1572 (fol. 8r) and 1535 (fol. 16r). The manuscript is the work of several scribes, including ‘Niall O Cuinn’ (fols 13r, 14r and 16r) and ‘Brian Mac Maol Tuile’ (fol. 8v). The Ó (or Mac) Maoil Tuile (‘Tully’ or ‘Flood’) family was a prominent medical kindred in Connacht, and it is possible that the reference to ‘An Cargin’ on fol. 14r refers to the parish of An Carraigín in Co. Galway.

The manuscript contains a variety of texts, several of which are concerned with prognostication. Following a page containing remedies and short passages on the properties of herbs there is a series of five poems, attributed to spirits of the dead, that relate to the 1545–1548 revolt of An Calbhach O’Donnell against his father Mánus (d. 1563), lord of Tír Chonaill (Simms 2015). This is followed by calendrical material, including prognostications from thunder (Herbert 1972); precepts relating to the months of the year; prognosis of disease according to the day of the month on which it begins; and notes on the signs of the Zodiac. Folios 17–19 contain cures and charms for various afflictions (on some of which, see Hayden forthcoming), followed by a passage on the signs of death. The last two quires contain an incomplete copy of a materia medica.

Some of the texts in this manuscript have been transcribed in Dublin, Royal Irish Academy MS 23 N 29 (467), a collection of fragmentary medical treatises dated to between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

Further reading:

  • Hayden, Deborah (forthcoming), ‘Premodern Irish Rituals for Conception and Childbirth in their Insular Context’, in Medicine in the Medieval North Atlantic World. Vernacular Texts and Traditions, ed. by Deborah Hayden and Sarah Baccianti, Knowledge, Scholarship, and Science in the Middle Ages Series (Turnhout: Brepols)
  • Herbert, Máire, ‘Some Irish Prognostications’, Éigse 14.4 (1972), 303–18
  • Simms, Katharine (2015), ‘O’Friel’s Ghost’, in Sacred Histories. A Festschrift for Máire Herbert, ed. by John Carey, Kevin Murray and Caitriona Ó Dochartaigh (Dublin: Four Courts Press), pp. 401–8

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