Life
1892-1983 [Rev. Aubrey Osborn Gwynn]; son of Stephen, ed. UCD, Oxon, Louvain; ordained SJ 1924; Chair of Medieval History at UCD, 1949-63; works include The Writings of Bishop Patrick 1074-84 [in Scriptores Latini Hiberniae, Vol 1[ (1955), and The Medieval Province of Armagh (1946); Roman Education from Cicero to Quintilian (OUP 1926); The English Austin Friars at the time of Wyclif (OUP 1940); also wrote on history of Irish settlement in Montserrat. DIW
Works
The Collected Papers of Aubrey Gwynn (Dublin 1990); Gerard O’Brien, ed., Aubrey Gwynn’s Irish Church in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Four Courts Press 1992) 420pp. SEE Irish Book Lover, Vol. 29 .
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Criticism
Gerard O’Brien, ed. Aubrey Gwynn, The Irish Church in the 11th
and 12th centuries (Blackrock: Four Courts 1992), 383pp.
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Commentary
Benedict Kiely, Drink to the Bird (London: Methuen 1991), at Cappagh Hospital: ‘Then came Fr Aubrey Gwynn, Jesuit and professor of medieval history in University College, Dublin, to, guess what, give a retreat to the nuns. He was one of a famous learned family, some of them Protestant, some Catholic, most Protestant, and so long and closely associated with Trinity College, Dublin (Queen Elizabeth’s cesspool, Fr Furlong used to say, meaning the first Elizabeth) that it was a sort of a Dublin joke to raffle off. Trinity is Gwynnity and Gwynnity is Trinity. / Fr Aubrey came to see me every day of his stay and frequently, out of the kindness of his heart, afterwards. He talked about everything from his first meetings with Hilaire Belloc to the fun it was to read Wild West stories in French translations. Now that was great company for a young fellow with literary aspirations. And particularly since the younger Jesuits visited regularly, bearing books, a generosity that I have never forgotten. It takes a lot of books to keep you going for eighteen months.’ (p.16.)
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References
University of Ulster Library, Morris Collection holds The Medieval Province of Armagh 1470-1545 (Dundalgan
Press, 1946).
De Burca Books (Cat. 44, 1997) lists With R. Neville Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses: Ireland (Harlow: Longmans 1970); Ireland and the English Nation at the Council of Constance (Dublin: RIA 1940) [45C8], 4to.; The Medieval Province of Armagh 1470-1545 (Dundalk: Tempest 1946), xi, 287pp. [£75]; with R. N. Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses [in] Ireland, with app. of Early Sites [1st edn. 1970] (Blackrock 1988), 479pp.; The English Austin Friars in the Time of Wyclif (Oxford U.P. 1940), x, 295pp. [£50].
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Notes
Rev. A. Gwynn, S.J., earns a mention and a footnote at [117] in George A Little’s Dublin Before the Vikings (1957), by informing the author that the list of pre-Norman churches in the Christ Church deeds, No.362 (destroyed by fire in the Custom House in 1922) – which contains the names of clerical witnesss to a Charter of Laurence O’Toole dated by Gwynn at 1178 – is itself incomplete, ending cum ceteris omnibus presbiteris (See Little, op. cit., p.117.)
Monserrat Islanders: His archival collection of papers on Monserrat Irish collected in the 1930s is employed in Donald Harman Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630-1730 (Liverpool UP 1997), where he is styled ‘the godfather of historians of Montserrat’. [Email review notice 31.3.1998.]
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