2007 marks the anniversary of four historic events which have had profound repercussions for modern Ireland:

1. The Flight of the Earls from Donegal to the continent in 1607.
2. The foundation of St Anthony’s College, the Irish College in Louvain (Leuven, Belgium) in 1607.
3. The beginning of the Ulster plantations from 1607 onwards.
4. The death of the Franciscan Luke Wadding in 1657.

Louvain, the seat of an important medieval university, witnessed the collision of the interests of seventeenth-century Europe: the influence of Spain in Flanders, the influence of England on the Continent, the influence of the Pope and his emissaries. When the Irish Franciscan, Flaithrí Ó Maoil Chonaire, theologian and aide to Red Hugh O’Donnell and Hugh O’Neill, petitioned Philip III of Spain to establish a college for Irish novices in the Spanish Netherlands he opened a new chapter in Irish and European history. The choice of Louvain was no accident. This university town was central to the Counter-Reformation movement in Europe and provided the intellectual environment required by the Irish Franciscans for their activities. Philip acceded to Ó Maoil Chonaire’s request. In September 1606 he donated 1,000 ducats and wrote to the Archduke Albert, his son-in-law and co-ruler of the Spanish Netherlands with Philip’s sister, Isabella, directing him to see to it that the Irish College be established with links to the university of Louvain. Albert and Isabella informed the highest authorities of the King’s wishes: the Archbishop of Malines, Marquez Spinola, the King’s Commander in Flanders and the Council of Brabant. Papal sanction was granted by Pope Paul V in April 1607.

From 1607-50s, the Franciscans engaged in an intense period of activity, collecting, transcribing, compiling and printing material. The initial intention to collect lives of the saints developed into a major historical and genealogical project which involved locating, collecting, and transcribing materials on the secular and ecclesiastical history of Ireland. From the 1650s onwards, work continued on cataloguing and maintaining the original historical schemes as many of the major figures involved in the grand project had died.

In the late eighteenth century, during the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars, St Anthony’s College was confiscated by the French government. Some of the manuscripts, books and documents were transferred to St Isidore’s, the Irish Franciscan College in Rome. James Cowan, OFM, the last superior, bought back the college from the French in 1797, with the assistance of Belgian noble family, Baron Snoy d’Oppeurs. The college passed out of Franciscan hands in 1822 and what was left of the library was divided between the Burgundian Library Brussels (Bibliotheque Royale Brussels) and St Isidore’s in Rome.

A combination of French intervention in Italy and the Risorgiomento contrived to make St Isidore’s unsafe for the storage of its own and the Louvain collections. Attempts were made at various points during the nineteenth century to have the library brought to Ireland (by the Royal Irish Academy and the Catholic University), but nothing happened until the early 1870s when St Isidore’s was under threat of confiscation. The library was transferred to Ireland with the assistance of the British legation in Rome, a process that took three years. Some material remains in St Isidore’s (see Analecta Hibernica 6, 1934) and in January of this year, the General Order of the Franciscans announced the founding of the Wadding Archive in Rome to house this material.

A substantial amount of material was sent to the Wexford Library in the early nineteenth century and early printed books in the collection feature an annotation indicating that a book had come from Louvain to Wexford. Fr Richard Walsh was instrumental in this transfer. In the twentieth century, further material was deposited in Merchants’ Quay where a purpose-built library was constructed. During World War II, this material was sent to Multyfarnham for safe-keeping and in 1946 was transferred to the Franciscan House of Studies in Dún Mhuire, Killiney. The material remained there until the 2000 partnership between UCD and the Irish Franciscans.

The Franciscan collection in Brussels includes Ó Cléirigh hagiographical collections, and in the state archives, correspondence with the administration in the Spanish Netherlands, with nuncio in Brussels and with the Archbishop of Malines, including the correspondence between Bonoventure Ó hEodhusa and the Archdukes and Archbishop concerning the setting up of an Irish printing press. Also in Brussels are very important primary documents concerning the history of the Franciscans in late medieval and early modern Ireland.

The corpus of sixty-seven Gaelic manuscripts which derive their nomenclature from their former storage in section ‘A’ of the Franciscan Library Killiney were transferred in November 2000 to the curatorship of University College Dublin under the terms of the University College Dublin-Order of Friars Minor Partnership and are housed in UCD Archives. For a description of the genesis and development of the collection see Myles Dillon, Canice Mooney OFM and Pádraig de Brún, Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the Franciscan Library Killiney (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1969).

The transfer to UCD is the latest in a series of moves to which the collection has been subject since its inception in the great hagiographical enterprise of the Irish Franciscans at Louvain in the early seventeenth century. Brother Míchéal Ó Cléirigh, the most famous of the annalists known as the Four Masters, spent eleven years in Ireland, 1626-37, locating and copying manuscripts. MS A 13, Annála Ríoghdhachta Éireann or the Annals of the Four Masters, is the centrepiece of the collection.

Luke Wadding was the most distinguished of the seventeenth-century Irish Franciscans and his papers are catalogued as the Franciscan Library Killiney ‘B’ and ‘D’ manuscripts. These manuscripts were transferred to UCD Archives in 2006 as part of the UCD-OFM partnership.

The ‘B’ and ‘D’ manuscripts reflect the varied and important activities of the Irish Franciscans in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The ‘B’ manuscripts are in different languages, mainly in Latin, English, Italian and French with a small number in Catalan, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, Serbo-Croatian and Ethiopian. They include manuscripts and printed material dating to as early as the twelfth century with the bulk of the material dating to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This rich collection contains many theological and philosophical tracts and notes used as references by the Irish Franciscans, and in particular by Luke Wadding. MS B22, for example, consists of a series of readings for meditation part of which was compiled and annotated by Wadding for use in St Isidore’s College. There are many copies of essential Franciscan handbooks such as the Rule and Testament of St Francis, chronicles, breviaries, and sermons as well as lecture notes prepared by teachers in the Irish Franciscan houses of study on the Continent in Louvain, Prague and Rome. MS B58 is a composite volume, one part manuscript (fifteenth-century), the other part print (sixteenth century) compilation of Franciscan texts from Germany and the Low Countries. Apart from works and notes by Wadding, the works of other prominent seventeenth-century Irish ecclesiastics appear, among them the works of Peter Lombard, Archbishop of Armagh (MS B27) and Bonaventure Baron, OFM (MSS B39 and 41).

Among the documents relating to major political events in the collection are letters in English and Italian addressed to the Stuart king in exile, James III or the Old Pretender and to pope Clement XI dating to c1700, advising both on the role of the Catholic church in contemporary English and European politics (MS B102) and also seventeenth-century copies of broadsheets printed in London at the time of the Popish Plot. MS B75 is an example of the type of textbook and motes used by Irish Franciscan lecturers in their colleges: it was compiled by Anthony Farrell OFM in Prague and brought to St Isidore’s when the teachers had to withdraw from Prague c1692. Among the more unusual manuscripts in the collection are and eleventh/twelfth century folio probably of Italian Benedictine origin which incorporates early musical notation for the feast of St Laurence (MS B29), and Ethiopian codex (MS B65) and Serbo-Croatian scrolls which include MS B1, a fifteenth-century Italian manuscript that incorporated a decorated miniature of St Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata and a thirteenth-century illuminated Italian manuscript of gospel concordances (MS B105). MS B85 is of Irish interest as it incorporated a large engraving showing St Ignatius Loyola supporting a shield together with St Patrick and a representation of Ireland (Hibernia).

The ‘D’ manuscripts consists of a highly significant collection of letters and papers associated with the Irish Franciscans of the seventeenth-century, in particular Luke Wadding. This archive is of national significance and contains the correspondence of some of the most eminent figures in seventeenth-century Irish history, among them Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, St Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh and Florence Conry (Flaithrí Ó Maoil Chonaire).

The contents of the Wadding papers can be divided into two sections. The first sections consists of material dating from the early seventeenth century to 1640 and is concerned with Irish ecclesiastical matters and constitutes the most important archive for the history of the Irish Catholic Church in the seventeenth century including correspondence and reports on appointments to bishoprics and on controversies and practices in the Irish church, especially in relation to the constant tension between regular clergy and the orders. The regular intervention by Irish nobility such as the O’Neills and the O’Donnells and the courts of France and Spain are also noted in charters in the Wadding papers. The second section extending from 1640 onwards, relates to political and military matters and is an especially valuable source for the history of the Confederation of Kilkenny and of campaigns of Owen Roe O’Neill.