Manuscript returns to Dublin 400 years after leaving

A manuscript of enormous research value has been returned to Dublin 700 years after its creation there and four centuries after first leaving the country.

Trinity College Library paid more than €250,000 at Christie’s auction last November for the document on more than 200 pages of vellum in a relatively modern binding — added in the early 1600s.

It was produced by monks of the Cistercian Abbey of St Mary’s in the centre of medieval Dublin, sometime home to the Irish parliament, to make good some losses suffered in a fire in 1304. Among the texts which their scribes copied into the manuscript are an account of the Trojan War and works by Gerald of Wales on the topography and conquest of Ireland.