Ré Órga na nGael: Joseph Cooper Walker (1761-1810)

An absorbing study of an eighteenth century Protestant antiquarian, his contacts with other antiquarians, both Protestant and Catholic, his cultivation of various Gaelic scribes with a view to safeguarding Irish manuscripts and producing new ones, and his efforts to come to an understanding of a shared Irish past, culminating in his Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786), a study of the poets of the old Gaelic order and their music.