Medieval Irish law, or the so-called ‘Brehon Law’, is the native legal system that was in operation in Ireland until the 17th century, when it was finally supplanted by the English Common Law. Scholarship in the past decades, mainly focusing on the early medieval texts, has revealed to us the amazing breadth and complexity of this legal tradition. It is not as clear, however, how the law was preserved and evolved in the later Middle Ages. We know that families of legal scholars were the primary custodians of legal knowledge after the 12th century, and they actively maintained law schools and produced legal manuscripts. But as society has changed drastically since the Norman Invasion, how did the scholars deal with the inherited customary law? Did they selectively transmit the texts, change the rules, or re-interpret them to fit the new reality?
All these questions can only be answered by analysing the late medieval legal materials. Fortunately, we have four sets of ‘digests’, produced after the 13th century, that are organised into thematic sections consisting of quotations from various earlier law tracts and later glosses and commentaries. This thematic format is an innovative approach to the inherited materials and represents a systematic review of the tradition. Moreover, the four sets share many common sections, but the order of the sections are very dissimilar. Altogether they constitute about one tenth of the extant corpus of early Irish law texts, but very little study has been done on them.
The first objective, then, is to find out what legal topics are discussed in the digests and whether they differ from the earlier law. The compilatory principle of these digests are then questioned, to see how the materials and themes are selected and organised within a digest set, and how these differ across the four sets. As the quotations and glosses form a highly complicated network, it is apt to use quantitative methods to measure and describe their relationships, such as linked data model and text reuse metrics. We will also probe the possible influences from other legal traditions such as the Canon Law and the Civil Law on the compilatory principles of the digests, and compare the making of the digests to that of O’Davoren’s Glossary, another late medieval text that quotes extensively from legal and other sources.
These objectives all aim to show how law texts were (re)produced, studied, and transmitted in medieval Ireland, and the intellectual universe of the legal scholars. At the same time, the project will provide the first fully digitised text of the digests, a linked database of all the parallel texts in the digests and in the whole corpus of early Irish law, and software for automated detection of parallel texts (text reuse) for early Irish texts. This toolkit will not only facilitate scholars of early Irish law, but also offer a long-needed solution which can quickly identify similar texts from the vast corpus of Irish materials, thus revealing intertextual relationships hidden from the human eye.
