University College Dublin
The corpus of sixty seven Gaelic manuscripts which derive their nomenclature from their former storage in section A of the Franciscan Library Killiney were transferred in November 2000 to the curatorship of University College Dublin under the terms of the Order of Friars Minor-University College Dublin Partnership and are housed in the UCD Archives Department.
The primary motivation for the transfer of custody of the manuscripts was to ensure their preservation through the establishment of an extensive programme of conservation; and to enhance their availability through involvement in the ISOS project.
The transfer to UCD is the latest in a series of moves to which the collection has been subject since its inception in the great hagiographical enterprise of the Irish Franciscans at Louvain in the early seventeenth century. The initial intention to collect lives of the saints developed into a major historical and genealogical project which involved locating, collecting, and transcribing materials on the secular and ecclesiastical history of Ireland.
Brother Míchéal Ó Cléirigh, the most famous of the annalists known as the Four Masters, spent eleven years in Ireland, 1626–37, locating and copying manuscripts. MS A 13, Annála Ríoghdhachta Éireann or the Annals of the Four Masters, is the centrepiece of the collection.
The dispersal of the original and much larger collection of Irish and Latin manuscripts from Louvain began in the late eighteenth century with the French revolution. The collection was moved for safekeeping to St Isidore's College, Rome in 1792 where it remained, at times in difficult and uncertain conditions, until 1872 when apprehension that the friary would be suppressed and its property seized by the Italian government provoked a move to the Franciscan Friary at Merchants' Quay Dublin. With the establishment of the Franciscan Library at Dún Mhuire, Killiney in 1946, the collection was relocated again and all Irish manuscripts in Franciscan hands were centralised there.
The transfer of the A MSS is the second phase of a partnership process between the Order and the university which began in 1997 with the transfer of a number of significant non-Franciscan private paper collections, most notably the papers of Eamon de Valera.
