Ireland, like Scandinavia, was one of the few regions of Western Europe which never came under the official control of the Roman Empire, or even saw a Roman legion. Latin was not established in Ireland until after the island’s conversion to Christianity and the establishment of monasteries, a process which began in the fifth century AD. Yet Ireland has long been famed as a bastion, indeed a wellspring, of Classical learning in the early and central Middle Ages. According to one still-popular view, a significant number of Classical texts and authorities owe their survival today to Irish scholars doggedly pursuing their calling amid the social and political turmoil of the Dark Ages, untroubled by the heathen content of the stories they preserved. Like the Scottish ‘invention of the modern world’ a millennium later, this story of how the Irish ‘saved civilization’ is too simple and too chauvinistic. It leaves out all the Frankish, Italian, German and other scholars who performed no less important and no less enlightened roles in the transmission of Classical literature and learning during the same period. Furthermore, the identification and significance of so-called ‘Insular’ symptoms in manuscript copies – scribal features pointing to an Irish or British stage of transmission – has become a matter of controversy once again, because features described as ‘Insular symptoms’ can often be explained as traces of much earlier stages of transmission on the Continent. Irish scholars were not working alone.

Nevertheless, Ireland’s status as an ‘island of scholars’ is not solely the creation of modern mythmakers. This same image haunted Anglo-Saxon and Frankish scholars of the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, and claims on behalf of English learning had to be pitted against Ireland’s acknowledged eminence in this regard. The understanding of the Bible and the Church Fathers, rather than of the Greek and Latin classics, was the primary focus and goal of all this scholarship; but it included secular learning as well, in the tradition of Classical rhetoric and grammatica, to judge from allusions made by Aldhelm of Malmesbury in the seventh century (among others). As Michael Herren has shown in his survey of early medieval Irish Classical learning, Ireland was far from being a cultural backwater in the pre-Carolingian period. Its scholars had access to as wide a range of Latin commentaries, grammars, treatises and encyclopaedias as anywhere in Europe.