Keating, Geoffrey

Keating, Geoffrey. English rendering of Séathrún Céitinn (c.1580–c.1645/1650), Irish historian, poet, and priest whose celebrated history of Ireland is often cited. Born in Tipperary of Norman stock, Keating was educated at a local bardic school, Bordeaux, and Salamanca before returning to Ireland as a doctor of theology and parish priest. According to legend, his sermons so enraged sinful parishioners that Keating was obliged to live in a cave in the Glen of Aherlow, Co. Limerick. His multi-volume history, whose Irish title is Foras Feasa ar Éirinn [lit. A Sound Basis for Knowledge of Ireland], was compiled between 1620 and 1633; some commentators assert that the principal labour on it was between 1629 and 1631. In contrast to the Annals of the Four Masters, a bare recitation of dates and facts compiled about the same time, Keating's history is written in a continuous narrative and includes colourful and dramatic vignettes. Written in Modern Irish when that language was still spoken by privileged and learned classes, Keating's history is an admired model of Irish prose style. To a degree the history is polemical, being a partial response to such denigrators of Ireland as Edmund Spenser (c.1552–99) and Giraldus Cambrensis (c.1146–1223). Keating is sometimes compared to the Greek historian Herodotus (5th cent. BC) because he comes at the beginning of Irish modern historiography, and also because his record includes events we judge mythological and legendary as well as the certainly historical. His was the last important European book of history to be circulated in manuscript rather than having been published. The text has been translated into English several times, the first in 1723. The modern edition was published in four non-sequential volumes of the Irish Texts Society, 4, 8, 9, and 15; David Comyn edited the first (London, 1902), and Patrick S. Dinneen edited the remaining three (London, 1908, 1914); reprinted, with an introduction by Breandán Ó Buachalla (London, 1987). Keating also wrote poetry and spiritual texts.