The centre, founded in July 1999, is an interdisciplinary group which has as its goal the task of analysing and making available the corpus of early-modern Irish writing in Latin.  Based in the Department of Classics in UCC, it has associates in the Departments of History in UCC, as well as within the broader community of scholars.  The core objective of the Centre is to use a collaborative approach to bring Irish Latin studies into the mainstream of historical and linguistic scholarship.

The long-term aim of the Centre is to gather, edit and translate the most significant Renaissance Latin texts of Irish provenance written/published after 1500.  The material will dovetail with the work already done by the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from Celtic Sources (Royal Irish Academy) on pre-1200 texts.  CNLS texts will be edited from scratch and captured in marked-up electronic form (probably SGML using the TEI DTD), then published in an appropriate electronic medium, whether that be CD-ROM, DVD, or online.

Around 1,000 printed works were written by over 300 Irish authors in Latin c.1500-1750. The goal of the project is to analyse these works and introduce them to the broader academic community.

To access a preliminary finding list of the authors and their works click here: Finding-List

Currently, there are two main objectives of the project:
1) to publish a Cambridge Handbook of Irish Neo-Latin
2) to publish editions and translations of the main works  - this is a central strand of Brepols' new Officina Neolatina series

In addition to this work, Jason Harris and Keith Sidwell have edited a collection of articles, Making Ireland Roman: Irish Neo-Latin Writers and the Republic of Letters (Cork University Press, autumn 2009).

An interdisciplinary group in UCC currently runs a weekly seminar the objective of which is to edit, translate and comment Latin texts of Irish provenance.  The current focus of the seminar is Irish Neo-Latin verse.

In previous years the seminar has focused on:

1. Richard Stanihurst's De rebus in Hibernia gestis (Antwerp, 1584)
2. Philip O'Sullivan Beare's Tenebriomastix (MS, c. 1625)
3. Stephen White's Apologia pro Innocentibus Ibernis (MS, late 1630s). 
   
4. Derrmot O'Meara's Ormonius (London, 1615)
5. John Lynch's Alithinologia (St Malo, 1664)
   

It is intended that editions of these texts will be published in the Officina Neolatina series.