Our Goal

Since the late 1970s, the Royal Irish Academy has been at the forefront of documenting and codifying the rich literary tradition of the Celtic periphery. Our mission is to create a comprehensive and definitive electronic database, featuring around 1300 texts ranging from brief inscriptions to extensive treatises.

Our database is an invaluable resource for lexicographers and offers significant benefits to scholars across various disciplines, including text editors, syntacticians, historians, and researchers interested in the geographical or chronological distribution of linguistic features.

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Subject Areas

his database contains more than five hundred Latin works by over a hundred known and unknown authors, spanning the fields of theology, liturgy, computistics, grammar, hagiography, poetry and historiography, and including legal texts, charters, inscriptions, etc.

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The Database’s History

The first, preliminary edition, was originally released on CD-ROM in 1994 and, in a revised form, on line in 2007. This extensive collection consisted of over four hundred selected texts, representative of the authors, nationalities, periods and genres in the Celtic-Latin domain. As befitted a database designed to encapsulate what was most distinctive in Celtic-Latin literature, the texts in ACLL-1 were largely chosen for their embodiment of that difference.

As it is increasingly becoming apparent that Celtic authors of Latin in the period from the fifth century to the thirteenth also contributed to mainstream European Latin culture, a principal intention of the developed and expanded second edition is to provide searchable access to Celtic-Latin material that went on to make its mark across western Europe. The additional works involved are being placed online in cumulative annual releases in which more and more material is being added.

The initiative is planned to culminate in ACLL-3, a third, definitive edition, once the database has reached the maximum feasible size — that is, when all accessible Celtic-Latin texts have been captured and processed to standard.

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User-Friendly Interface

The powerful search-software enables the users to undertake enhanced search possibilities:

• by using wildcards and operators, the user can construct complex search-queries
• filters are used when, instead of searching through the entire data set, one wishes to restrict the search to a particular Author or group of Authors, a articular Work, a particular Period or Century.

To guarantee a full experience, the interface has been developed in in English, French, German, and Italian

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Live Links

Through “live links”, users will be given the possibility to select a word found in a text of ACLL and automatically find entries on the word in the constituent dictionaries of the Database of Latin Dictionaries (28 dictionaries available)