A New Date for the Composition of the Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii

Abstract

THE fame of the Legend of St Patrick's is probably the most extensive of any in the vast corpus of mediaeval vision-literature that has come down to us. References to the legend go back as far as the late twelfth century in Jocelyn of Furness and Gerald the XVelshman; in the thirteenth century a portion of it was copied in the Speculum Historiale of Vincent of Beauvais; Dante undoubtedly had an intimate knowledge of it in one of its many literary versions; Froissart alludes to it in the fourteenth century, and in the sixteenth Rabelais and Ariosto knew it. Calderon wrote a play based upon the legend, and Shakespeare relied upon his audience's knowledge of it in Hamlet. As late as the nineteenth century, Southey wrote a poem on the theme. The impressive number of manuscripts in European libraries of the literary version of the legend in both Latin and the vernacular languages is confirmatory of the influence it had upon the imagination of the Middle Ages.' Very early in its history the legend precipitated a pilgrimage to the physical locality of the Purgatory on Station Island in Lough Derg in County Donegal, Ireland, and the history of that pilgrimage is well docurmiented from the thirteenth century until the time of the suppression of the site in the fifteenth century.2 It is important from the beginning to distinguish between the Purgatory of St Patrick, that physical site in Ireland, alleged to have been indicated to the saint in answer to his prayers to convert the incredulous Celts, and the subsequent literary form which the legend took. If in 1925 Van der Zanden could say of the Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii of the monk of Saltrey that it was si peu connu de nos jours,3 it could, I suppose, be safely said that any direct familiarity with the literary version of the legend is today all but defunct except for the knowledge of it by a handful of mediaevalists. The amount of misinformation which has been circulated about the Tractatus is overwhelming. In spite of the fact that in the manuscript the author is indicated only by a capital H (which was only much later expanded into Henricus),4 one literary historian refers to him as Henry of Salisbury, confusing Salisberiensis with Salteriensis.5 Among earlier antiquarians he was very arbitrarily assigned the name Hugh (Hugo). But it is in the area of dating the composition of the Tractatus that the most confusion has taken place. Lucien Foulet has summarized the evidence for a terminus ad quem and a quo