O'Donnell, 'Archive of Celtic-Latin Literature:  ACLL-1', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9601
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9601-o'donnell-archive

@@@@96.1.4, Archive of Celtic-Latin Literature

Anthony Harvey, Kieran Devine, Francis J. Smith.  <i>Archive of
Celtic-Latin Literature:  ACLL-1</i>.  Turnhout:  Brepols, 1994. 
CD-ROM database.  ISBN 2-503-50410-8.  Pricing varies by type of
purchaser.
  Reviewed by James J. O'Donnell -- University of Pennsylvania

  To survey the list of authors whose texts are contained on
this new CD database is to recognize afresh the variety and
richness of the Celtic, esp. the Irish, contribution to medieval
Latinity and, lingering to this day, its marginalization.  This
CD grants access while in a curious way still reinforcing
marginalization.

  The disk embraces a striking diversity of writers (for there
are few bulky corpora here) from Patrick to Geraldus Cambrensis. 
Of particular value and interest are the numerous lives of
saints:  Irish hagiography has been a rich subject of interest
throughout this century, recently heightened by the publication
of Richard Sharpe's <i>Medieval Irish Saints' Lives</i> (1991). 
In total number of titles, approximately 40% of what is here
(counting from the list supplied) are anonymous or insecurely-
attributed works, including liturgical texts, church canons,
penitential rules, and charters of princelings.  There is no true
"canon" here, though there are a few major figures (Patrick,
Columbanus, Eriugena -- but it is not clear why the first two
books of his <i>Periphyseon</i> are missing), and indeed it is
one of the strengths of Celtic Latinity that it comes with no
predigested canon of authors, but rather a canon of
<i>saints</i>, long since called into question.  The "author"
died a long time ago in this field, with anonymity, pseudonymity,
and polyonymity almost the rule rather than the exception.  Since
Sharpe and Michael Lapidge published their <i>Bibliography of
Celtic-Latin Literature, 400-1200</i> in 1985 and with the
ongoing publication of the journal <i>Peritia</i> from 1984, the
field has come of age.

  This CD began as part of a larger dictionary project sponsored
by the Royal Irish Academy.  The decision to make the corpus of
texts available is an important and praiseworthy one.  The format
here will be familiar to anyone who has used the CETEDOC CD of
patristic Latin texts:  same publisher, same software.  The
differences are few and fairly transparent.  First, the
collection of data has gone on over a long period using various
technologies.  Much of what is here is still in a primitive form
using all capital letters (and asterisks to mark "real"
capitalization).  Second, an unusually candid discussion in the
accompanying manual makes it clear that the accuracy of texts
across the database is variable, and anecdotal usage turns up a
higher percentage of typographical errors than are in the CETEDOC
data base.  

  As with CETEDOC, this is not meant as a definitive artifact: 
it is the "First (Preliminary) CD-ROM Edition" and a total of
three editions are promised.  One difficulty with this approach
is that, though upgrades are provided at costs substantially
below that of the first purchase, it is still difficult to know
how expensive the whole thing will be when finished.  When the
original is published in this truly preliminary stage, more users
will notice and object to the pricing.

  The CD is remarkably easy to install and the instructions are
fairly transparent.  I have not seen anyone have trouble doing a
rudimentary search on first acquaintance with the disk, though
more complicated searches are (as is often the case) somewhat
challenging purely from the software point of view; doing
intelligent searches from the point of view of content and using
the material wisely is another matter.  (The CETEDOC manual has
an intelligent few pages of advice on that score, lacking in the
manual here.)  But any student of the field will immediately feel
that she has been turned loose in a familiar but enriched
playground of authors and texts, many of them hard to locate or
published only in large corpora.  Simply for ownership of this
much text, the purchase price is a bargain.  (I do not know of
anyone who has successfully gotten this or the CETEDOC disk to
run on a Macintosh system where essentially you need a DOS-
emulator program like "SoftPC".  Under Windows, it can also be a
bit buggy and for safety's sake, I usually leave Windows and run
it under old DOS.  It will be necessary for later versions to be
upgraded appropriately.)

  There are some further drawbacks to the Brepols CD's, however. 
Chief among them is a nervous fear of downloading.  It is not
possible to extract from one of their disks a complete text of
<i>anything</i> unless you are both quite clever and willing to
endure almost hopeless tedium -- at any rate, the ordinary user
will not be able to do so.  The text can then be read
consecutively on-screen in the software supplied, but not
cut/pasted or quoted extensively elsewhere.  (A download feature
will let you take away selected citations from search results,
but the output format is often quarrelsome when it encounters a
standard word processor.)  

  Finally, the most notable handicap is the inability to search
for a specific citation.  If you are told that Eriugena says
something striking at <i>Periphyseon</i> 3.43 but are not given
specific Latin words to search for, you cannot find it easily
here and you are left browsing the whole of the third book.  This
is true of both ACLL and CETEDOC and a major handicap; but the
information is already in the database, for search results that
hit upon <i>Periph.</i> 3.43 will tell you that information. 
This requires a readjustment of the search software and should be
an urgent priority with Brepols.  By comparison to that painful
lack, the want of an apparatus criticus and (urgent for Christian
Latin texts) an apparatus scripturisticus is only a nagging ache.

  I said at the outset that the project managed to remarginalize
Celtic Latin.  Though it is quite clear that with this disk, the
interested searcher the world over has new power to control this
body of literature, the production of a separate CD is what re-
ghettoizes the subject.  Given that Brepols is publishing the
CETEDOC disk with at last count well over 20 million words of
Christian Latin, it would surely make more sense for the ACLL to
be incorporated in the one larger database than kept separate
here.  I have and use both databases and find it irksome to have
<i>one</i> question about Latinity and need to swap disks in a CD
drive to get there.  There may come a point at which the
expansion of the two databases would require CETEDOC to think of
a two-disk format, but (1) disk capacity will probably grow
faster than text can be input, and (2) the obsolescence of CD as
anything other than a transportation medium will impinge on us
all soon enough.  (I have already begun transferring a couple of
crucial CD's to my new vast hard disk, forasmuch as they can be
searched at <i>much</i> higher speeds.  CETEDOC and ACLL are set
up in such a way as to discourage this, another mild drawback.) 
Eriugena, e.g., and Geraldus Cambrensis <i>clearly</i> belong in
the CETEDOC database as well as ACLL and it would be far more
efficient to introduce "Celtic" as a tool for limiting searches
on an expanded CETEDOC disk than to require it be treated as a
separate category.  When that reunification takes place, Hiberno-
Latinists can begin afresh the task of luring colleagues who
customarily work in continental settings to take this remarkable
material seriously.