De Excidio Research Articles

Radegund and Amalfrid in The Wife’s Lament

ABSTRACT Who is the woman in The Wife’s Lament? This essay makes her out to be St Radegund (c. 520–587), deaconess of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers. Reevaluating the narrative syntax mainly of the first half of this poem, the argument finds not the one man conventionally taken to be the woman’s lover or husband in this poem, but four male subjects there whose actions fit the stories of Radegund’s cousin Amalfrid, her husband Clothar, her unnamed but murdered brother, and lastly Lord Jesus. The poet’s main sources are argued to be the two Vitae of St Radegund and the poems of Venantius Fortunatus (c. 530–c. 609), mostly his (and possibly also her) lament De excidio Thoringiae (c. 568). The essay finally claims that The Wife’s Lament is related to the winileodos banned by Charlemagne in 789, and that it was composed in this period as an elegiac riddle for St Radegund.

Narrativity and literariness in receptions of Josephus’s teknophagia story

Abstract In this article, I present an analysis of the narrative discourses and literary elements found in the teknophagia story that originates with Josephus’s Bellum Judaicum and trace the development of those motifs in subsequent Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Ethiopic versions of the story. I first outline the reception history of Josephus within medieval Coptic and Ethiopic literary traditions, by way of the Hebrew Sefer Yosippon and one of its Latin sources, the De Excidio Hierosolymitano. I then illustrate how the literariness of the various authors who reworked the teknophagia story influences a reading of the narrative discourses of each text. In doing so, I emphasize the unique iteration of the account of the cannibalistic mother that appears in the Christian-Arabic and Ethiopic histories, showing how this version of the story develops out of not only earlier stylistic changes, but also from the literary elements introduced into the story by the redactor of the Arabic reworking of the Hebrew Yosippon.

Qui volunt eos cognoscere, Argonautas legant

Abstract The late antique De excidio Troiae historia, supposedly written by a soldier in the Trojan War, Dares the Phrygian, encourages the reader to consult a work called Argonautae. This article discusses three possibilities of how to understand this reference—it could either be a comment by the real author of this pseudonymous work, or the supposed translator Nepos, or the ostensible author Dares. It argues that audiences in antiquity were familiar with the idea of literature written prior to the Trojan War, and debates the possibility that the Trojan Dares might refer to a poem about the Argonauts which was composed by the mythical Orpheus. It comes to the conclusion that the reference is intentionally ambiguous.

Entre la historia y la ficción: Dictis y Dares como modelos de la Historia Karoli Magni (Pseudo-Turpín) y el De gestis Britonum de Jofre de Monmouth

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s De gestis Britonum and Aimeric Picaud’s Historia Karoli Magni are, according to their manuscript fortune, the most successful Latin prose narratives of the Middle Ages. They are also, given their presumed status as stories, the legitimate basis on which the two most productive literary cycles of the Middle Ages are based: the Arthurian matter and the Carolingian matter. The article proposes as hypothesis that both authors knew their respective works and shows how, simultaneously and in parallel, they managed to blend into the historiographical context of their time, through a perfect knowledge of the conventions of the genre; and through authorization strategies that were modeled on the De excidio Troiae of Dares the Phrygian and the Ephemeris belli Troaini of Dictis of Crete

The origin legends of early medieval Britain and Ireland by Lindy Brady

Reviewed by: The origin legends of early medieval Britain and Ireland by Lindy Brady Donato Sitaro (bio) Lindy Brady, The origin legends of early medieval Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. ISBN 9781009225618 (hardback), 9781009225670 (ebook). x + 272 pages. $99.00. Origin myths and legends are prominent features of early medieval writings and mentalities. They became a popular genre, an ever-growing corpus of traditions and pseudo-histories, and eventually a late-antique/early medieval 'scholarly preoccupation', as underlined by Brady & Wadden in the foreword to their edited volume Origin legends in early medieval Western Europe (2022: 4). Despite not being the first recorded origines gentium, the Insular origin myths stand out as precious hermeneutic objects for scholars of early medieval culture, as part of a genre 'that has shaped national identity and collective history from the early medieval period to the present day', as we read in the synopsis. The variety of their approach and their richness in contents and traditions make the British, Irish, Pictish, and Anglo-Saxon origin narratives a perfect subject for a dedicated volume. Discussing these apparently divergent narratives in comparative terms was not an easy task, but Brady bravely attempts it in a relatively compact and easily readable book. Divided into five main chapters, the book is prefaced by a 27-page introductory section, eloquently titled 'The anachronism of nationalism', where modern scholarly debate around the contested concepts of ethnicity, post-Roman identities, and early medieval writers' agendas is summarized and discussed. Brady's approach consciously differs from the two major historiographical standpoints on ethnic identities, as it neither gives excessive weight to the influence of Classical ethnography (as Goffart did), [End Page 156] nor does it look too far forward by extending the effects of enduring ethnic identities from the Migration Period deep into the Middle Ages (as in certain readings by Wolfram and Pohl). Brady decides to look 'sideways' (21) to explore the textual and conceptual interrelations between the origin legends of the British Isles without attempting to construct from the texts a straightforward idea of the development of ethnic identities. She looks at the development of origin stories within and among the texts surveyed, more than outside and beyond them. For this reason, the interpretative keywords for Brady's analysis of the sources are 'discourse' and 'development' (3). Her assessment that the concepts enshrined in early medieval origin narratives were communicating and were part of a shared intellectual milieu is repeated throughout the introduction and beyond (1, 4, 16, 21, 63, 227, 229). This assumption finds support in the first chapter through a survey of the textual history of the Insular works containing origin stories: Gildas's De excidio, Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, the ninth-century Historia Brittonum, and the later Irish Lebor Bretnach and Lebor gabála Érenn. While the first two works are referred to in cursory fashion as embryonic nuclei of traditions that would develop later, the latter three pseudo-histories are discussed in depth throughout the book. The Historia Brittonum is given a justified pre-eminence as 'a valuable microcosm of the intellectual connections which form the focus of the study' (16). After the presentation of the sources, the proper narratological analysis begins: chapters 2, 3, and 4 focus on exile, kin-slaying, and intermarriage and incest, respectively. Having established the interrelated nature of the Insular writings in chapter 1, Brady is able to conduct a comparative survey of shared concepts and their development within three concentric levels of investigation corresponding to the three-part structure of these chapters: (i) first she explores the wider conceptual resonance of the motif in literature, usually through comparison with biblical and classical archetypes; (ii) then she outlines the recurrence of historical episodes involving the motif (cases of exiles or kin-slayers in the early medieval Insular context); and finally (iii) she considers the meaning of the motif within the Insular origin narratives. The second part of these themed chapters, the attempt to show 'resonances of these topics in [historical] early insular society' (138), could have been the trickiest. However, Brady addresses the eventual collision between literary motifs and the 'hard facts' drawn from legal and historical records through...

Contagion of the Jews: Metaphorical and Rhetorical Uses of Sickness, Plague, and Disease in Pseudo-Hegesippus

Drawing upon discourses developed in earlier Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian antiquity, the little-known text De excidio Hierosolymitano, also dubbed ‘Pseudo-Hegesippus’, develops a discourse of Jewish disease within a history of Jerusalem's destruction by the Romans in 70 CE. Based upon Flavius Josephus's Greek Jewish War, this Latin Christian text of Late Antiquity thus deploys a rhetoric of Jewish contagion within its historiographical solution to the Christian theological exigency of explaining the Jews out of history. Far from being an incidental or merely aesthetic component of this work, this article shows that a discourse of Jewish sickness constitutes a central component of Pseudo-Hegesippus's conceptualization and presentation of the end of Jerusalem and the historical demise of the Jews.

The ‘Maria Story’ in Greek, Latin, & Hebrew

This article provides the first close comparative analysis of the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew versions of the ‘Maria Story’ or teknophagia, the account of the mother who ate her child within a besieged Jerusalem first recorded in Flavius Josephus’ Jewish War 6.201–203. Josephus’ original account was written in Greek in the first century. Within the following half-millennium, three Latin versions of the story developed: those of 1) the Latin translation of the War, 2) Rufinus of Aquileia’s translation of Eusebius’ Church History, which contains Josephus’ Greek version of the story, and 3) the Latin adaptation of Pseudo-Hegesippus or On the Destruction of Jerusalem (De Excidio Hierosolymitano). This latter text comprises a late fourth-century Christian rewrite of the War and served as the most important source for a Jewish text that would emerge five hundred years later: the so-called Sefer Yosippon, an early tenth-century Hebrew text which is arguably the first and most important installment of medieval Jewish historiography. Each of these texts has received scholarly attention, and sometimes several of them have been discussed together; the Maria Story itself has not escaped scholarly treatment. Yet for all this research the exact relationship between these texts and particularly their accounts of the Maria Story has never been explained clearly and in detail. This article fills this gap in the research and uses the Maria Story to explore source-critical, literary, philological, and rhetorical questions pertaining to these five versions of the Maria Story, with an emphasis upon De Excidio and Sefer Yosippon, the most understudied iterations of this developing ancient and medieval tradition, enhancing scholarly knowledge and appreciation of all these works as distinctive iterations of an interconnected web of tradition.

The ‘Maria Story’ in Greek, Latin, & Hebrew

This article provides the first close comparative analysis of the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew versions of the ‘Maria Story’ or teknophagia, the account of the mother who ate her child within a besieged Jerusalem first recorded in Flavius Josephus’ Jewish War 6.201–203. Josephus’ original account was written in Greek in the first century. Within the following half-millennium, three Latin versions of the story developed: those of 1) the Latin translation of the War, 2) Rufinus of Aquileia’s translation of Eusebius’ Church History, which contains Josephus’ Greek version of the story, and 3) the Latin adaptation of Pseudo-Hegesippus or On the Destruction of Jerusalem (De Excidio Hierosolymitano). This latter text comprises a late fourth-century Christian rewrite of the War and served as the most important source for a Jewish text that would emerge five hundred years later: the so-called Sefer Yosippon, an early tenth-century Hebrew text which is arguably the first and most important installment of medieval Jewish historiography. Each of these texts has received scholarly attention, and sometimes several of them have been discussed together; the Maria Story itself has not escaped scholarly treatment. Yet for all this research the exact relationship between these texts and particularly their accounts of the Maria Story has never been explained clearly and in detail. This article fills this gap in the research and uses the Maria Story to explore source-critical, literary, philological, and rhetorical questions pertaining to these five versions of the Maria Story, with an emphasis upon De Excidio and Sefer Yosippon, the most understudied iterations of this developing ancient and medieval tradition, enhancing scholarly knowledge and appreciation of all these works as distinctive iterations of an interconnected web of tradition.

Stephen J. Joyce, The Legacy of Gildas: Constructions of Authority in the Early Medieval West. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2022, x, 190 pp.

Abstract The British-Latin writer Gildas (493‐570) is an enduring presence in Celtic tradition. So this monograph is welcome. Its author, thanks to his command of Latin, places Gildas firmly within the context of classical, patristic, and early medieval learning, identifying him as one who contributed much to understanding of “political and ecclesiastical authority in the early medieval West” (11). The volume, consisting of six chapters, starts off with the relation of Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae to other sources for the early Middle Ages (St. Patrick’s Confession, Bede, the ninth-century Historia Brittonum), all of them problematic, especially for fifth- and sixth-century dates. (Yet the difficulties are less than imagined.) In chapter two we encounter images of Gildas, who (53) devised “a providential history of Britain” to underpin his own “authority on Church law.” Chapter three has as subject the monastic features of De Excidio, with useful statements on Gildas as a cleric “directed by God to edify a fallen kingship and priesthood” (77). The remaining three chapters provide explorations of Gildas’s influence on St. Columbanus (d. 615), Hiberno-Latin canon law, and Bede (d. 737). There follow a conclusion and some ancillary matter.

Compilation as Palimpsest

Abstract This article offers an initial assessment of the multiple and varied uses of a manuscript of the Liber Floridus as a source of the early thirteenth-century Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César. The material deriving from Lambert de Saint-Omer’s twelfth-century encyclopaedic compilation ranges from idiosyncratic chronologies and genealogies to his abridged versions of Daretis Phrygii de excidio Troiae historia and the Epitome of Julius Valerius. Uncovering the origins of these passages compiled in the Liber Floridus alters our understanding of the composition of the Histoire ancienne and provides new evidence of the wider legacy of Lambert’s compilation.

Disease and the Christian Discourse of Jewish Death in "De Excidio Hierosolymitano" 5, 2

The late-fourth century work called On the Destruction of Jerusalem (De Excidio Hierosolymitano), or “Pseudo-Hegesippus”, records the history of the Roman-Jewish War (66-73 CE) and particularly the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. As a Christian version of this history based largely upon Flavius Josephus’ earlier Jewish War, De Excidio understands himself to be telling the story of the effective death of the Jews in history. One major aspect of this narrative, I argue, is a discourse of Jewish disease, wherein Ps-Hegesippus portrays the Jews as “sick” with the plague of civil insurrection and sedition. But this discourse goes much further as well, cutting to the very core of De Excidio’s narrative logic. Here I argue that this discourse of Jewish disease finds its most powerful expression in one particular chapter of the work, Book 5, Chapter 2. I show that De Excidio 5.2 epitomizes the work’s rhetoric of Jewish contagion, which can nevertheless be traced throughout the entirety of the work.

Writing the Jews out of History: Pseudo-Hegesippus, Classical Historiography, and the Codification of Christian Anti-Judaism in Late Antiquity

AbstractScholarly narratives of the development of Christian anti-Jewish thinking in antiquity routinely cite a number of standard, well-known authors: from Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Justin Martyr in earlier centuries to Eusebius, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine in the fourth and early fifth centuries. The anonymous author known as Pseudo-Hegesippus, to whom is attributed a late fourth-century Latin work called On the Destruction of Jerusalem (De Excidio Hierosolymitano), rarely appears in such discussions. This has largely to do with the fact that this text and its author are effectively unknown entities within contemporary scholarship in this area (scholars familiar with Pseudo-Hegesippus tend to be specialists in medieval Latin texts and manuscripts). But “Pseudo-Hegesippus” represents a critical contribution to the mosaic of Christian anti-Jewish discourse in late antiquity. De Excidio's generic identity as a Christian piece of classical historiography makes it a unique form of ancient anti-Jewish propaganda. This genre, tied to De Excidio's probable context of writing—the wake of the emperor Julian's abortive attempt to rebuild the Jerusalem Temple, resurrect a robust Judaism, and remove Christians from public engagement with classical culture—renders De Excidio an important Christian artifact of both anti-Judaism and pro-classicism at the same time. This article situates Pseudo-Hegesippus in a lineage of Christian anti-Jewish historical thinking, argues that De Excidio codifies that discourse in a significant and singular way, frames this contribution in terms of its apparent socio-historical context, and cites De Excidio's later influence and reception as testaments to its rightful place in the history of Christian anti-Judaism, a place that modern scholarship has yet to afford it. As a piece of classical historiography that mirrors not Christian historians—like Eusebius and others—but the historians of the broader “pagan” Greco-Roman world—like Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus—De Excidio leverages a cultural communicative medium particularly well equipped to undergird and fuel the Christian historiographical imagination and its anti-Jewish projections.

A New King David for Late Antiquity: Classical Exemplarity and Biblical Personality in Pseudo-Hegesippus

In late ancient Christian literature, King David is ubiquitous. Not simply cited as the famous author of many psalms, he almost always appears as a model of penitence, a foreshadow of Christ, or a paradigm of Christian virtues and values. But not always. In one fourth-century Christian text, King David appears in a striking and distinctive relief. This Latin text, known as De excidio Hierosolymitano (On the Destruction of Jerusalem), sometimes called PseudoHegesippus, presents King David as a figure familiar from Judaeo-Christian tradition, but in a way that resonates most strongly with classical Greco-Roman literary norms. This text rewrites Josephus’s Jewish War from a Christian perspective, and mentions David at a dozen points. In each case, David appears as an exemplum associated with a particular biblical episode or theme. Often, the treatment of these episodes in Josephus or other early Christian literature helps explain why Pseudo-Hegesippus presents David in particular lights. However, taking all of the appearances of David in De Excidio into view, this article shows that Pseudo-Hegesippus is not only beholden to biblical, Josephan, or early Christian precedents, but creatively constructs his own portrait of David within his historiographical framework. This article then suggests that this David’s rhetorical valence and distinctive character are best explained vis-à-vis the traditional (Greek and) Roman use of exempla inasmuch as Pseudo-Hegesippus’s David conspicuously lacks any of the theological, doctrinal, or ethical features so characteristic of his portrayal in most of ancient Christian literature. Pseudo-Hegesippus portrays King David in terms resonant of both Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian traditions.

De Excidio Patriae: civic discourse in Gildas’ Britain

This article explores the use of civic discourse in Gildas’ De Excidio Britonum. It argues that such language and imagery functioned within a larger dialectical argument that exhorted readers to choose virtue over vice. Gildas assigned the Britons collective moral agency by styling them citizens (cives) of a shared homeland (patria) defined by cities (civitates). Due to the citizens’ moral failings, however, this urban landscape had been compromised: enemies had destroyed the patria’s cities, rendering it a place of desolation. Only a return to virtue could save the Britons from ruin and grant them access to heavenly Jerusalem.

Ovid's Heroides 3 and the inventio of Criseyde in the Medieval Matter of Troy

Abstract In its focus on Briseis, Heroides 3 develops an amatory reading of the traffic in women depicted in the Iliad. Heroides 3 transmitted this Ovidian version of the Homeric Briseis to the Medieval West in the absence of the Homeric epics. The medieval story of Briseida as the lover of Troilus and Diomedes, derived from Dares's De excidio Troiae historia, intersected with medieval versions of Heroides 3, both in Latin and vernacular, resulting in the re-naming of Briseida as Criseyde in order to distinguish between the Ovidian and medieval figures.

From the Editor

From the Editor Andy Cain This robust issue, which features twelve pioneering studies by fourteen different authors, typifies JLA's mission to showcase cutting-edge scholarship on all aspects of the late antique world. Collectively spanning the third through eighth centuries, these articles whisk us off to numerous locales, such as Egypt, the Middle East, Gaul, Italy, and the Balkans. They take deep dives into a broad swath of the material culture of the period, and they interface with written sources in an array of languages (Greek, Coptic, Latin, Syriac, and Arabic). Their disciplinary coverage, moreover, is comprehensive, as they make noteworthy advances in everything from papyrology, epigraphy, textual criticism, numismatics, and archaeology, to the history of late antique society, politics, economics, literature, law, religion, medicine and art. Anna Dolganov and Éric Rebillard provide a critical edition, translation, commentary, and interpretive essay on the well-known papyrus P.Mil.Vogl. VI 287. After arguing against a recent identification of it as the transcript of a trial of Christians, they propose that it records not a trial at all but instead a preliminary hearing for an official accused of maladministration, and they also suggest that this fragmentary papyrus belongs to the archive of a prominent office-holding family from the Arsinoite nome. Robert Chenault establishes 369 as the date of Symmachus's embassy to the imperial court at Trier, where he addressed panegyrics to Valentinian I and Gratian, and he gives us a nuanced analysis of this embassy which yields valuable new insights into not only Symmachus's career but also relations between the senate and imperial court at the time. Duncan MacRae examines the anonymous fourth-century De excidio Hierosolymitano, which often is misunderstood as a mere translation of Josephus's historiography. Focusing on an episode within this work (the sexual assault of the Roman aristocrat Paulina in the temple of Isis), MacRae compellingly demonstrates that its author subtly reworks Josephan material to engage with polemic against paganism and with issues surrounding aristocratic marriage and asceticism in contemporary Rome. In an addendum to his substantial 2017 JLA article, Michael Kulikowski sheds further light on the corpus of bronze tesserae of urban and praetorian prefects from late and post-imperial Italy by adducing four previously unknown tesserae (and noting the re-appearance of two more thought to be lost) which introduce one new prefect to the fifth-century fasti. Matthew Cobb considers why the major Egyptian port city of Berenike, after a period of decline, witnessed a sharp upsurge in trade activity during Late Antiquity. [End Page 175] Taking into account recently discovered epigraphic and archaeological evidence, he argues that this revival was tied closely to the Blemmyes's local influence and control of Berenike. Andrei Gandila challenges the prevailing method of studying coin finds in the Balkans, with its heavy reliance on written sources, and proposes a stronger focus on material culture. As he cogently shows, the archaeological and numismatic evidence exposes the local economy as an artificial construct driven by the region's heavy militarization as well as by the state-controlled annona dispatched to the garrisons defending the Danube frontier during the long sixth century. Karen Britt and Ra'anan Boustan forge a new approach to the famous Elephant Mosaic from the fifth-century synagogue at Huqoq in Galilee. Establishing that it evokes a historical episode from the Hellenistic period and is not based on a biblical story (as usually is thought), they make the case that Jewish communities in Galilee had interests in the non-biblical past and actively engaged with broader cultural and artistic trends than scholars hitherto have assumed to be the case. Jordan Pickett challenges current scholarly orthodoxy about why Roman thermae were abandoned or repurposed by the sixth or early seventh century, and he insightfully argues that the Roman state phased them out in part to curtail social unrest and violence for which these grand public baths increasingly had become a breeding ground. Janet Wade explores another source of popular unrest, the circus factions and their partisans. Whereas most scholars have focused on their land-based activities, she adduces fourth- to seventh-century sources documenting their maritime violence (piracy, etc.) and affirms just...

Jewish National Decline and Biblical Figures as ClassicalExempla: Moses, Aaron, Joshua, David, and Elisha inDe Excidio5.2.1

AbstractThe fourth century of the Common Era was a period significant for witnessing the effective birth of Christian historiography and the (putatively) definitive separation of ‘Jew’ and ‘Christian’ as distinctive identities. A text emerged, known as Pseudo-Hegesippus orDe Excidio Hierosolymitano(On the Destruction of Jerusalem). This text illustrates how Christian historiography and Christian anti-Jewish ideology at that time could engage with the traditions of classical antiquity. In particular, this article argues that Pseudo-Hegesippus deploys figures from the Hebrew Bible in the mode of classicalexemplaand that it does so within the largely classical conceptual framework of national decline. For Pseudo-Hegesippus, biblical figures presented as classicalexemplaserve to illustrate the historical decline of the Jews until their effective end in 70 CE (when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple). One passage,De Excidio5.2.1, and its enlistment of five Hebrew heroes illustrates this point particularly well. The use of exemplarity and the theme of national decline employed there help us appreciateDe Excidioas a distinctive contribution to early Christian historiography and anti-Jewish literature in late antiquity; this expands our ability to imagine the ways in which fourth-century Christian authors could conceive of and articulate Jewish history in classical terms.

A New Source for mons Badonicus? Returning to the Irish life of Finnian of Clonard

This paper examines a report describing conflict between Saxons and Britons in the Irish life of Finnian of Clonard. It connects this report to the battle at Llongborth, remembered in an early medieval Welsh poem, and to the siege of 'mons' Badonicus, reported by a variety of early medieval insular historians. Both battles have been linked to the legendary King Arthur. In connecting these battles to an entry in 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle' and to the immediate context of Gildas' 'De excidio Britanniae', this article offers a date for 'mons Badonicus' in the early 480s and conjectures that the 'Age of Arthur', if historical, postdates the publication of 'De excidio'.

Pseudo-Hegesippus at Antioch? Testing a Hypothesis for the Provenance of the De Excidio Hierosolymitano

A significant proportion of the meager scholarship that treats Pseudo-Hegesippus, or De Excidio Hierosolymitano, has been spent arguing about whether or not Ambrose was the author of the work. Part and parcel of this argument has been the implicit or explicit location of the text’s provenance in Rome. However, there are very good reasons for believing that the text, or the text’s author, hailed from Antioch in Syria instead; at the very least he held some significant attachment to that city. Here I argue that the text of De Excidio suggests for itself an Antiochene author. By presenting together a series of evidence that suggests an Antiochene provenance for De Excidio, I submit that scholarship should at least retain the possibility that De Excidio is a product of Antioch (or an Antiochene), as this is a more likely provenance than Rome.

St Samson of Dol and the Earliest History of Brittany, Cornwall and Wales, ed. Lynette Olson

This collection of essays arises from a symposium on the First Life of St Samson of Dol held at the University of Sydney in 2013. As the editor, Lynette Olson, explains in her introductory chapter, the symposium was prompted by two developments: the publication of Pierre Flobert’s critical edition and translation of the text in 1997, and the appearance of an important article on the subject by Richard Sowerby in the journal Francia in 2011. The First Life of St Samson, written at the saint’s foundation of Dol in the north of Brittany, is the most substantial written source for Brittany, Cornwall and Wales surviving from the period between Gildas’s sixth-century De excidio Britonum and ninth-century works such as the Historia Brittonum and Wrdisten’s Life of St Winwoloe. However, fundamental questions surrounding the work’s purpose, date and relationship with its oral and written sources remain hotly disputed. The present volume consists of eight chapters, including the editor’s introduction. The rationale behind the ordering of the chapters is not entirely clear. Essential discussion of the background of the saint and his contemporaries in the sixth century may be found in Chapters Five (Ian Wood) and Seven (Jonathan Wooding). Wood investigates the only contemporary historical source for St Samson, the record of the Council of Paris (which Wood would date specifically to 561), and he places Samson’s continental career in context by comparing him with Columbanus and the latter’s various British followers. Wooding skilfully employs the exiguous records for early British monasticism to show that the First Life of St Samson’s treatment of monastic practice can be understood within the context of early debates about asceticism, deference towards authority, and pastoral responsibility. The posthumous cult of St Samson in Wales and Cornwall comes into view in Chapters Two (Richard Sowerby) and Eight (Karen Jankulak). Sowerby, in what is probably the most original study in the volume, draws attention to the Life’s considerable interest in the activities of Samson’s near relations. It is suggested that Samson’s relatives may have encouraged an early cult of Samson in order to defend their own continuing positions of authority in monasteries associated with Samson, and that this same impulse may have resulted in the production of the First Life’s primary written source (called the Vita primigenia throughout the volume), which Sowerby maintains was written in Cornwall. Jankulak addresses the question of Samson’s cult in Wales using place-names and dedications, but finds the evidence wanting. Nonetheless, by examining the implications of this, she makes important observations about the processes that initiated and prolonged the commemoration of saints in the early Middle Ages. Chapters Three (Joseph-Claude Poulin), Four (Caroline Brett) and Six (Constant Mews) address the textual questions surrounding the Life more directly. Poulin reviews the debate about the text’s date and its relationship with the Vita primigenia, and eventually decides that the text belongs to the late eighth century on account of its apparent use of two texts that cannot be shown to have circulated widely before the middle of the eighth century. Brett revisits the observation that many of the episodes in the First Life of St Samson seem to be modelled on Venantius Fortunatus’ Life of St Paternus of Avranches, and she points out that this complicates Sowerby’s view about the existence of an earlier Cornish Life of St Samson. She then proceeds to trace the intertwined fortunes of the cults of SS Samson and Paternus as far as the twelfth century. Finally, Mews compares the Life’s stance on liturgical practice with the views espoused in the tract Ratio de cursus, which sought to justify existing Irish and Gallican liturgical practices in the face of reforming pressure from Rome. The differences in standpoint detected by Mews are explained in terms of chronology, the Life reflecting more closely the views of the late seventh century and the Ratio those of the mid-eighth.