ep-CLASSICAL EPIGRAPHY IN AN IRISH TOPOGRAPHY

This essay recalls the cultural breadth and historical transformations of architectural inscription, from sententious epigraphy to signage. It then focuses on a case from the periphery of Europe, in Ireland, where classicising interventions were conditioned by the encounter with Gaelic civilization. In the late eighteenth century, Richard Robinson, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, remodelled the cathedral city of Armagh through the erection of a sequence of axially-related monuments and buildings which were also linked epigraphically. The essay explores how the inscriptions worked together to articulate the ambitions of Robinson’s project and the meanings generated by the overlay of a classicising urbanistic intervention on an ancient Irish site with its own embedded topographical and literary relationships. Robinson’s architectural inscriptions are not only in play with one another, but with earlier levels and kinds of monumental writing, pertaining to the Insular church and the pre-Christian mythological landscape. The architectural epigraphy is thus viewed as one manifestation amongst multiple strata of monumental and place-specific texts used to construct the pre-eminence of an ecclesiastical city.

This essay focuses on the Irish primatial city of Armagh, where saint Patrick supposedly established his principal church in an area which was already a rich mythic and ritual landscape 1 . The city was reshaped in the eighteenth century by an archbishop who used inscriptions to highlight the significance and the axial configuration of his monuments. We will consider the inscriptions as one stratum in Armagh's long history of topographic literature, which encompasses Old Irish onomastic literature, early Christian legend and Humanist epigraphy. Within this multiplicity of place-specific texts, we examine how the eighteenth-century inscriptions work in their architectural and urban setting -and how their agency evolved as their civic context changed. The unique superimposition of classicising planning on an early Christian topography which was in turn impressed on a pre-Christian ritual landscape means that Armagh is discussed here intensively as an individual case, rather than extensively in relation to other Irish urban or religious centres. Since the essay at core concerns architectural inscription as one privileged form of interaction between text and sited object, we shall open with an introductory overview of the forms and roles which urban inscription can assume.
Preamble: from epigraphy to signage Text on buildings reflects the ways that the built (urban) environment is or should be inhabited; it can be aspirational, normative, or descriptive -read phenomenologically in the context of the lived city or promoting its abstraction into information. The deployment of text on architecture occurs in many cultures and at many levels, from monumental inscriptions to graffiti. The global character of the topic is evident in such varied examples as the long tradition of Qur'ānic inscriptions, the epigraphy of South Indian temples or the complex Sanskrit poetry inscribed at the Khmer temples of Angkor. Amongst the most obvious aspects of inscription is the language chosen; the preponderance of Latin in European architectural epigraphy reflects its status as a 'timeless', supranational language, intelligible to ruling elites. Humanist revival of Roman square capitals established enduring epigraphic and typographic norms with their seemingly perennial ability to connote cultural authority, even (or particularly) to an audience unable to read the words inscribed. Universality can more rarely be addressed through multilingualism, as at the Basilica della Santa Casa in Loreto, where the Translatio miraculosa, a text concerning the angelic transportation of the house of Mary, was inscribed on plaques affixed to the nave pilasters in eleven languages: Greek, Arabic, Italian, Spanish, French, German, "Slavic" (Serbo-Croat), Welsh, Irish, Scots and English 2 . Alternatively, the potential for linguistic incomprehensibility or obsolescence could be evaded altogether by using pictograms or "hieroglyphs", as Alberti recommended, in a discussion that presaged the links between ep-

CLASSICAL EPIGRAPHY IN AN IRISH TOPOGRAPHY Clare Lapraik Guest
This essay recalls the cultural breadth and historical transformations of architectural inscription, from sententious epigraphy to signage. It then focuses on a case from the periphery of Europe, in Ireland, where classicising interventions were conditioned by the encounter with Gaelic civilization. In the late eighteenth century, Richard Robinson, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, remodelled the cathedral city of Armagh through the erection of a sequence of axially-related monuments and buildings which were also linked epigraphically. The essay explores how the inscriptions worked together to articulate the ambitions of Robinson's project and the meanings generated by the overlay of a classicising urbanistic intervention on an ancient Irish site with its own embedded topographical and literary relationships. Robinson's architectural inscriptions are not only in play with one another, but with earlier levels and kinds of monumental writing, pertaining to the Insular church and the pre-Christian mythological landscape. The architectural epigraphy is thus viewed as one manifestation amongst multiple strata of monumental and place-specific texts used to construct the pre-eminence of an ecclesiastical city.
igrams, mottoes, gnomic sayings and devices which would flourish with Erasmus' Adagia (Paris 1500, rev. 1508) and Alciati's Emblemata (Augsburg 1531) 3 . Architectural epigraphy in the sense of a text, often in a classical language exhibiting certain rhetorical features (e.g., brevity, wit, enigma), inscribed on a significant or monumental edifice in a display of intellectual, genealogical or social prestige is only one manifestation of text on building. Beyond this conception of epigraphy as architectural ornament, we can posit a continuum of signs which make buildings or urban spaces 'speak', ranging in pre-modern cities from classicising epigraphy to painted signboards and graffiti 4 . Signage may incorporate rebuses and heraldic devices, denoting or implying aristocratic endorsement, and was an early legal requirement for certain trades, such as brewers and innkeepers (required to erect advertising signs from 1389 in England and 1567 in France). A "citizen comedy" such as Ben Jonson's Alchemist (first performed 1610) shows contemporary London as a field of emblems and rebuses manipulated by the charlatan protagonists who play on disjunctions between word, image, referent and reality 5 . Here emblematics becomes co-extensive with civic life, providing the means to perform identity and articulate the urban context. A century later, Addison discussed the devices invented to identify houses and businesses, designating the name, trade or even the humoral disposition of the proprietor 6 . The signage he de- The compilers of city directories advertised the "economising" of time by the documentation of the "city-text" into lists of information which could promote and expedite commerce 12 . The "spatial regime of inscriptions" produced by governmental requirements and commercial initiatives would ultimately result in the 'abstract' or 'rationalized' urban space of the modern city 13 . The city as text, as conceived by city trade directories and subsequently city managers or engineers, concerns the abstraction of urban geography into an index which can be read off with maximum speed and efficiency. The utilitarianism of the compilers of city directories who declared that their compendia of urban facts allowed "no scope for the play of the imagination" contrasts with the figurative play of earlier signboards 14 . By the nineteenth century, despite the explosive growth of lettering types for signage, the figural rendition of the city lay chiefly in literature; Dickens' fantastical descriptions of London, with their bizarre conjunctions and metamorphoses of objects, might be seen as the descendent of the emblematic play in Hogarth. In Joyce's Ulysses (Paris 1922), the proliferation of commercial signs and the multiple strata which constitute civic identity in the modern city, from municipal bureaucracy to primordial myth, interweaves with the citizens' consciousness, taking the city-text to a further degree of richness. The poetic counterweight to the factual, rationalized city-text is by now however a creation of an author's individual imagination unlike the 'public' experience of Hogarth's emblematic signboards which rely on a collective figural imagination, albeit encompassing various levels of erudition or wit. Inscribed buildings are not just as discrete objects but nodal points in the evolving interaction between language and urban fabric. The theme may be most richly approached if regarded as a spectrum, with varying degrees of permanence, authority and general or restricted legibility. A given inscription, whether monumental or subversive, poetic or technical, enduring or ephemeral, has a site-specific meaning but derives its further resonance in relation to the diversity of codes within the city and the multiple levels of institutional ordering which determine the possibilities and modalities of praxis. We can now turn to more concrete historical details to substantiate these arguments.    . 6). Bainbridge suggests an axis from the observatory through the school to the obelisk -a monument type long associated with perpetual fame, axial planning and astronomical observation, as in the Solarium Augusti in the Campus Martius. Robinson thus encompassed the renovated city within the landscaping of his palace, in a kind of planning novel in Ireland or Britain, but whose antecedents are hinted by Oram's description of its "baroque statement in marked contrast to the restrained classicism of Robinson's build-ings" 43 . Robinson's 'baroque' planning is familiar to students of Renaissance and Baroque urbanism where palaces were planned in relation to urban topographies, with landscaping and axial planning providing a medium which linked a palace or villa to a townscape 44 . Thus we might consider two levels of interest in Robinson's urbanistic projects, the first being the employment of 'baroque' planning in which buildings and monuments act as nodes, creating axes or vistas within an existing cityscape and the cityscape is conceived as a perspective radiating from a palace. The most celebrated instances occur in 16 th -18 th century Rome, the archetypal sacred city on hills, with its 'trident' street plan, its sacred buildings dispersed on multiple hills connected via axial roads marked by obelisks and its opulent prelates' villas within suburban parks, planned in alignment with the surrounding urban topography 45 . Such planning is distinct from the projection of New Towns in eighteenth century Britain and Ireland, laid out in squares and crescents away from existing civic centres 46 . The second level of interest lies in the overlay of a planning derived ultimately from Italian Renaissance-Baroque urbanism on an early Irish topography. If Robinson's structures were dispersed over the city's hills, Armagh's landscape is distinct from the verticality of Italian hill-town topography, whose dramatic impact lies in the tension between luminous summit and grotto. Armagh instead shows the concentric topography characteristic of early Irish royal and ecclesiastical sites, where a central hill or mound is encir-  . 7). The library and observatory were commemorated in medals struck in bronze and sil-ver in or after 1777 and 1791 (although dated 1771 and 1789) respectively; the library medal commemorates the opening of the library but names Robinson as Baron Rokeby of Armagh in the Irish peerage, a title he received in 1777. Commemoration of the building was thus tied to Robinson's ennoblement, celebrated also in the obelisk 52 (figs. 8-9). Robinson was a keen numismatic collector; his valuable collections of ancient, medieval and early modern coins, of engraved gems and gem impressions by James Tassie are conserved in the library 53 . The architectural inscriptions can be viewed as instances of Robinson's wider interest in engraved objects, from miniature gemstones to monumental epigraphy. Planning organised around axially related monuments, exemplified by the Rome of Sixtus V, relies on markers which give symbolic significance to axes which would otherwise be perspectives or circulation routes. These markers can be monuments whose form carries symbolic associations like obelisks or fountains, but inscription plays a vital role in articulating the meaning of the intervention, as well as proclaiming the builder's fame. What role then did the inscriptions of Robinson's obelisk, observatory and library play beyond commemorating him through his works?

Epigraphy and urbanism at the margins of
The obelisk as noted acts as an axial and thematic marker, illustrating the prospects from palace to cathedral (and library) and to the observatory. If we read the observatory's motto, "The heavens declare the glory of God" in conjunction with the obelisk, we see the latter as pointing a way to the stars through its form and its illumination of an urban axis from observatory to bishop's palace, or from palace to cathedral 54 . Beyond its astronomical applicability, the inscription suggests a typological dimension in the urbanism -centred on the archbishop's palace from whose park the renovated city 'extended'. If Psalm 19 inscribed on the observatory had obvious pertinence for ecclesiastically sponsored astronomy, the library inscription PSYCHE -S IATREION has some curious features. In the library medal, which shows Cooley's design prior to extension, the inscription is prominent, with the word psychēs stamped decisively above the building ( fig. 8). James Stuart describes the inscription above the door, presumably in a tablet beneath the central window with the date 1771 carved in Greek characters αψοα 55 . When the library was extended under Primate John Beresford, the shortened inscription ΨΥΧΗϹΙΑTΡΕΙΟΝ was carved not in adaptations of Roman square capitals but in elegantly designed uncials, in an epigraphic translation of biblical majuscule (fig. 10). The reason for the changed lettering style remains unclear; uncials are obviously associated with insular manuscript production which had an important centre in Armagh 56 . Reeves, who described the characters as "archaic letter" (a more fitting description for Irish than Greek uncials) bought for the library in 1853 the most important Armagh manuscripts and one of the earliest surviving documents in Irish minuscule or pointed hand, the Book of Armagh 57 . There are two antique sources for the psychēs iatreion motto: Diodorus Siculus' Bibliotheca Historia (I.49) and Epictetus' Discourses (III.23.30). Diodorus recounts that the words psy-chēs iatreion were inscribed above the bibliothekē in the Ramesseum of Thebes, the monumental complex of Pharoah Ozymandias (Rameses II), described as a great builder whose epitaph challenged posterity to outdo his works 58 . Epictetus in his Discourses spoke of his philosophical school as an iatreion, in a passage contrasting oratory as a public entertainment with philosophy as medicine, whose salutary severity is essential to effect a cure. Epictetus' iatreion, which continues a long tradition of Socratic-Platonic medical analogies for philosophy, does not so much imply a therapeutic locale (like Plato's Academic grove or Epicurus' Garden) as a surgery where drastic treatments are administered 59 .    Act, the word "forever" appears no less than three times 69 . Then there is the relationship between inscriptions and urbanism. If the Armagh psychēs iatreion motto was unique in its street appearance, its interaction with its civic context became more pronounced in the 1848 re-carving. The use of uncial lettering opened the epigraphic connotations to early Christian palaeography, and thence to the role in manuscript production -and the preservation of Greek -of the Insular church, headed by Armagh. The re-carved inscription coincided in time with William Reeves' scholarship on the early Irish church and antiquities, although Reeves did not become Keeper of Armagh library, for which he collected local antiquities, until 1861 70 . The inscription thus endured yet modified to add a further dimension of significance to the "healing place of souls", namely Armagh's textual, intellectual and spiritual heritage as metropolitan see of the Irish Church 71 . The library also occupied a siteat the corner of Abbey Street and Callan Street -within the ecclesiastical enclosure, or ráth, of the medieval town, whose eastern entrance was marked with a 8 th -9 th century high cross which appears Richard Bartlett's 1602 map and Black's 1810 painting ( fig. 3) 72 . The ráth was the sacred precinct, the place of souls rendered in Humanistic terms in Robinson's library inscription; amongst the buildings within the ráth was Armagh's first library, the Teach Screapta or scriptorium 73 . Thus, the change of lettering style can alter or expand the connotations of epigraphy; if Robinson's urbanism superimposed baroque-style planning over an Irish town, the nineteenth century re-inscription suggests remembrance of Armagh's early history, its ancient library and scriptorium, whose treasures were (briefly) restituted, as a further level of meaning. Armagh's church history was also renovated from 1840 with the construction of the new Catholic cathedral of St. Patrick on a hill northwest of old St. Patrick's 74 . The memory held by the memorial is not fixed or static, but amenable to enrichment. If we recall Erasmus' semantics in the Adagia, where the meaning of an adage develops in a cumulative fashion with the contexts of each usage, the inscriptions of Armagh library and observatory enrich the associations of the urban topography both by recalling earlier states of the city and widening their significance with its subsequent development.
We have seen how a later re-carving of the library inscription opened historic allusions which long predated the Enlightenment library created by Robinson. We might also note that the psychēs iatreion motto had unforeseeable connotations given the coinage of the term "psychiatry" by Johann Christian Reil in 1808 to designate a new branch of psychological medicine to complement internal (pharmacological) medicine and surgery 75 . Reil's conception of the interaction of chemical, mechanical and mental elements in all illness as "an affection of the one process of life" extends a Humanist motto about salutary scholarship into wider connotations 76 . As a town which suffered grievous casualties in the Northern Irish conflict of 1969-1994, when its rural hinterland, South Armagh, was the most heavily militarised zone in Western Europe, the therapeutic healing of "the one process of life" in Armagh is indeed topical. In terms of Armagh's recent history, the library as "healing place of the soul" signals the fragility of cultural heritage in conflict zones and its inestimable value as a literal, not merely metaphorical medicina animi in recovering from the psychic and societal trauma of war. The civic context with which the library continuously interacts provides the horizons of meaning for the psychēs iatreion inscription beyond the personal pretensions of its founder.
In conclusion, we can review the multiple associations of the inscriptions on Robinson's buildings. At surface level, there is the ambiguity for an audience today in the civic 'healing' of a public library proclaimed in an exclusive manner, or of a city renovated for optimal viewing as a landscaped prospect from an archbishop's palace. We then pass into a deeper level of association, in which the eighteenth-century epigraphy is just one level in the strata of topographical-textual relationships which constituted the city, such as the processional recitation of psalms or hymns in circumambulation or the regalia which denoted possession of the primatial office -the Book of Armagh, St. Patrick's Bell and the Bachall Isu with which Patrick traced the cathedral's plot under angelic direction 77 . Beyond these Christian legends lie the topographical myths of the dindsenchas which recount how Macha like Patrick traced the plot of Emain Macha with her brooch. Armagh's multi-valent topography encompassed an eighteenth-century urban project articulated by inscribed monuments, an area for astronomical observation marked by a circle of meridian markers and an ancient cathedral city with a radial-concentric organization which itself supplanted the older sacred site of Navan Fort, with its circular earthworks. The observatory inscription in this sense forms a line of connection back to the symbolism of a medieval cathedral city -which is not to claim that Robinson intended this association. Robinson's interest in inscribed objects (architectural epigraphy, numismatics, engraved gems) corresponds to the continuum of artefacts bearing imprese, from miniatures to monumental inscriptions discussed in Tesauro's encyclopaedic manual of concettismo, Il Canocchiale aristotelico (Torino 1654). The semantic working of such objects is discussed by Erasmus in the prologue to the Adagia which describes how objects adorned with sententiae function topically, generating meaning via allusion and context. Thus, the precious engraved objects (gems, medals) acquired by Robinson and the engraved monuments which he erected can be seen in Humanist terms as a continuum of emblematic objects, which generated significance through textual-visual interplay, through intertextual allusion and through contextual or site-specific meanings. In this sense a group of inter-related inscribed buildings will be related through their axial alignments and civic functions, but also through their type and the other instances of the inscription, as we saw in the library, where even a change of lettering style opened new dimensions of meaning. What we find in Armagh is the overlay of this kind of Humanist contextual reading upon earlier narratives which brought together treasures, texts and sited meaning: the onomastic lore of the dindsenchas and medieval literature which insisted on possession of the Book of Armagh and Bachall Isu as the insignia of the bishopric.
We have argued that such contextual significance can continue to expand or accrue in the urban context, as the inscribed edifices continue to relate to the changing circumstances of the city -both progressive development and archaeological recovery. The case of Armagh shows that the relationship between topography, literature and significant artefacts extends back into pre-urban landscape myths and beyond the classical world.