EAA2021: Abstract

The presence of castles in Ireland before its incorporation into the Angevin Empire has been a matter of some debate due to the use of several Latin loanwords in Old and Middle Irish relating to enclosed settlements. This paper will apply a transdisciplinary approach, using philological, textual, toponymic, archaeological and architectural evidence together to make a contribution to this debate. The paper will open by treating the use of loanwords in Irish sources in their palaeographical, codicological, and political context. It will also explore the epistemological and ontological systems, and the general intellectual and intertextual context of these texts and their authors. This will shed important light on the motivations of the scribes using these words, seeing as no act of textual production is passive, helping to unpack and unpick their use of terminology. Rather than focus solely on twelfth-century Ireland, the paper will outline the sum evidence for castle-building in areas where Middle Irish/Gaelic was a spoken language, either as the principal language or spoken along with Old Norse, Middle Scots or Middle English, proposing several distinct forms of region-specific castle, which will then be used to explore the examples in Ireland, and how these forms may have influenced the emergence of more widespread castle use outside of core areas of the English colony in Ireland in the later medieval period. This will provide an important corrective to the standard narrative of transculturation in high and late medieval Ireland, by bringing a much wider set of potential interaction and cultural reference into the analysis, and its results will be applicable to encastellation in areas occupied by other speech communities.

castles, medieval Ireland, Kingdom of the Isles, medieval Scotland, intertextuality, textual archaeology

 Abstract (PDF)

Russell Ó Ríagáin¹