Classical Antiquity in Medieval Ireland: The Antiquity Sagas and Related Literature

The aim of this interdisciplinary conference is to showcase and make accessible a large body of medieval Irish texts, written in the Middle Irish vernacular in prose and poetry, which recreate and transform in Celtic guise the myths, legends, and intellectual culture of ancient Greece and Rome. These texts, dating from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries, are important because they demonstrate Ireland’s indigenous and pre-colonial expertise in classical learning. The ultimate goal is to produce a groundbreaking open access anthology of short extracts from relevant texts, along with discursive essays, based on the conference presentations in order to create a new framework for considering medieval Ireland within the network of other North Atlantic countries.