Publisher's Synopsis
An excerpt from the beginning of the book:
1. The difficulty of dating Latin MSS. written by Irish scribes is well known. In this monograph an attempt will be made to fix the date of some of the earlier specimens of Irish minuscule and to make their peculiarities, especially their abbreviation symbols, available as a clue for dating other Irish MSS. Two specimens of majuscule script may be considered first.
2. The Bangor Antiphonary (680 - 691), edited, with photo- graphic facsimile, in 1893 for the Henry Bradshaw Society by Rev. F. E. Warren, is, in the words of its editor, " the earliest Irish MS. to which an almost exact date can be assigned with certainty." It was written by two scribes at Bangor, or Benchuir, in the North of Ireland, during the abbacy of Cronan (680 - 691). The evidence for the date is this. A hymn, written on the last page by the scribe who has written the second part of the MS., enumerates the Abbots of Bangor. When Cronan, the fifteenth Abbot, comes to be mentioned, the Perfect Tense is changed to the Present (nunc sedet) and a prayer is added (with a characteristically Irish parade of Greek scholarship in the first word): zoen ut carpat, conservet eum Dominus (see Mr. Warren's preface, p.x.).
