An annotated bibliography of secondary literature on St Patrick is planned as an Ancillary Volume to the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of Medieval Latin from Celtic Sources, to bear the title Clavis Patricii III. (CP I was Kieran Devine’s then-groundbreaking work A Computer-Generated Concordance to the Libri Epistolarum of Saint Patrick, published by the Academy in Dublin in 1989, while CP II was Ludwig Bieler’s Libri Epistolarum Sancti Patricii Episcopi, a 1993 single-volume reprint of the now-canonical edition of the Saint’s Latin works that had originally been published in two parts, in Classica et Mediaevalia in 1950 and 1951; a digital version of this now serves as the central pillar of the present on-line HyperStack.)

For now, the current trial digital “beta” version of the bibliography is being made available as a layer of the Stack to serve as (a) an omnibus elucidator of references made throughout the other layers, (b) a resource that should prove useful in its own right, and (c) a prompt to readers to send in corrections or additional items for inclusion in a definitive CP III (all such submissions will be verified and, if accepted, will be acknowledged, with thanks; they should be sent to DMLCS at ria.ie).

Some initial, draft work on the bibliography was handed over by Dr (now Professor) David Dumville in the mid-1980s to Dr Anthony Harvey, by whom over many years it was researched, systematized and expanded to something approaching its current size. Subsequently digitized by Dr Stephanie Hayes-Healy, the result has since been further revised, supplemented and adapted to Stack-specific requirements by Hayley Humphrey, Roman Bleier, Daniela Schulz and Dr Franz Fischer.

The annotation has been limited, according to principles laid down by the DMLCS Editorial Board, to justifying the inclusion of items whose presence is not explained by their titles, or identifying the subjects being raised therein.