From script to print: some evidence in manuscripts compiled in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland

An Irish primer with a translation into Irish of the catechism from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer by John Kearney, or Seaán Ó Cearnaigh (d. c. 1587), has the dual distinction of being the earliest book in the Irish language printed in Dublin in 1571 and the first printed example of an Irish typeface known as the Queen Elizabeth Irish Type. 1 The catechism’s author was apparently a native of the barony of Leyny (Luighne) in Co. Sligo who became an adherent of the Reformed Church during his student days in Cambridge. By the mid-1560s he was back in Ireland, where he began his career as a minister and subsequently held office as treasurer of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. 2 In the same year that Kearney’s work was published, a second item appeared as a broadsheet, also in Dublin and in the Queen Elizabeth Irish Type, namely a fifteenth-century religious poem in the form of strict syllabic metre known as deibhidhe. Beginning Tuar feirge foighide Dé (‘God’s patience is a portent of anger’) and ascribed to Fr Pilib Bocht Ó hUiginn OFM (d. 1487), the poem’s main theme is the absolute judgement of God which can never be reversed by intercessory prayer.3 The broadsheet itself is now in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and it arrived there as part of the books and papers of the Rev. Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury (1559-1575). It seems that John Kearney may have provided the printer with the text of the poem for the broadsheet. Given that it is a rare instance of a bardic religious poem which places clear restrictions on the intercessory power of the Virgin Mary and the
saints,4 it is not unreasonable to assume that it may have been a conscious choice for printing by Kearney himself.