It is usually thought that during the seventh century, a formal split in the Irish Church had resulted in the creation of two rival factions: a “Roman party” of reform-minded ecclesiastics, and an “Irish party” intent instead on maintaining current practices. A partial record of their decades-long schism has been thought to be preserved in the Irish canonical compilation, the Collectio canonum Hibernensis, which attributes a substantial number of canons either to “Roman synods” or to “Irish synods,” and we have understood this to reflect a period in which the two groups had sought to advance their cause by holding separate synods from which their opponents were excluded. The foundations for this interpretation of the “Roman” and “Irish” canons of the Hibernensis were laid more than a century ago, but more recent scholarship provides reasons for rethinking the hypothesis. The article focuses especially on one of the texts which the compilers of the Hibernensis understood to be the work of the “Romans” — a short text which has come to be known as the “Second Synod of St. Patrick” — and argues that certain details within the text suggest an association with documents produced on the Continent, in the network of monasteries founded by the Irish peregrinus Columbanus. I suggest a new context for the creation of the “Second Synod of St. Patrick,” and argue that this in turn offers a new way of thinking about the meaning of the “Roman synods” and “Irish synods” attested in the Hibernensis.

This article analyzes the connections between the oral genres displayed by Gitano (Spanish Gypsy) children and adults during religious instruction classes at an Evangelist church and the writings produced by Gitano children in an after-school computer program in the same community. Results are discussed in relation to two strands of received assumptions regarding Gypsy culture and recent theoretical insights in the study of literacy and discourse. On one hand, previous portraits of Gitano culture as exclusively oral need to be revised, in line with a more social and situated perspective on literacy. On the other, the results are a basis for critical examination of dominant explanations regarding the educational failure of Gitano children, an argument that highlights the importance of engaging intratextual linguistic analysis with discussions of the social and institutional orders.We first thank the research participants for their warm welcome to the different sites that are part of this study. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments. This study began when David Poveda worked in the School of Education and Humanities of the University of Castilla-La Mancha, where Ana Cano and Manuel Palomares-Valera completed their training. The research project was funded by the University of Castilla-La Mancha through an internal research grant (Principal Investigator: Beatriz Martín).

A crucial division of linguistic labor is that among metalinguistic labors. Who is authorized to speak about language, how, and where? Language ideologies not only ascribe different functions to different languages; they also ascribe different sorts of metadiscourse to speakers of (or about) those languages. Drawing from archival and field work, this article traces the ways particular Soviet and post-Soviet institutions and actors modeled and regimented metapragmatic discourses, specifically through stage and screen practices and representations that hypercontextualized utterances in Romani. They became so hegemonic that, in public arenas, Romani speakers spoke only about nonreferential functions; only in less well broadcast contexts (and mainly with other Roma) did they articulate metalinguistic and metareferential discourses. These practices reverse and contrast with the mainstream metapragmatics of Russian. Language ideologies commonly rank codes and metadiscourses; this case illuminates not only that they do so, but also how they do so, and it suggests what their social effects may be.