Irish Migrations and Classical Antiquity: (Classical Diaspora)

Why should classical antiquity matter to Irish migration? Irish Migrations and Classical Antiquity argues that ancient Greece and Rome have shaped Irish migration narratives from the earliest texts to the 21st century. These classical models emerge in response to four key drivers of migration: war, economic need, religious motivation and the pursuit of education. Rather than passive inheritances, Graeco-Roman forms are used both to join and to challenge dominant frameworks, offering tools for cultural participation and strategies of resistance to exclusion. The book traces classical reception in contexts ranging from early Irish origin legends and medieval Latin learning to 21st-century cultural politics, including Irish-language translation, diaspora literature and gendered experiences. Participation appears in assertions of Irish civilisation, synchronistic histories, literary cosmopolitanism and transnational exchange. Resistance surfaces in critiques of marginalisation, defence of minority languages and challenges to aesthetic or political canons. This book rethinks how Irish identities travel across borders, languages and centuries by showing how the ancient world underwrites both movement and its meanings. 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.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations List of Contributors Foreword (Mary McAleese, President of Ireland 1997-2011) 1. Irish Migrations and Classical Antiquity (Isabelle Torrance, Aarhus University, Denmark) Part One: Medieval Ireland: Historiographical Migrations and Transfers of Knowledge 2. Etymology, Graeco-Roman Mythology, and Hiberno-Latin Scholarship: Irish Migrant Scholars in the Pre-Carolingian and Carolingian Periods (Jason O’Rorke, Independent Scholar, Ireland) 3. Narratives of Migration as Origin Stories: A Comparative Study of Lebor Gabála Érenn ‘The Book of Invasions of Ireland’ and Late Antique Historiography (Pau Blanco Ríos, Cambridge University, UK) 4. Irish Identity, Stories of Migration, and Models from Graeco-Roman Antiquity (Maxim Fomin, Ulster University, UK) 5. Tracing a Macrobian Dragon from Old Irish to Old Norse (Mikael Males, University of Oslo, Norway) Part Two: Early Modern Ireland: Politics of Travel and Exile 6. 'For others Pergamum has been overthrown; for me alone it still stands': Reflections on Conquest and Migration in Neo-Latin Histories of Ireland (Feliks Levin, Centre for Irish Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark) 7. The Ius Communicandi (Right to Travel) and the Irish Franciscans in the Seventeenth Century (Ian Campbell, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland) 8. Tiocfa Séasair clann Cholla ‘The Caesar of Cholla’s race will come’: Exiles and Homecomings in Early Modern Gaelic Political Poetry (Gregory Darwin, Uppsala University, Sweden) Part Three: Eighteenth-Century Voyages, Real and Imagined 9. Classicizing the Gaelic: Visual Classicism, Migration, and Irish Manuscript Culture (Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh, University of Edinburgh, UK) 10. A Trip to the Moon by Mr. Murtagh McDermot (1727): Lucian, Swift, Migration Satire and Irish Politics (Isabelle Torrance, Aarhus University, Denmark) 11. Eachtra Ghiolla an Amaráin ‘The Voyage of the Hostage to Misfortune’: Virgil’s Aeneid and Eighteenth-Century Irish Migrations (Pádraig Ó Liatháin, Dublin City University, Ireland) Part Four: Gendered Experiences 12. John Hogan and the Male Nude in 1820s Rome (Ciarán Rua O’Neill, Aarhus University, Denmark) 13. A New Fidelity: Eavan Boland, Ovid, and Exile (Rosie Lavan, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland) Part Five: Twentieth-Century Irish Odysseys 14. An Irish Odyssey: Autofiction and Tradition in Padraig de Brún’s An Odaisé (Richard Martin, Stanford University, USA) 15. Readers on the Move: Migrant Subscribers to James Joyce’s Ulysses (Ronan Crowley, Aarhus University, Denmark) Part Six: Irish Classicism and the World Stage 16. The Global Afterlives of Joycean Classicism: Case Studies from Argentina and India (Kiron Ward, University of St. Andrew’s, UK) 17. Migration and Exile in Seamus Heaney’s Virgilian Pastoral (Rachel Falconer, University of Lausanne, Switzerland) 18. Immigration, Classical Antiquity, and Diversity: Envoi (Isabelle Torrance, Aarhus University, Denmark) Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Isabelle Torrance is Associate Professor of Classics at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark.