Irish Migrations and Classical Antiquity

This open-access volume explores the reception of Graeco-Romano culture from Ireland’s earliest medieval scholars such as Columbanus and John Scottus Eriugena to later writers including James Joyce, Seamus Heaney and Colm Tóibín. Migrations and classical antiquity have played a key interconnected role for successive centuries in the experiences of the Irish diaspora, in the articulations of those experiences, as well as in the influences of Irish classicism abroad. Throughout subsequent centuries ancient Greece and Rome were repeatedly evoked in literature, art, and historiographies associated with migrations as vehicles for the expression of varied political and cultural positions. The chapters in this collection explore how the early Irish peregrini left their mark on continental scholarship; how the model of ancient Rome was coopted for political purposes; the ways in which Protestant writers adopted the notion of ancient Romanitas as a key to the British imperial project; and, finally, how the Catholics perceived ancient Rome as being subsumed into the universalism of the Roman Catholic Church. As such, this collection, the first of its kind, seeks to create a holistic overview of the distinctive cultural classical in Irish culture throughout the ages. What we learn is how deep articulations of migration through classical media have penetrated Ireland’s diasporic culture. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council. https://bibliores.bloomsbury.com/getimage.aspx?bibliologin=1&s=50143b60-832b-4234-8b33-e73eaec8b4bb&cat=default&class=books&type=jpg&mode=&size=original&id=809450 Ireland has an estimated diaspora of approximately 70 million people, ten times the actual population of the island, with a history of migration dating back to the medieval period. Why should we consider classical antiquity an important factor for understanding the intersection of migration and various Irish identities? This book proposes that ancient Greece and Rome lie at the root of a variety of Irish migration narratives and experiences, from our earliest written records until the twenty-first century, representing four central, and often interconnected, causes of migration: warfare; economics; education; religious grounds. Graeco-Roman models surface as expressions of participation and resistance, namely through an impetus to participate on the international stage and a vigorous resistance to exclusion. Participation manifests in knowledge transfer; in synchronistic narratives of Irish migratory origins; in defences of Irish civilization against claims of ‘barbarism’; in European debates on migratory and colonial policy; in cultural artistic exchange; in Irish-language translation; and in a networked literary diaspora. Resistance appears in rejection of disenfranchisement; in articulating the loss of dispossession and predicting restoration; in satirizing Anglo-Irish politics; in disrupting aesthetic expectations; in addressing the discrimination of exclusion as sectarian, xenophobic or gendered; in asserting the vigour of a minority language; in mining the power of pastoral; and in promoting hybridity and diversity over canonicity and hierarchy. The research presented in this book has been generously supported by the European Research Council (grant no. 818366).