Miscellanea Historica Hibernica

Miscellanea Historica Hibernica, also known as MS G1, is a manuscript miscellany, a miniature vellum commonplace book.

Compiled by Pilip Ballach Ó Duibhgeannáin during the years 1579 - 1584, it is described on the front endpaper as Miscellanea Historica Hibernica in a later hand. Ó Duibhgeannáin was a resident of Cloonybrien, County Roscommon.

The Miscellanea contains an Irish rendering of an extract from a Latin tract found in Roger Bacon's 13th century version of Secretum Secretorum on physiognomy.

Paul Walsh suggested that Ó Duibhgeannáin was a son of Fer Caogad mac Ferghal Ó Duibhgeannáin, who died at Cloonybried in 1581.

Sources

• Irish Medieval Learning, by Fr. Paul Walsh, 1918, pp. 18–19.
• Rudimenta Physionomiae, by Gearóid mac Niocaill, in Celtica vi (1963), pp. 271–77.
• A world of wonders:marvels and prodigies in the diocese of Elphin, 1588, pp. 134–54, in Stories from Gaelic Ireland:Microhistories from the sixteenth-century Irish annals, by Bernadette Cunningham and Raymond Gillespie, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2003, ISBN 1 85182 7471.