Texts in Irish had almost no access to the printing press until the mid-19th century. Some 17th-century Gaelic intellectuals on the Continent, many of whom had joined the Franciscan Order, used printing resources in Louvain and Rome for devotional tracts and saints’ lives, most of these in the service of the Counter-Reformation with the added objective of demonstrating to the world how Ireland, notwithstanding English denigrations, had always been a pious and civilized country. Within Ireland, there was no printed activity in Irish except for a scant production of religious texts aimed at converting the native population to Protestantism. An antiquarian rather than religious interest slowly rose in the course of the 18th century. One historiographical work, Geoffrey Keating’s Foras feasa ar Éirinn (“A foundation for knowledge about Ireland”), an anti-Protestant compendium to, and celebration of, Irish antiquity, was printed in an English translation in 1723 (the Gaelic text remaining unpublished until the appearance of a partial edition in 1811, but circulated widely in many MS copies).

In the 1760s, interest in ancient Irish texts was provoked by the controversy over Macpherson’s Ossian. While the authenticity of the material which Macpherson claimed to be Scottish was subject to severe doubt from c.1770 onwards, there was some awareness that more genuine material might be extant in Ireland, while Irish antiquaries, both native and Anglo-Irish, indignantly claimed back for their country the material which Macpherson had appropriated for Scotland. The first, ground-breaking edition of Irish-Gaelic literature was brought out by Charlotte Brooke as Reliques of Irish poetry (1789) – the title betraying the underlying role model of Bishop Percy and his Reliques of ancient English poetry (1766). Brooke, in a pointedly anti-Macphersonian move, printed her English translations and the Gaelic originals side by side on facing pages (a presentation also used by Fortis in his 1772 printing of Hasanaginica). This became standard editorial practice, illustrating both the unfamiliarity of the Gaelic language and its importance as the text’s true source and warrant of authenticity, and exemplifying the diglossia of Ireland as an aboriginally Gaelic country with an English-language overlay. The effect was strengthened by the universal choice to print Gaelic in its own font (based on medieval insular half-uncial handwriting), rather than in a modern typeface. Irish maintained its separate letter-type until well after 1950.

Some literary and antiquarian societies in the early 19th century also edited literary material. Theophilus O’Flanagan, who had assisted Brooke in her Reliques, edited the “Deirdre” story from the mythical Ulster cycle (a tragic tale which was to remain a favourite in literary reworkings), as well as a bardic poem, in the sole volume of the Transactions of the Gaelic Society (1808); a member of that society, William Haliday (who also published a Gaelic grammar), was the editor of the first part of Keating’s Foras Feasa in 1811. The editorial prefaces to such editions show them to be inspired still by the main objective of Patriot antiquarians of the previous century: to vindicate the civility of ancient Ireland against anglocentric denigration.

A watershed was marked in 1831 by the appearance of Irish minstrelsy, or Bardic remains of Ireland by the historian James Hardiman. The most important sections in this collection were dedicated to the early-18th-century harper Carolan (who in these years was becoming an icon for the gracefulness-in-adversity of Irish poetry and song) and, crucially, to a collection of Jacobite ballads and “vision”-poems from the same period (the early 18th century being marked by particularly harsh oppression of Ireland’s Gaelic population by means of anti-Catholic “Penal Laws”). These poems (hitherto transmitted only orally, as songs, or in MS) denounced the country’s oppression under English Hanoverian rule and foretold the return of justice when help would come from abroad (in the form of the exiled Stuart king, or, later, Washington or Bonaparte). Hardiman presented this corpus as the collective-anonymous (“national”) voice of a tyrannically oppressed people, and explicitly cited the example of Claude Fauriel’s Philhellenic Chants populaires de la Grèce moderne (1824), equating the Irish-English relationship to that between Greece and the Ottoman Empire. From Hardiman’s collection onwards, Romantic-Nationalist poets were to take recourse to the country’s older poetic tradition as a reservoir of anti-English sentiment. Foremost in this respect was the poet James Clarence Mangan, who translated a good deal of older Gaelic poetry into English, in the process updating the rhetoric into the diction of contemporary Romantic Nationalism.

In the realm of philology, the edition of older texts was taken in hand by amateur scholars from the Royal Irish Academy. The key scholars involved were George Petrie, who relied heavily on the native expertise of John O’Donovan and Eugene O’Curry. O’Donovan and O’Curry were mere amanuenses, their rural Catholic background not allowing them to become fully-fledged members of the societies reserved for erudite gentlemen of leisure. It is indicative of the social mobility which in this century could attend on philological learning that both men, though never wealthy, gained wide respect and professorial chairs in the newly founded university establishments of the mid-century decades. The main focus of interest was historical and antiquarian, and much effort went into two flagship enterprises. The first of these involved the large Annals of the four masters (an annalistic compendium compiled in the first half of the 17th century by Irish Franciscans based in Louvain); a 6-volume annotated bilingual edition by John O’Donovan appeared in 1848-51. The other involved the native Gaelic law system of Ireland (the so-called “Brehon Laws”). After much laborious inventorization and transcription by O’Donovan and O’Curry, the corpus appeared as Ancient laws of Ireland in 6 volumes (1865-1901), under the editorial name of W. Neilson Hancock – neither O’Curry nor O’Donovan having lived to see the publication. In his introduction, Hancock drew specific attention to parallels between Brehon law in Ireland and Brahminic law in India – these two peripheries of the British Empire being considered both equally archaic from an anglocentric point of view. One common feature was that of the coercive fast, which, having been mentioned in O’Curry’s lecture series On the manners and customs of the ancient Irish (posth. 1873) and thematized in W.B. Yeats’s play The King’s threshold (1904), became one of the main inspirations behind the revival of the hunger strike as a political tactic. Meanwhile, special societies had been created to foster the publication of Irish texts. In the mid-century, there were the Irish Archaeological Society, a side-branch of the Royal Irish Academy led by O’Donovan and Petrie, and the Ossianic Society. In the second half of the century, the various mythical cycles from which Macpherson had drawn his Ossianic themes – the Ulster Cycle around the hero Cú Chulainn and the Fenian Cycle around the hero Fionn Mac Cumhail – were thematically and editorially retrieved and brought back into literary circulation. This happened initially in re-tellings. Standish James O’Grady (1846–1928) used the material both in his narrative histories (History of Ireland: The heroic period, 1878) and in his historical adventures (aimed at a juvenile readership like those of G.A. Henty in England): Finn and his companions (1892), The coming of Cuculain (1894). No less influentially, Lady Gregory reworked the ancient heroic tales into a more oral-narrative style, as if they were transcribed folk tales: Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902), Gods and fighting men (1904). Reworkings and re-tellings like these fed into the agenda and thematic reservoir of the Irish Literary Revival of the decades around 1900.

By this time, Celtic philology was also firmly established at the European universities, and the great medieval codices in which these materials had been preserved began to be printed in facsimile and in scholarly editions. A nationally Irish project for the printing of ancient materials was started with the Irish Texts Society (founded in 1896, with Douglas Hyde as its first president). While the retrieval and re-edition of ancient literary material has continued to be an important concern, also in independent 20th-century Ireland, the material itself, while full of historical interest, proved to be less easily suited to the ideals of Romantic Nationalism than the sources tapped by the first generation of editors: messianic anti-English vision-poetry and mythical-heroic tales. These continue to be the most eagerly recycled portions of the Gaelic literary past for contemporary purposes.