(In)felix Paupertas : Scholarship of the Eighteenth-Century Irish Poor

Abstract

Questions as to the meaning and "ownership" of classics continue to drive vehement debate. What did the classics mean to a despised and suspect group of threadbare teachers and students in eighteenth-century Ireland? These distant contestations are interesting in themselves and illuminate our own. Following a description of the contemporary intellectual and political ferment, I show how traditional Irish bards purveyed their classical learning in the harsh new environment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some evolved into "hedge schoolmasters." In a world that no longer valued Irish language and culture, they deployed classical learning to articulate and assert Irish identity.