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Examines the present framework for rebuilding in the aftermath of climate disasters and presents a new framework for planned retreat in cities.

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Explores how an increasing frequency and intensity of drought conditions is driving water scarcity in cities and presents built environment strategies for moderating drought conditions.

Explores climate resilience strategies in the Vine City neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia.

Explores how sea level rise and flooding are amplified by the design of cities, presents built environment strategies to manage flood risk, and considers issues of climate justice.

Though Ireland was never properly a part of the Roman Empire, it was a part of the Roman frontier. The extent of exchange and interaction with Britain and the Continent justifies our consideration of Ireland in the context of Late Antiquity as early as the third century CE. Elva Johnston has noted that the fifth century has served as ‘a chronological boundary’ and, as a result, ‘early Irish historical scholarship is greatly invested in analyzing conversion, Christianization and changing religious affiliations’, rarely treating the earlier period. Johnston has challenged the tendency of Irish historians to view Ireland as isolated from the Roman world and has argued that it should be viewed in a comparative context and as a frontier of the Empire. She writes of Roman frontiers that ‘They are no longer viewed as lines on a map, as hard borders defended by large-scale fortifications … instead they are seen as zones of complex cultural, economic, and military interaction’. The influence and reception of Roman, Gallo-Roman, and Romano-British culture along Irish transmarine frontier zones is witnessed in the archaeological record and includes decoration, ornament, and, of greatest significance to the current study, literacy, ogham being the primary example.

It is clear now that Christianity and its literate culture arrived in Ireland at an early date, likely by way of Roman Britain. The Romans had arrived in what they would call the Roman province of Britannia as early as 55 or 54 BCE, as Julius Caesar reports in his Gallic Wars. However, the Roman presence would not endure until 43 CE when Roman emperor Claudius, in front of 200,000 soldiers, invaded the island from the south. The Romans would gradually take control of much of Britain over the coming decades. The Roman presence in Britain was naturally to spread to the near neighbours in Ireland.

The archaeological evidence shows that the Irish were involved in maritime trade with Romano-British and Spanish traders, and perhaps even traders from the Mediterranean world, as early as the later fourth or early fifth century CE. Burials in the Roman fashion, found scattered along the eastern coastal region, provide evidence that Romans may have resided in Ireland as early as the first or second century CE.

The Hisperica famina (‘Western Orations’) (hereafter Hisperica) are a seventh-century collection of fascinating, Latin orations that constitute a school textbook on rhetoric and composition. Similar to several other extant ‘hisperic’ texts written in a unique form of Hiberno-Latin, they invoke neologism and archaic vocabulary, draw on Greek, Hebrew, and Celtic, and employ terms in unique ways. Their influence was widespread, and a number of insular compositions are believed indebted to the hisperic style they demonstrate. For example, Máeldub likely imparted knowledge of the Hisperica to Aldhelm while he was a student at Malmesbury, and their influence is evidenced in his De virginitate, Aenigmata, and epistle to Eahfrid. Due to their gratuitous artificiality, deliberate obscurity, extreme invective, and outlandish style an argument can be made that the Hisperica are evidence of the continuation of the so-called ‘third sophistic’ that developed in the late antique and early medieval west. Or, perhaps they could be placed alongside other hisperic texts in a ‘Celtic’ or ‘Insular’ sophistic in the seventh and eighth centuries. Second Sophistic rhetoric in the Latin ‘Silver Age’ tended towards heightened, superficial style, bombast, and strange vocabulary, including graecism and archaism, and later writers are sometimes identified as part of a third sophistic. Rather than evidence of a decline in literary and rhetorical style, the rhetoric of the second and third sophistic reveal the social and cultural values of the learned classes from which it emerged, and hisperic style reveals much about the stylistic values of the early medieval Irish. Aside from the exemplary studies discussed below, hisperic Latin has in large part escaped the notice of rhetorical studies.

The A-Text of the Hisperica likely dates to the mid-seventh century and is certainly the work of an Irish milieu. As a terminus post quem, Andy Orchard suggests the writings of Isidore, indicating composition in the first half of the seventh century at the earliest, and a terminus ante quem based on the writings of Aldhelm, who appears to imitate them in his fixed patterns of syntax, indicating the late seventh century. Michael Herren also argues that the Hisperica influenced the Lorica of Laidcen (d. 661 CE), providing further evidence for a late seventh-century date. As for the text's Irish provenance, P. Grosjean was the first to note the influence of Irish on some of the faminator's coinages, and most commentators now agree the text is an Irish production.

The history of rhetorical traditions in Ireland is one that is slowly forming but that offers much promise. The scope of the vernacular and Latin learned tradition from the seventh century forward is wide-ranging, including grammars, learned handbooks, letters, liturgical texts, hagiography, lawtexts, genealogy, lore of place-name, verse, and pseudo-history. As primary scholarship advances new editions and translations, the door is opened for scholars in adjacent fields, and Ireland should no longer escape the attention of rhetorical studies. Below, I briefly review some of the texts mentioned in the preceding chapters only as a representative sample of areas ripe for rhetorical inquiry.

The writings of Columbanus offer important insight into rhetorical education in the sixth and seventh centuries not only in Ireland, but in continental centres of learning. In addition to his letters, sermons, and hymns, there remain unedited and untranslated manuscripts associated with Columbanian circles on the continent, works associated with rhetorical learning, and more that is yet to be discovered. Several hagiographic works, including the Life of Columbanus (and the writings of Adomnán generally) and the Latin and vernacular lives of Patrick, will also prove to be of value in our pursuits, as epideictic and other rhetorical genres inform their composition. The examples from early Ireland are plentiful, and such studies are wanting.

There are a number of Irish learned Christian poems that demonstrate a special interest in language, especially, ‘Versus Cuiusdam Scotti de Alphabeto’, ‘Aipgitir Chrábaid’, ‘Interpretatio mystica progenitorum Domini Iesu Christi’ of Ailerán the Wise, De Mirabiilibus sacrae scripturae, and the Carmen Paschale. Though these poems have in part been the subject of stylistic studies, much remains to be done regarding linguistic theories preserved therein, including the rhetorical.

The grammatical texts discussed also deserve further study. All of these, with the exception of the learned vernacular text, Auraicept na nÉces (‘The Scholar's Primer’) (the edition of which is incomplete) remain to be translated, though they are all now edited. The Auraicept is perhaps the most important as it is a vernacular learned handbook informed by the tradition of Latin grammatica, but rhetorical theories can also be detected. The Insular Latin grammars are all of interest, but Vergilius Maro Grammaticus's grammar proves of special interest to rhetoric, as he specifically discusses rhetorical theory.

The Libri Epistolarum Sancti Patricii Episcopi, the Book of Letters of St. Patrick the Bishop, is the name Ludwig Bieler gave to St Patrick's opuscula, including the Confessio and the Epistola ad milites Coroticus. Bieler constructed his edition from eight surviving manuscripts of various date but dates the exemplar to the fifth or sixth century, though the earliest surviving version was copied c. 800 in what is now known as Book of Armagh. This codex, including the Psalter, Gospels, the entire New Testament, the Liber Angeli, and the Lives of St Patrick and St Martin, as well as Patrick's writings, was written to be the personal devotional book of Toarbach, coarb of Patrick. In the manuscript, the Patrician texts begin: Incipiunt libri sancti Patricii episcopi (‘Here begins the book of St Patrick the bishop’). This section of the Book of Armagh is the work of two scribes, including the Armagh scriptorium's master scribe, Ferdomnach, and they represent incomplete versions of the Epistola and Confessio.

While the earliest manuscripts do not appear to have survived, the eight surviving manuscripts are believed to accurately represent the original exemplar, as the copies were not influenced by the romantic style of the early Bardic tradition in Ireland. Concerning this matter, Ludwig Bieler argues,

Bieler's thesis is widely accepted and has helped to set aside concerns that the manuscripts, copied over several centuries, are tainted by the rhetorical, stylistic, grammatical, and thematic tendencies of redactor context. The version of the Confessio in Book of Armagh, however, does leave out an important section on Patrick's childhood sin. However, considering the propagandistic ends to which the early manuscripts were put by the hagiographers Muirchú and Tírechán in order to claim superiority for the ecclesiastic community at Armagh, that the Libri Epistolarum remained mostly unchanged is remarkable.