James Joyce

In the ‘Proteus’ episode of Ulysses, Joyce described the experience of reading in Marsh’s Library. The 'furious dean', Jonathan Swift (an early trustee of Marsh's) stalks his cathedral close, fleeing the crowd into madness, and is identified with the horse-like Houyhnhmn from Gulliver's Travels:

"Come out of them, Stephen. Beauty is not there. Nor in the stagnant bay of Marsh's library where you read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas. For whom? The hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close. A hater of his kind ran from them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the moon, his eyeballs stars. Houyhnhnm, horsenostrilled."
(U, 40)

Joyce’s last published work is famously difficult to decipher, and the passage that refers to Marsh’s Library is no exception:

"Only snuffers’ cornets drifts my way that the cracka dvine chucks out of his cassock, with her estheryear’s marsh narcissus to make him recant his vanitty fair. Foul strips of his chinook's bible I do be reading, dodwell disgustered but chickled with chuckles at the tittles is drawn on the tattlepage"
FW, 212.30-4

As with Ulysses, this passage links Marsh (‘marsh narcissus’) to Dean Swift. It seems to play on Swift’s infamous pen-picture which suggested that Archbishop Marsh had severe hygiene problems. The reference to ‘dodwell’ may be Henry Dodwell (d. 1711), with whom both Dean Swift and Archbishop Marsh corresponded. 

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) is considered the major Italian poet of the Middle Ages, and has been called the father of the Italian language. Joyce would have been very familiar with his works.

This volume was printed in Venice in 1520. It contains Commedia, which recounts the poet’s fictional journey though the three realms of the afterlife: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. The full-page woodcut shows Dante lost in the dark wood, his encounter with the three wild beasts, and his first meeting with his guide, the ancient Roman poet Virgil. 

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) was the illegitimate son of a Tuscan merchant. His most popular and influential work, the Decameron, is regarded as the foundation of Italian prose in the vernacular. The work contains 100 short stories told by seven women and three men as they wait for a plague ravaging Florence in 1348 to pass. The image displayed represents the storytellers returning to Florence, which can be seen in the background. 

Francesco Petrarch (1304–74) was an Italian scholar and poet, who was perhaps most famous for his body of 366 poems, the Canzoniere. The majority of these poems were sonnets, and the Petrarchan sonnet became the model for lyrical poetry in the Renaissance. Most of Petrarch’s love poetry was dedicated to a woman known as ‘Laura’.

This volume is an edition of Petrarch’s poems produced with a commentary by Alessandro Vellutello. One of these images is a map of the French city of Avignon and its environs. Marsh’s Library holds a number of works by Petrarch printed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This was originally written by St Bonaventure (d. 1274), a philosopher and theologian who joined the Franciscan order in 1243, and held the Franciscan chair at the University of Paris. He was Minister General of the Order from 1257 until his death, and became Cardinal Bishop of Albano in 1273. This was the standard life of St Francis between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Fortunatus Hueber (d. 1706) was a Franciscan historian and theologian from Bavaria. He was the official historian of the Order in Germany and his major work, the Menologium Franciscanum, was a collection of lives of the beatified and saints of the Franciscan order. This was the official history of the Franciscan Order from its very foundation.

Willem Spoelberch (1569–1633) was a Belgian Franciscan. His edition of the life of St Francis was extremely popular from its first publication in 1620. In English, the title is The Mirror of the Lives of St Francis and His Companions, and the text is significant because it contains the first reference to a letter, supposedly by Francis’s vicar, Elias of Cortona (c. 1180–1253), which attests to the presence of the stigmata on Francis’ body very shortly after his death.

This set of prophecies was not written by Joachim himself, but was produced in the late thirteenth century within the Joachimite tradition. It has generally been accepted by scholars as the book referenced in Ulysses. The text consists of a series of prophecies concerning the successions of the Popes from Nicholas III onwards.

This 1589 Venice edition gives the text of the 30 prophecies in Latin and Italian, with an accompanying commentary and an engraving for each. This work was held in deep suspicion by the Catholic Church, and was cited by a host of banned authors, such as the millennialist Calvinist, Pierre Jurieu. 

This is another edition of the prophecies attributed to Joachim.

Like Vaticinia, the second section of this volume consists of two separate series of medieval prophecies about the Papacy. Pictured here is the first prophecy, which refers to Giovanni Orsini, who was elected Nicolas III in 1277. He is enthroned, with two small bears at his feet representing the ferocious bears of 2 Kings 2:24, and the little bears (orsatti) of his family, whom he appeases with gold coins.

This is an early-sixteenth-century edition of the historical writings of Joachim. It contains details of his scriptural interpretation of the Book of Revelation and his expositions on the nature of the Apocalypse. The first image depicts the great beast of the Apocalypse.

Mícheál Ó Cléirigh (c. 1590–c. 1643) was professed as a Franciscan lay brother in the Irish College of St Anthony at Louvain, where he helped to collect material on the lives of Irish saints which led to the publication of John Colgan’s Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae (1645). To this end, he returned to Ireland to collect manuscripts and conduct further research.

While he was based in the Franciscan friary at Bundrowes, Co. Donegal, he gathered material for the historical work that became known as the Annals of the Four Masters. In 1637 Ó Cléirigh returned to Louvain, where he prepared his Irish lexicon, Foclóir nó Sanasán Nua (Louvain, 1643). 

Geoffrey Keating (1569–1644) studied at the Irish College in Bordeaux. He returned to Ireland in 1610 and was based in the area around Cahir. His most famous work, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn was completed c.1634.

Keating was not a Franciscan, but his work had a huge effect on generations of historians who wrote about Ireland. Joyce was familiar with Keating, who was a standard author in Irish secondary schools by the time he attended Belvedere. 

John Colgan (1592–c.1657) studied at the Irish Franciscan College in Louvain, where he was a professor of theology, and devoted himself to Irish studies. Between 1656 and 1657, he published six volumes of a work on Irish ecclesiastical history and antiquities. This was an important milestone in the veneration of the three most prominent Irish saints: Patrick, Brigid and Colum Cille. 

Patrick Fleming (1599–1631), studied at Douai and Louvain. He was ordained a priest in Rome, and appointed the first Guardian of the Franciscan College in Prague. He wrote a life of St Columbanus while in Louvain, but it was not published until 1667. Among Fleming’s other works were a chronicle of St Peter’s Monastery at Ratisbon, and a life of Hugh MacCaughwell, Primate of Armagh.

Hugh MacCaughwell (1571–1626) was educated in Co. Down and the Isle of Man. He became tutor to the Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and acted as messenger to the Court of Spain during the Nine Years’ War. He gained a doctorate in divinity at Salamanca, and entered the Franciscan Order. He taught initially at Salamanca but subsequently moved to St Anthony’s College in Louvain. In 1626 MacCaughwell was nominated Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland. His Latin works on Duns Scotus were highly regarded. He also penned one book in Irish, Scáthán shacramuinte na haithridhe (‘The Mirror of the Sacrament of Penance’), printed in 1618, at the Irish press in St Anthony’s, Louvain.

John Punch (1603–70), entered the novitiate of the Irish Franciscans in Louvain, and subsequently studied at Cologne, Louvain, and Rome. He assisted Luke Wadding in editing the works of Scotus, and subsequently lectured at Lyons and Paris.  His 1661 commentary on the theology of Duns Scotus is depicted here.

Wadding’s definitive edition of the history of the Franciscan order includes information about Joachim of Fiore. The item depicted is the first volume in the set.

This was an important text as it reproduced documents which recorded the rights, privileges and benefices given to the Franciscan order from its earliest days. It also attempted to defend and rehabilitate Elias of Cortona (c. 1180–1253), the man who succeeded Francis as Minister General and moved the Order decisively away from the founder’s concept of radical poverty towards being a powerful organization which owned and maintained property. Elias was something of a bugbear for those within the Franciscan Spiritual tradition.

In 1614 the Franciscan college at Louvain established a printing press with a typeface in Irish; the item depicted here was printed on that press soon after. It is the only known surviving copy of Suim riaghlachas Phrionsias, a short summary of the Franciscan rule which governed the Order. It is one of a series of Louvain catechisms and devotional texts written in plain style accompanied by simple verse aimed at home and exile communities.

The distinctive typography developed at Louvain would have been familiar to Joyce from his period learning the Irish language under the tutelage of Patrick Pearse.