From Carolingian wanderers to Enlightenment giants: a thousand years of Irish thought (750-1800)
From Eriugena (9th c.) to the Gaelic scholarly networks of the high Middle Ages, Irish-born scholars shaped European philosophy. After 1607—the Flight of the Earls—that tradition fractured. Protestant Irish built careers in Britain (Boyle, Ussher, Berkeley). Catholic Irish scattered to Continental exile colleges (Louvain, Rome, Salamanca). Two separate intellectual networks, two separate historiographies.
Boyle (chemistry), Berkeley (philosophy), Swift (satire), Burke (conservatism), Hutcheson (moral philosophy). Shaped the Enlightenment.
Lombard, Wadding, Colgan preserved Irish identity abroad. Their work on Irish saints and history largely forgotten in anglophone scholarship.