Describing the indescribable: Lexical obscurity and biblical exegesis in early medieval Ireland

In the seventh century, medieval Irish scholars, who had received and internalised an educational system that placed the Bible at its very centre, began to produce texts that were marked by innovation in artistic style and taste. This rich and vibrant corpus is exemplified by distinctive lexical features, such as neologisms (including those coined from Hebrew and Greek), rare vocabulary, and hapax legomena. This thesis focusses on Hiberno-Latin texts presenting lexical “obscurity”, including the Altus Prosator and the Lorica of Laidcenn, and a group of related texts, such as the Hisperica Famina, and offers a new approach to the circumstances that informed their origin and development. In particular, it questions whether it is possible that the “obscurity” of such texts has been overstated in modern scholarship. This question is explored throughout the thesis by utilising evidence from Patristic discussions on language and style, analogous Latin traditions, and the early manuscript context. This thesis suggests that the authors of Hiberno-Latin “obscure” texts may, in fact, be utilising particular stylistic features to encode levels of spiritual interpretations into their texts. This idea is supported not only by Patristic discussions on biblical style and the use of “obscure” lexicon in analogous exegetical/theological contexts, but also by the early manuscript contexts, which demonstrate that the early medieval literati viewed Hiberno-Latin texts with textual “obscurity” in a fundamentally different way than modern scholars and associated them with texts that sought to encapsulate, often through their style and arrangement, complex spiritual interpretations.2026-06-2