Author: MacDonald, Archibald
Biography:
MACDONALD, Archibald (1739-1814: ODNB)
His surname is given as M’Donald on title-pages and in library catalogues and reference works variously as McDonald, MacDonald or Macdonald. He was born in Knoydart, Lochaber, in the Western Highlands of Scotland, in 1739. No birth record has been found and the name is common in the area, but according to ODNB his mother was Mary Cameron and his father was the Jacobite Ranald Macdonald, one of 140 rebels convicted of treason and executed in 1746. He was sent to Douai, France, to be educated for the Roman Catholic priesthood, and entered the Benedictine monastery there in 1756, taking the name “Benedict.” He was appointed missionary to Liverpool in 1783 and founded the Benedictine mission of St. Peter’s, Seel St., there in 1788. He contributed to his Catholic community both by pastoral duties and by publishing extensively—pamphlets on liturgical issues, anthologies of essays on religious topics, discourses on passages from the gospels, and A Companion to the Altar (1792). His literary interests focused on Scotland, particularly his defence of the authenticity of the Ossian poems produced by James Macpherson (q.v.). His first rendering of Ossianic fragments into English verse is dated from Seel St. and dedicated to the Highland Society of Scotland, which had just released its Reporton the controversy (1805). He died at St. Peter’s on 29 July 1814. (ODNB 8 May 2023; T. B. Snow, Obit Book of the English Benedictines from 1800 to 1912 [1913]; GM Sept. 1814, 298)
Other Names:
- Archibald McDonald