Vol. 8: Geoghegan, Vincent and Yves Le Juen.

Type: Article

Geoghegan, Vincent and Yves Le Juen. ‘An Early Work by James MacGeoghegan: Oeuvres mêlées en Latin, Anglois et François sur divers sujets en prose et vers.’, Eighteenth-century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr, Vol. 8 (1993), Pp 59-72..

This article discusses a little-known text by James MacGeoghegan, author of the famous History of Ireland, Ancient and Modern, published in Paris 1758-1762. A Miscellany in Latin, English and French, written and published in Hamburg in 1730 is one of MacGeoghegan’s earliest works and offers “insight into the world-view of the young MacGeoghegan” and information about the material conditions of his life at that time. MacGeoghegan was clearly a penniless hack writer in his young days in Hamburg and the authors quote, and comment on, much of the material in this early book. Looking for connections between this text and the famous History, they note, among other things, the different contexts in which the two texts were produced. In Hamburg where the established religion was Lutheranism and there existed strong anti-Catholicism; “a Catholic writer like MacGeoghegan would need to be cautious in such an environment”. However, when he wrote the later History of Ireland, “his supporters and patrons came from a far more homogeneous group of émigré Irish Catholic Jacobites, in a Catholic France at war with Protestant England”.