Late Medieval Irish Law Manuscripts

Late Medieval Irish Law Manuscripts: A Reappraisal of Methodology and Context challenges the long-held view that Irish law manuscripts produced in the secular law schools of the late medieval period are only the work of antiquarians.

This book examines the texts in their political, social and cultural contexts, particularly in relation to the Irish revival of the fourteenth century onwards. Finnane’s examination of the manuscripts includes:

• legal interpretation and the role of glossing and commenting on older ‘canonical texts’ in establishing the authority of those texts in the present
• the use of the manuscripts in legal education
• the use of the past in providing legitimacy and authority, particularly in a legal context.

Finnane argues that the manuscripts are the work of jurists authorising a revived legal system connected to a re-emergent Irish political elite, after more than a century of Anglo Norman invasion and rule.