Seán Ó Catháin (

fl. ''Floruit'' ( ; usually abbreviated fl. or occasionally flor.; from Latin for 'flourished') denotes a date or period during which a person was known to have been alive or active. In English, the unabbreviated word may also be used as a noun indic ...

1726) was an Irish

scribe A scribe is a person who serves as a professional copyist, especially one who made copies of manuscripts before the invention of Printing press, automatic printing. The work of scribes can involve copying manuscripts and other texts as well as ...

and tutor. While little is known of Ó Catháin, he is described in ''The Irish Classical Self: Poets and Poor Scholars in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries'', by Laurie O'Higgins, as having left an "impression of his life and personality" in the notes which accompany some of his transcriptions. In 1726, he was employed to transcribe ''Trí Biorghaoithe an Bháis'' (by

Seathrún Céitinn Geoffrey Keating (; – ) was an Irish historian. He was born in County Tipperary, Ireland, and is buried in Tubrid Graveyard in the parish of Ballylooby-Duhill. He became a Catholic priest and a poet. Biography It was generally believed unt ...

) and ''Beatha Chaitríona'' (on the life of

Catherine of Alexandria Catherine of Alexandria, also spelled Katherine, was, according to tradition, a Christian saint and Virginity, virgin, who was martyred in the early 4th century at the hands of the emperor Maxentius. According to her hagiography, she was both a ...

) for Francis Óg son of Thomas Blake of Furbogh, County Galway. This work is now in the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. Based in London, it is one of the largest libraries in the world, with an estimated collection of between 170 and 200 million items from multiple countries. As a legal deposit li ...

where it is labelled "Egerton MS 184". In his notes, Ó Catháin described himself as the "tutor and humble dependent" of Blake. He included a Latin

acrostic An acrostic is a poem or other word composition in which the ''first'' letter (or syllable, or word) of each new line (or paragraph, or other recurring feature in the text) spells out a word, message or the alphabet. The term comes from the Fre ...

(a composition in which the first letter of each line spells out a message) which reads ''FRANCISCUS BLAKE DE FORBAGH VIVAT DIU'', "Francis Blake of Forbagh, long may he live". He also wrote a work (classified as manuscript reference "RIA 23 G 4") which contains history, genealogy and poetry, sometime between 1722 and 1729. According to the historian

Nollaig Ó Muraíle Nollaig Ó Muraíle is an Irish scholar. He published an edition of Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh's ''Leabhar na nGenealach'' in 2004. He was admitted to the Royal Irish Academy in 2009. Life and career A native of Knock, County Mayo, Ó Muraíle ...

, Ó Catháin "was aged about sixty" when he "signed his name in manuscript" on 14 June 1724.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:O Cathain, Sean Irish scribes Writers from County Galway 18th-century Irish writers 18th-century Irish male writers Place of birth unknown Place of death unknown Irish-language writers