How many Westmeath people know that more than four and a half centuries ago, the English Queen, Elizabeth 1 was presented by a Westmeath man with a beginners guide to the Irish language?
Famous Irish leaders like Shane O’Neill and Grace O’Malley were among those who went to see Elizabeth 1, who was a keen student of languages, it seems, but did not have Irish.
Christopher Nugent of the anglo-Irish Delvin family, and who had been educated at Oxford University, learned of the Queen’s interest, and it is claimed, he presented her with a small Irish language ‘primer’ which he had written while in the university. His gesture resulted in him being made a baron, it is suggested.
Nugent’s small book is still regarded as a landmark in the history of the Irish language — it represents the earliest surviving documented attempt to explain aspects of Irish grammar to non-Irish speaking people.
Denis Casey has now written the first in-depth study of this oldest surviving ‘beginner’s guide’ to the Irish language, and the small paperback is due to be published by Four Courts Press on 19 August, and should be of local interest in Westmeath.
Although of limited practical use for learning Irish, the primer was nonetheless a landmark in the history of the Irish language and Anglo-Irish cultural relations, which has remained largely unexplored until now. This study locates the primer within a variety of contexts, including Christopher Nugent’s Anglo-Irish background, the medieval Irish grammatical tradition, Renaissance second-language teaching, and English attitudes to Irish culture in the sixteenth century. It also offers the first-ever detailed analysis of the contents of the primer and highlights its possible indebtedness to a pre-print version of the Aibidil Gaoidheilge & Caiticiosma (1571) of Nugent’s Cambridge contemporary, Seán Ó Cearnaigh. The links between the writings of Nugent (an Anglo-Irish Catholic) and Ó Cearnaigh (a Gaelic-Irish Protestant) highlight the religious and cultural complexity of the time and help make the primer a compelling object of study.
Denis Casey is a graduate of University College Dublin and the University of Cambridge. He has taught medieval and early modern history, literature and manuscript studies at the universities of Maynooth, Helsinki, Cambridge and UCD.
