Geoffrey Keating

Keating, Geoffrey (Seathrún Céitinn) (c.1580-c.1644), Irish historian and poet of Anglo-Norman extraction, born in Burges (Buiríos) near Cahir, in Co. Tipperary. He was ordained in Ireland before leaving in 1603 for education at Bordeaux and Reims. In France he collected the material for Eochair-sciath an Aifrinn, a prose work in defence of the Mass written in 1610-13. On returning to Ireland he occupied a parish at Tubrid in his native part of Co. Tipperary. According to tradition, he was driven into hiding in 1618 or 1619, and is said to have planned Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, the foremost work of Gaelic historiography, while living in a cave in the Galtee Mountains. In the 1620s he exhaustively examined all the historical manuscripts and materials he could find. The entire work seems to have been complete in 1634. Although Foras Feasa ar Éirinn is often seen as a synthetic compilation of Gaelic historiography and the final statement of a doomed people, Keating himself conceived it as a grounding for an emergent composite Catholic nation of Ireland. Trí Biorghaoithe an Bháis (Three Shafts of Death) is a typical 17th-cent. tract reflecting the post-Tridentine obsession with death. He also wrote Saltair Mhuire, a brief treatise on the rosary, which exemplifies the Marian emphasis of Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Keating was a considerable poet. ‘Óm sceól ar ardmhagh Fáil’ combines personal anguish and historical trauma. ‘A bhean lán de stuaim’ is a love-poem renouncing the flesh with irony and regret.

English rendering of Séathrún Céitinn (c.1580–c.1645/1650), Irish historian, poet, and priest whose celebrated history of Ireland is often cited. Born in Tipperary of Norman stock, Keating was educated at a local bardic school, Bordeaux, and Salamanca before returning to Ireland as a doctor of theology and parish priest. According to legend, his sermons so enraged sinful parishioners that Keating was obliged to live in a cave in the Glen of Aherlow, Co. Limerick. His multi-volume history, whose Irish title is Foras Feasa ar Éirinn [lit. A Sound Basis for Knowledge of Ireland], was compiled between 1620 and 1633; some commentators assert that the principal labour on it was between 1629 and 1631. In contrast to the Annals of the Four Masters, a bare recitation of dates and facts compiled about the same time, Keating's history is written in a continuous narrative and includes colourful and dramatic vignettes. Written in Modern Irish when that language was still spoken by privileged and learned classes, Keating's history is an admired model of Irish prose style. To a degree the history is polemical, being a partial response to such denigrators of Ireland as Edmund Spenser (c.1552–99) and Giraldus Cambrensis (c.1146–1223). Keating is sometimes compared to the Greek historian Herodotus (5th cent. BC) because he comes at the beginning of Irish modern historiography, and also because his record includes events we judge mythological and legendary as well as the certainly historical. His was the last important European book of history to be circulated in manuscript rather than having been published. The text has been translated into English several times, the first in 1723. The modern edition was published in four non-sequential volumes of the Irish Texts Society, 4, 8, 9, and 15; David Comyn edited the first (London, 1902), and Patrick S. Dinneen edited the remaining three (London, 1908, 1914); reprinted, with an introduction by Breandán Ó Buachalla (London, 1987). Keating also wrote poetry and spiritual texts.