“may this great plague pass by me and my friends, and restore us once more to joy and gladness”
Feeling a powerful kinship with this scribe from 1350 today.
OTD (Christmas Eve), 670 years ago
[For example, a note on p. 36 gives the text a definite fourteenth-century date and a Mac Aodhagain provenance to this manuscript:
It is one thousand three hundred and fifty years tonight since Jesus Christ was born, and in the second year of the coming of the plague to Ireland was this written and I myself am full twenty one years old….and let every reader in pity recite a ‘pater’ for my soul. It is Christmas Eve tonight, and under the protection of the King of Heaven and earth I am on this Eve tonight. May the end of my life be holy and may this great plague pass by me and my friends, and restore us once more to joy and gladness. Amen. Pater Noster. Aed, Mac Concubair mac Gilla na Naem, Mic Duinnslebe Mic Aodhagain wrote this on his father’s book the year of the great plague.
The following year he wrote at the top of the same page:
It is just a year tonight since I wrote the lines on the margin below; and, if it be God’s will, may I reach the anniversary of this night many times. Amen. Pater Noster.
Translation by R.I. Best.]
Thank you for transcribing the image! I always forget to do that.
It is just a year tonight since I shared this… may we reach the anniversary of this night many times.
From MS 1316, Trinity College Dublin:
You can see Aodh Mac Aodhagáin’s notes at the top and bottom of the page.
Our God is the God of all men, the God of heaven and earth, of the sea and the rivers, God of the sun and the moon and all the stars, the God of high mountains and low valleys;
God above heaven and in heaven and below heaven, He has His dwelling in heaven and earth and sea and in everything that is in them. He breathes in all things, makes all things live, surpasses all things, supports all things; He illumines the light of the sun, He consolidates the light of the night and the stars, He has made wells in dry earth and dry islands in the sea and stars for the service of major lights.
He has a Son, coeternal with Him, similar to Him; the Son is not younger than the Father, nor is the Father older than the Son, and the Holy Spirit breathes in them; the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are not separate.
Good morning to hermits, navigators, women raised by cows, runaway swineherds, vigilante beekeepers, white cows with red ears, exiled penitents, and the Loch Ness Monster.
St. Gall Gospel, The Crucifixion. Illuminated by Irish monks around 750 AD it is now preserved in the Library of the Monastery of St. Gallen in Switzerland
