This collected volume, including publications dating from the late 1960s to his retirement in 1997, demonstrate why John Bannerman, who died in 2008, played a key role in highlighting the significance of Scottish history's Gaelic dimension. Section 1 of this book republishes in full his 1974 collected work, Studies in the history of Dalriada, but then adds (with a few new typographical errors) another fourteen articles and chapters drawn from various sources, covering a wide time-span, from the sixth to the seventeenth centuries. Studies contains a key chapter on the Irish chronicles, ‘Notes on the Scottish entries in the early Irish annals’, and editions and a detailed analysis of textual issues, the people, places, and surveys found in Senchus fer nAlban (now often called Míniugud senchusa fher nAlban) which is still indispensable, even if other scholars, such as Donnchadh Ó Corráin and David Dumville, have since provided further important research on this difficult text.
Section 2, ‘Studies in the history of Alba’, mainly covers the period from 800 to 1300, with essays on the coarbship and relics of Columba, the supposed ninth-century Gaelic ‘takeover’ of Pictland, the MacDuff of Fife kindred style and surname, and two articles on the kings’ Gaelic poets and their roles in royal inauguration. These essays provide important discussions of Irish evidence for the headships of monastic confederations, relic cults, the emergence of surnames and the social roles and status of later medieval poets, providing a valuable Scottish comparison to Ireland.
Section 3, ‘Studies in the history of late-medieval Gaelic Scotland’, is more focussed on the late medieval and early modern Scottish Highlands and Islands, with two very useful introductory syntheses of politics, culture and society of the Lordship of the Isles, one extracted from the seminal study of inscriptions and art undertaken by Bannerman with Kenneth Steer in Late medieval monumental sculpture in the west highlands (1977). Gaelic cultural interaction with elite non-Gaelic society is stressed in both chapter nine, which proposes (perhaps over enthusiastically) that medieval Gaelic social and official terminology and concepts were incorporated into Scots-speaking society, and chapter ten, which suggests that the origins of the triangular-frame harp, the clàrsach, originated in Scotland and examines the families who performed for kings of the Scots into the sixteenth century.
Section 4, ‘Studies of Gaelic manuscripts and texts’, concentrates more on early modern evidence for the use and context of Gaelic in manuscripts, letters, legal documents and inscriptions, providing detailed analyses which highlight continuity, albeit in an increasingly difficult political and cultural context for the language. Chapter eleven which explores the provenance of the Kilbride collection of Gaelic manuscripts, examining the history of the ecclesiastical and professional branches of the MacLachlans of Kilbride in Argyll, is especially impressive.
Some ideas and assumptions in this book, such as that Scottish Dál Riata was founded by an elite migration c.500, and that the Gall-Gaedheil Gofraid mac Fergusa helped Cináed mac Alpin to conquer the Picts and was the ancestor of the Lords of the Isles, have since been rejected. Moreover, Bannerman's practice of finding early Irish parallels for Gaelic Scotland up to a millennium later and his overall conception of the ‘kin-based society’ tends towards a static and sometimes monolithic view of these societies, with his focus on continuity leading to the neglect of Scandinavian influence. On the other hand, Bannerman did stress that we should not regard Gaelic culture and language as necessarily in conflict with other languages and ideas, including the feudal world of the post-twelfth century era. Through his studies of the learned kindreds and the surviving Gaelic written evidence, Bannerman demonstrated the vitality of this literary, oral and musical tradition into the modern era, supported not just by the MacDonalds, but also by the Campbells, who used to be regarded as antipathetic towards Gaelic culture.
These studies constitute a significant achievement. On its own, the reprint of Studies in the history of Dalriada is very welcome, but when combined with the other essays, the introduction to the author and his research by Dauvit Broun and Martin MacGregor, and an index to the whole volume, this produces an affordable publication which is recommended and is of relevance to anyone interested in the history of medieval and early modern Ireland and Scotland.
