Book of Ballycummin Facsimile Edition

The Book of Ballycummin is a late sixteenth-century Gaelic Irish miscellany—an anthology assembled for use rather than display, and shaped by the practical rhythms of a learned household. Written around 1575 in north County Roscommon, it belongs to the scholarly world of Seán Ó Maoil Chonaire, where copying was both an intellectual discipline and a means of cultural continuity.

The manuscript preserves not only texts, but the social texture of their transmission: a small community of scribes, reading and writing in proximity, building a book meant to be handled, consulted, and kept close.

A Connacht Workshop of Hands and Voices

The codex is the product of collaboration. Several scribes participate, with Aodh emerging as the principal copyist and—by the way other hands address the volume—the effective owner.

Other named contributors add their work alongside his, and later interventions suggest that the manuscript continued to evolve after its initial compilation. What results is not a single-author statement but a layered record of scholarly practice: copying, correcting, supplementing, and occasionally reshaping the book’s internal sequence.

A Hybrid Body: Vellum and Paper

Physically, the manuscript is distinctive for its composite structure: a small quarto volume combining vellum and paper. Fourteen vellum leaves precede a substantial paper section, later paginated to around 160 pages with blanks interleaved. The materials suggest both continuity and adaptation—vellum carrying the prestige of older manuscript culture, paper reflecting early modern availability and changing economics.

The book’s later history is equally tangible: repeated unbinding and rebinding introduced misplacements and discontinuities, leaving modern readers to encounter it as a textually rich object with a complicated physical memory.

Ruling, Layout, and the Discipline of the Page

Across both supports the pages are ruled by dry-point, and the layout is generally single-column, with a brief double-column sequence early in the modern pagination. This quiet infrastructure signals a controlled approach to legibility and order.

Even where the book now shows gaps, missing leaves, or fragmentary endings, the underlying planning remains perceptible: the manuscript was designed to carry long stretches of text with consistency and to make a diverse compilation readable.

Initials, Ornament, and Unfinished Intentions

Decoration is restrained but meaningful. Enlarged display initials typically rise two to four lines, occasionally higher, marking textual thresholds in the Irish tradition. Ornamental capitals appear, and small traces of the production process survive in the margins—guide letters left for a decorator, and even a trial flourish that implies planned embellishment. These are telling signs: the manuscript gestures toward decoration as a finishing language, even when the labour of completion remained partial or was deferred.

A Library in Miniature

The book’s contents form a compact archive of Gaelic learning, moving with ease between ethical instruction, devotional writing, and heroic narrative.

Foundational wisdom texts anchor the compilation—Tecosca Cormaic and Audacht Morainn set out ideals of judgement, kingship, and conduct—while older gnomic collections such as Bríathra Flainn Fhína and Senbríathra Fíthail condense inherited authority into memorable, portable sentences.

Narrative tradition is present not as ornament but as cultural infrastructure: the inclusion of Tochmarc Emire carries the prestige of Ulster Cycle storytelling, while a fragment of the Triads of Ireland gestures toward the encyclopedic habits of early Irish learned culture.

Alongside these, religious and pastoral materials—such as Cáin Domnaig and hymnic pieces like A Muire min maithingen—show the manuscript’s devotional pulse, reminding us that moral learning and prayer were often copied side by side.

Even the shorter items fitted into residual spaces behave like deliberate additions: brief maxims, rules, and notes that expand the book’s usefulness, turning blank margins into extra memory and making this miscellany feel less like a heap of texts than a working library, arranged for recall, teaching, and return.