Irish Saints Research Articles

Making St Brigit real in the early middle ages

Abstract: Brigit of Kildare is the first Irish saint to be celebrated in detail by Irish writers. Her cult enjoyed great depth and popularity. Nevertheless, Brigit's very existence has been doubted; she has been recast as a pre-Christian goddess despite an overwhelming disparity in evidence. This paper reframes our approaches to the origins of her cult through examining how the earliest writers understood her and made her real for their audiences, real through shaping her sanctity, her historicity and her family relationships. They placed Brigit along a gender continuum where sanctity intersected biology. Yet, Brigit has been treated differently to Irish male saints, becoming a secondary character in her own biographies, reductively overshadowed by a barely attested goddess. It is time for a revitalised appreciation of Brigit as an actual woman, depicted by her first hagiographers as pushing against the grain of an elitist and patriarchal society.

Making St Brigit real in the early middle ages

Brigit of Kildare is the first Irish saint to be celebrated in detail by Irish writers. Her cult enjoyed great depth and popularity. Nevertheless, Brigit’s very existence has been doubted; she has been recast as a pre-Christian goddess despite an overwhelming disparity in evidence. This paper reframes our approaches to the origins of her cult through examining how the earliest writers understood her and made her real for their audiences, real through shaping her sanctity, her historicity and her family relationships. They placed Brigit along a gender continuum where sanctity intersected biology. Yet, Brigit has been treated differently to Irish male saints, becoming a secondary character in her own biographies, reductively overshadowed by a barely attested goddess. It is time for a revitalised appreciation of Brigit as an actual woman, depicted by her first hagiographers as pushing against the grain of an elitist and patriarchal society.

Editor’s Note

ISLE 30.1 opens with the theme of the blue humanities in the article “Noise on the Ocean Before ‘Pollution’: The Voyage of Saint Brendan” by Liam Lewis, who argues that revisiting “The Voyage of Saint Brendan, a short and popular text recounting an Irish saint’s journey across the sea to visit an earthly Paradise ( … ) from an acoustemological perspective can tell us a great deal about the history of noise on the ocean.” Graham Huggan and Pippa Marland, in “Queer Blue Sea: Sexuality and the Aquatic Uncanny in Philip Hoare’s Translantic Eco-narratives,” bring attention to Hoare’s writing in order to “argue for an expanded view of ( … ) eco-narrative—that charts its littoral and oceanic dimensions,” and “claim that Hoare articulates a vision of nature that is both queer and ecological.” Nicholas Tyler Reich’s essay, “Queer Ecology in (Gay) Post-Pastoral Cinema,” “considers how queer ecology complicates the ways in which pastoral gayness on screen imbricates in more-than-human natures and how ecological belonging manifests in a contemporary gay mise-en-scène.” What Reich aims to understand “is the extent of queer work contemporary gay pastoral cinema performs by invoking what Terry Gifford calls the ‘post-pastoral’ mode, in particular.”

The Cult of Kollumkilli in Medieval Scandinavia

References to the veneration of Colum Cille in medieval Iceland and Norway use both versions of his name adapted to Old Norse conventions: Kolumba and Kollumkilli. Medieval primstaven refer to the saint distinctly as Kolbjørn med laksen ‘Kolbjørn with the salmon’. In the medieval Icelandic texts Landnámabók and Kjalnesinga saga, a presumed version of St Patrick presents Orlyg, a Norse settler wishing to migrate to Iceland, with several gifts intended to allow the successful foundation of a church dedicated to Colum Cille upon arrival. A church dedicated to the saint was also present in Bergen between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, indicating the presence of a cult in the area. Considering this evidence, this article discusses the way in which a cult dedicated to Colum Cille in medieval Scandinavia might be understood through medieval Norse sources, and especially the way in which they emphasise his eminence as an Irish saint.

The Afterlife of St Cuthbert: Place, Texts and Ascetic Tradition, 690–1500

The Afterlife of St Cuthbert: Place, Texts and Ascetic Tradition, 690–1500

Sacred Sisters: Gender, Sanctity and Power in Medieval Ireland

Sacred Sisters: Gender, Sanctity and Power in Medieval Ireland

The Lives of Guénolé and Idunet: A Study of the Memory of the Abbey of Landévennec

The abbey of Landévennec, situated in western Brittany, experienced political and religious change beginning in the ninth century with the advent of the Benedictine Rule, a consequence of the further imposition of Carolingian hegemony. Prior to this, the community had used the Irish rule and tonsure and practised a rigorous ascetic lifestyle. Using the hagiographies of St Guénolé, Landévennec’s founder, and St Idunet, his little-known disciple, this article explores how the community of Landévennec understood and reacted to the transforming climate in Brittany. It reveals that the community of Landévennec chose to remember and record a past in which the community had close ties to Irish saints and Ireland more generally, in order to reflect on the tumultuous present and maintain continuity with their glorious past, now distant.

Il santo che non ti aspetti : Sorprese ed eccentricità dell’agiografia medievale

Hagiography is one of the literary genres in which unconventional theological and moral conceptions are most freely expressed, revealing a less uniform Middle Ages than we imagine. The article presents some examples from texts originating in different areas, from the Greek Mediterranean to Ireland, from late antiquity to the late Middle Ages. Saints such as the Breton Macutus, Epiphanius of Salamis, the Edessenian martyrs and several Irish abbots are described as acting out of touchiness, vindictiveness, jealousy and competition. In the stories of other Irish saints, including Bridget, we read the miracle of the elimination of an unwanted foetus from his mother’s womb. The Bolognese Proculus is celebrated for having cold-bloodedly murdered his persecutor. The Greek Irene is physically assumed into heaven. Finally, in the Navigatio Brendani, the figure of Judas is granted a quite exceptional piety. All these anomalies arouse some reactions of censorship and mitigation in the reception and transmission of these texts, but fundamentally they are accepted and preserved, testifying to the doctrinal openness and variety still possible in medieval times.

Four Offaly saints. The Lives of Ciar�n of Clonmacnoise, Ciar�n of Slm�n of Lynally and F�on�n of Kinnitty by P�draig � Riain (review)

244 North American journal of Celtic studies The final chapter, ‘Dogs in the nighttime’, constitutes all of the third section of the book proper. Here the author invites us to pay attention to subjects where the lawbooks are particularly silent. In this case, it is noted that despite the fact that the medieval literature is full of graphic scenes of violence, the lawbooks are strangely reticent on the subject. This silence is even more striking when compared to the Welsh chronicles, such as Brut y tywysogion, and contemporary laws in England, which are very detailed in their descriptions of violent acts and the resulting compensation and/or punishment. This is not to say that the Welsh lawbooks do not have detailed schemas for compensation for various types of injuries; they do, the Value of Limbs, (183–185). But why the silence on violence? The author suggests that the silence is deliberate on the part of the redactors (201). The purpose of this silence seems to be a deliberate effort to contrast contemporary depictions of the Welsh as ruled by violence, and instead to depict the Welsh as strong, yet ‘ruled by law and grounded in agriculture’ (211). The conclusion reminds readers of the multiple realities depicted in the Welsh lawbooks and of the ways that symbolic interpretations, and not necessarily literal ones, can further our understanding of the Welsh legal material. Most of us who work with medieval legal texts are trained to approach the law with an eye towards a literal interpretation of what the texts say. Surely, what they say must be ‘true’. As Robin Chapman Stacey demonstrates, ‘true’ does not have to mean ‘literal’, although it sometimes can mean just that. ‘True’ can also mean metaphorical and symbolic . And the ‘truths’ presented in the lawbooks are never too far away from contemporary literary texts, or political events, or current intellectual trends within a wider European context. Only a scholar of Robin Chapman Stacey’s caliber could have produced such a scholarly work as this. She has broadened and deepened our understanding of not just the Welsh legal texts, but also the ways in which the literary texts interact with and inform our understanding of the laws. By combining both points of view, new ways of interpreting both types of texts emerge. The analytical model presented here will inform future generations of scholars both within and outside the field of Welsh law. Four Offaly saints. The Lives of Ciarán of Clonmacnoise, Ciarán of Seir, Colmán of Lynally and Fíonán of Kinnitty, comp. & trans. Pádraig Ó Riain. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2018. ISBN: 978-1-84682-704-4. xvii + 142 pp. $19.95 (paper). Gregory J. Darling Hostos Community College and Fordham University Gregory J. Darling [gregorydarling@msn.com] obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of English at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2003. His dissertation was based on a medieval Irish manuscript. He currently teaches in New York City at Hostos Community College and Monroe College. Reviews 245 In Four Offaly saints, Pádraig Ó Riain presents the reader with a masterpiece of hagiography —replete with photographs and maps—grounded in careful and thorough scholarship on the lives of St. Ciarán of Clonmacnoise, St. Ciarán of Seir, St. Colmán of Lynally, and St. Fíonán of Kinnitty—four early saints associated with the modern-day county of Offaly in the center of Ireland. Ó Riain notes that, after the publication of his Four Tipperary saints, he was asked to write on the saints of Offaly. He begins by pointing out in the Introduction the value of hagiography if it cannot be considered history per se: If hagiography is not history, as is now generally held, what value attaches to Lives of saints? Largely confined to patrons of substantial churches, Irish saints’ Lives can be of considerable value, not because they throw much light on their subjects but because they reveal how the traditions surrounding the saints might be used to protect and promote the interests of the communities that hold them in high regard (xiii). Hagiography, in other words, can highlight the ‘interests’ of groups holding traditions about the saints in...

Richard Sharpe 1954–2020

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3318/ERIU.2020.70.9 Ériu LXX (2020) 1–4 Royal Irish Academy RICHARD SHARPE 1954–2020 Richard Sharpe was a giant of scholarship and an extraordinary ­ personality. A proud Yorkshireman, he was trained in Cambridge, first in Classics, then in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (counting Kathleen Hughes among his teachers). His doctoral thesis, completed in 1980, formed the basis of his magisterial Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives, published in 1991. Even in the early stages of his career no-one could have been in doubt of his talent and industry (Raasay: a study in island history—the first volume of his work on Raasay—had appeared in 1977), but in the 1980s it was no easy thing to find a comfortable position in academia, especially in Britain—something he often recalled in more recent times to give comfort and hope to younger academics struggling to establish themselves. Although his early career did not follow the path he might have expected and hoped for, his ravenous curiosity and insatiable appetite for work ensured that wherever he went and whatever he undertook he would deepen his knowledge and make enduring contributions to scholarship. After nearly a decade at the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, he became reader of Diplomatic in Oxford in 1990 and professor in 1998. It is impossible for any one scholar to do justice to Richard’s immense output and the impact of his work in all the fields in which he distinguished himself. Even a survey of his contributions to Irish Studies is a tall order, for few scholars have roamed so widely, worked so thoroughly or thought so Richard Sharpe photographed at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin in 2013, on the occasion of the launch of his book Roderick O’Flaherty’s letters to William Moylneux,Edward Lhywd,and Samuel Moylneux,1696–1709.(Photo: John Ohle) 2 MÍCHEÁL HOYNE critically. Ireland was for him a second home, and he was deeply gratified to become an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2018. Many of Richard’s Irish papers ‘had legs’ . His first contribution to this journal (‘Hiberno-Latin laicus, Irish láech and the Devil’s men’, Ériu 30 (1979), 75–92), is a characteristic piece, displaying the author’s deep familiarity with medieval Irish sources, his control of the languages required to study them, and his determination to think clearly about the problem and follow the evidence wherever it may lead.The importance of this paper may be measured by the subsequent surge of interest in the aristocratic sub-culture of brigandage in early medieval Ireland. Similarly, an article in Peritia in 1984 (‘Some problems concerning the organisation of the Church in early medieval Ireland’, 3 (1984), 230–70) sounded the death-knell of the prevailing orthodoxy and inaugurated a radical reassessment of the character of the medieval Irish Church. Though he remained a medievalist at heart, Richard came increasingly to devote his many skills to the study of early modern Ireland. Among other things this engagement with post-medieval Irish material produced his edition (with exhaustive commentary) of Roderick O’Flaherty’s letters (2013). Richard appreciated, as too few medievalists do, the vagaries of manuscript survival and the crucial role post-medieval Irish scholars played in transmitting medieval material and framing our interpretation of it. In recent years, he published important work on manuscript sales and the formation of manuscript collections in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and he lectured extensively on the topic in Dublin. Regrettably he did not live to complete his Irish manuscript sales, an annotated edition of manuscript sales catalogues, in which he tracked the precarious journeys of hundreds of Irish manuscripts from sale to sale before they reached the comparative safety of modern libraries. While combing through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sales catalogues , Richard had encountered many references to printed works in Irish, along with comments on their comparative rarity, and found himself searching for a satisfactory bibliography of early Irish printing: had anyone, he wondered, actually set out what was printed in Irish, by whom, where, when, and how often, and where the surviving copies were...

Rewriting Holiness: Reconfiguring Vitae, Resignifying Cults ed. by Madeleine Gray

Reviewed by: Rewriting Holiness: Reconfiguring Vitae, Resignifying Cults ed. by Madeleine Gray Linda Zampol D'Ortia Gray, Madeleine, ed., Rewriting Holiness: Reconfiguring Vitae, Resignifying Cults ( King's College London Medieval Studies, 25), London, King's College London, Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 2017; hardback; pp. 338; 9 colour illustrations; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9780953983896. Madeleine Gray's edited collection is a significant contribution to the study of the transformations undergone by saints' hagiographies, and how they relate to wider, contemporary cultural and political changes. The book's aim is to bring to attention the importance of the variations present in the Vitae as sources of information on mentalités: 'what people wanted to have happened is arguably more illuminating than what "actually" happened' (p. 2). The introduction provides an extensive overview of literature on the subject, engaging with different approaches to the study of the lives of saints and representing a helpful tool for the uninitiated. Most of the thirteen contributions that make up the collection address one aspect of the book's general project. The sources employed range from the textual (hagiographies to parodies) to visual, archaeological, and, in one case, musical. Nearly half of them focus geographically on England, Scotland, Wales and/or Ireland, while two chapters (Jayita Sinha, James M. Hegarty) analyse the lives of holy men from non-Christian traditions. [End Page 250] The book is subdivided in four sections. The first, 'Rewriting Monasticism', looks at the tensions extant between different religious lifestyles and how they influenced the rewriting of saints' lives. The asceticism of Serapion the Sindonite and its different interpretations are the focus of Svitlana Kobets's paper. John R. Black looks at English textual and visual depictions of the lives of Saints Mary of Egypt, Guthlac, and Cuthbert, to show how elements related to coenobitic life were systematically emphasized in texts written after the Norman Conquest. Kate Helsen and Andrew Hughes consider cases of rewriting of new chants and texts dedicated to saints, by looking at Thomas Becket's office, its Benedictine origins, and its link with the later rewriting and promotion of John Peckham's Trinity Office. In the second part, 'Re-Gendering', Gray analyses the Vitae of Saint Gwenfrewi. She traces the origins and the innovation of Gwenfrewi's defining characteristics, to exemplify how they were informed by different conceptualizations of female sanctity, and how they interacted in a contact area of Welsh and Anglo-Norman influences. Karen Casebier draws a comparison between the hagiographic text La Vie de Sainte Euphrosine and the more parodic Frère Denise, by considering how they both display the tensions between the older, lay, model of marriage, and the emerging ecclesiastical one. The third section, 'Translating Cultural & Religious Identities', begins with a chapter on Irish saint Darerca and the developments that made her into Anglo-Norman Modwenne. Diane P. Auslander shows how Darerca's asceticism, following the transformation of Irish Christianity from admired to disparaged, is subjected to a different interpretation, which makes it the mark of female, not Irish, holiness. The function of the cult and beatification of Florentine Umiliana de' Cerchi, to establish the endurance of her family's power through the city's changing political landscape, are the focus of Anne Schuchman's essay. Jayita Sinha tackles the concept of 'saint' in a non-Christian setting by analysing the figure of Kabir, a holy man venerated by Muslims and Hindu alike, who moulded his image and the accounts of his life to better fit their needs and support their beliefs. Adam Coward expands the applicability of the conceptual framework when he considers the 'saint-like attributes' (p. 205) of Independent minister Edmund Jones, and how they fit or rejected common elements of Welsh expressions of holiness. Slavia Barlieva's contribution on Saints Cyril and Methodius opens the fourth part, 'Appropriating Political & National Identities', by looking at how their cults, initially Slavic and supranational in nature, have undergone 'intense "nationalization"' (p. 229). In the following chapter, Gray delineates Henry VII Tudor's devotion to a minor Welsh saint, Armel, and how his figure was used to display support to the previous dynasty. James M. Hegarty shows how the Sikh...

Native and Non-native Saints in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Irish-Language Charm Historiolas

AbstractAn examination of surviving healing charm texts originating in Ireland between 1700 and the mid-nineteenth century suggests a strong link between the contents of this corpus and a select few national saints (Columcille, Bridget, and Patrick) and international Catholic religious figures (Christ, Mary, and the Apostles). By contrast, local Irish saints, which otherwise figure so prominently in religious practices of the time, are significantly underrepresented in the Irish charm corpus of this time period. This essay looks at the long-term status of highly localized saints in religious and medical discourse, the effect of church centralization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and the rise of select national saints as factors in this feature of the Irish charms.

Saint Brigid of Kildare: Life, Legend and Cult by Noel Kissane (review)

reference to many original sources and the contemporary anecdotal accounts are valuable and bring the texts to life. Specialist articles on sister physicians including their medical training curricula (Barbra Mann Wall), together with new perspectives on religious in Ireland through the lens of translations from French by Catholic women religious in nineteenth century Ireland (Michèle Milan), will be of interest to scholars of these topics. An historical article on the Presentation Sisters (Catherine Nowlan-Roebuck) deals with what will be familiar to many concerning the founding and early days of the congregation but also informs us of the involvement of the bishops in regulating affairs, sometimes with a heavy hand. For the non-expert, like this reviewer, the overseas involvement in religious education in countries which today are rich first-world countries, makes the book particularly interesting. One gets an historical insight from contemporary sources of how new countries were dealing with their problems of integration and education and which factors eased or contributed to the difficulties encountered. Áilín Doyle has practised as a solicitor and lectured in moral theology at the Milltown Institute in Dublin. Saint Brigid of Kildare: Life, Legend and Cult, Noel Kissane (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017), 357 pages. This is a comprehensive account of St Brigid, the Mary of the Gael. It is the fruit of a life time of research. The author became academically involved with St Brigid when he completed a doctoral dissertation under the supervision of the distinguished Austrian medieval scholar Ludwig Bieler. Subsequently, in 1977, he edited and published the Metrical Life of St Brigid, which had been written in Latin by an Irish bishop in Italy in the ninth century. Since then he has been pursuing the elusive St Brigid. At the outset Kissane describes the Ireland of St Brigid’s time, its culture and its identity. Then he surveys the extensive literature on the saint. He begins with seven extant early lives, dating from the seventh to the twelfth century.The first of these, by Cogitosus, is the most important, because it is the closest to Brigid’s life-span. Kissane urges caution in assessing it, however. He highlights the fact that Cogitosus, a cleric resident at Kildare, was keen by his account to enhance Brigid’s reputation as a means of promoting the status Studies • volume 107 • number 426 248 Summer 2018: Book Reviews of Kildare, at a time when it was in competition with Armagh for precedence in the Irish church. All the extant lives represented an oral tradition and were primarily concerned with Brigid’s way of life rather than her life as such, and focused on her saintliness and the alleged miracles that testified to this. Kissane points out that for some scholars, including Pádraig Ó Riain, the foremost authority on the early Irish saints, St Brigid was not a real person. He rehearses the arguments for and against her historicity. In the end he states that, ‘while here is no conclusive evidence that Brigid actually existed, taking everything into account, the balance of probability suggests that Brigid was a real person, albeit of uncertain origins and manifesting many of the attributes of her namesake, the pagan goddess Brigit’. Acknowledging that hagiography is not history and is generally not given much credence in historical studies, Kissane claims that the contemporary or near-contemporary lives of early Irish saints contain a stratum of biographical information, some of which may be generally accurate. On that basis he sets out his putative biography of St Brigid. He fixes her life cycle at c. 450–530. Her father was Dubthach, a member of the Fothairt, a tribe who acted as mercenaries for the Uí Fhailge dynasty. He resided close to Croghan Hill in present-day County Offaly, hence this would seem to have been Brigid’s birthplace. She was born of an illicit union of Dubthach and his slave Broicsech. She grew up in her father’s household and was engaged in caring for farm animals. A Christian from an early age, she was later a leading figure in the Irish church and was involved in the establishment of convents, churches and monasteries while being mainly associated...

Music, Liturgy, and the Veneration of Saints of the Medieval Irish Church in a European Context ed. by Ann Buckley

Reviewed by: Music, Liturgy, and the Veneration of Saints of the Medieval Irish Church in a European Context ed. by Ann Buckley Constant J. Mews Buckley, Ann, ed., Music, Liturgy, and the Veneration of Saints of the Medieval Irish Church in a European Context (Ritus et Artes, 8), Turnhout, Brepols, 2017; hardback; pp. xxxiv, 359; 7 colour, 15 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €100.00; ISBN 9782503534701. The notion of Ireland as a land of saints has always generated its devotees. Such has been the vigour of enthusiasm for Ireland as having a multitude of saints and as pursuing its own Celtic identity, imagined as at odds with Romanizing orthodoxy, that a good deal of romantic extravagance has been invested in notions of a Celtic Church and a spirituality that is different from Rome's. This volume sets out to counter such notions, by emphasizing the European framework in which the Irish saints have been venerated. From the outset, it must be said that it provides an [End Page 150] authoritative synthesis on a subject that has been too little studied from a European perspective. Ireland suffered what some have called 'cultural genocide' in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, resulting in the near extinction within the country of manuscripts copied between the early and late medieval periods. As a consequence, our knowledge of its liturgical culture is fragmentary in the extreme, and often dependent on a few surviving manuscripts preserved outside of the country. Buckley has gathered together an impressive group of scholars who all seek to place veneration of Irish saints within a European context. A common theme is criticism of the notion of an autonomous Celtic liturgy as a romantic enthusiasm and, in its place, emphasis on the Gallican traditions from which it derives. The dominant focus in this volume is on the way liturgy articulates local identity, most often studied through the offices of individual saints, but within a larger ecclesial framework. There are a few general essays, notably the introduction by Buckley and an overview of early Irish chant by the late Michel Huglo, as well as a closing overview by Liam Tracey, 'Celtic Mists: The Search for a Celtic Rite'. Nils Holger Petersen offers a stimulating reflection on the role of liturgy preserving cultural memory by considering how Irish saints were remembered in a Norwegian context. Perhaps a surprising omission (apart from a brief mention by Buckley in her introduction) is discussion of the eighth-century Ratio de curs<ib>us, which documents and defends distinctions between the cursus scottorum and the cursus gallicorum, formulated just as the Roman liturgy was being imposed across many continental abbeys which proudly remembered their Irish founders. While there can be little doubt, as Huglo and others show, that the melodies preserved in Offices for Irish saints may derive from ancient Gallican chants, the question remains whether foundations claiming an Irish legacy considered themselves to preserve a distinct liturgical tradition. One theme that comes out from Buckley's excellent paper 'From Hymn to Historia', as well as from other contributions, is the magnitude of the transformation brought about within liturgical practice in the twelfth century. Only from this date do we find a full blown liturgical Office for a saint emerging on the continental pattern. There are a large number of specialist studies in this volume about saints whose Irish origins rest on legend rather than firm documentation: Bernhard Hanngartner on St Fintan of Rheinau, Pieter Mannaerts on St Dympna of Gheel, Patrick Brannon on St Canice at Kilkenny Cathedral, Ciaran O'Driscoll and Patricia Rumsey on St Brendan, and Senan Furlong on St Patrick. Each of these has much to offer, both from a musicological and liturgical perspective. The title of the volume may disguise the fact that it also contains some fascinating contributions relating to Scotland and Wales. Thus, Betty Knott writes about the Office for St Kentigern in Glasgow, while Greta-Mary Hair offers important political context to understand why St Andrew rather than St Columba became patron saint of Scotland—the simple reason is that St Andrew, brother of St Peter, was perceived by the Scottish kings as a more worthy apostolic authority...

The communities of St Columbanus: Irish monasteries on the continent?

The image of the Irish saints on the continent, carrying the light of Christianity into the darkness of a Europe descended into barbarity, has proven one of the most enduring aspects of the ‘Island of Saints and Scholars’ narrative that formed part of every Irish schoolchild's education. Although this motif may persist in the popular imagination, regularly used as a shorthand for Ireland's relationship with Europe, it has been widely critiqued in recent decades as an overly nationalistic reading of the past. While recent reappraisals have focussed primarily on historical evidence, there is an enduring expectation among some that the monasteries founded by these individuals would be distinctively ‘Irish’ in their layout and material culture. This article offers a critique of this assumption by outlining the results of recent work carried out by an Irish-French team at the first of St Columbanus' continental foundations, Annegray, in Eastern France. The preliminary results of work at two of his other foundations, Luxeuil and Bobbio, are also discussed. It is argued that there is nothing inherently Irish about the material culture of these sites, nor should we expect there to be.

A house-shaped shrine in a Carolingian setting, as depicted in the oldest portrait of St Columba in Cod Sang 555

This paper will consider the oldest known image of St Columba, contained within a copy of Adomnán’s Vita sancti Columbae, created around the middle of the 9th century in the monastery at St Gallen in Switzerland. Columba established a confederation of monasteries in Britain and Ireland, centred on his great foundation at Iona, before his death in AD 597. His fame spread to the Continent, in relation to a network of Carolingian monasteries with Scotto-Irish links, resulting in a persistent devotion to certain Irish saints, the context for which is outlined here. Rather than simply being an illustration in support of the manuscript, the image affirms the significance of Columba to the culture of St Gallen more than 200 years after his death. Most remarkably, a ‘house-shaped’ shrine – of possible Insular origin – features in the church setting of this image, and this is discussed in relation to the possible origins and identification of this object, possibly as a Columban reliquary. Whereas this paper focuses on the materiality of the image and especially on the extraordinary representation of the reliquary, an art historical assessment of the image is also essential to achieving a full understanding. As this is outwith the skills of the present author, the art historical significance will be fully explored in a forthcoming, accompanying paper by Prof Jane Geddes.

Early Irish saints' cults and their constituencies

Early Irish saints' cults and their constituencies

Early Irish saints' cults and their constituencies

Early Irish saints' cults and their constituencies

“Ovre londe” / “Irlonde”: Appropriating Irish Saints in the Aftermath of Conquest

A pair of textual errors in the Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 108, South English Legendary Lives of St. Brendan and St. Brigid (ca. 1280–1320) misidentify these two saints as coming from “ovre londe” (“our land”; implicitly, England) and “Scotlond” instead of from Ireland. These errors reflect English anxiety about possessing and reclaiming Irish culture as well as Irish land during a period when Anglo-Norman forces are colonizing and occupying portions of Ireland. The Brendan error claims Ireland for England in order to justify England’s colonization projects. The Brendan and Brigid errors also construct Ireland as well as Scotland as exotic spaces whose wonders distinguish them from England, while at the same time appropriating Celtic exoticism for English culture and Celtic lands for an Anglo-Norman empire.

Peregrini pro Christo: the Irish church in medieval Europe as reflected in liturgical sources for the veneration of its missionary saints / Peregrini pro Christo: irska cerkev v srednjeveški Evropi kot se kaže v liturgiji njenih svetnikov misijonarjev

The Irish saints, many of whom were important figures in continental-European ecclesiastical and cultural history, figure prominently in European liturgical manuscripts. According to a research (still in progress), they make their appearance in more than 300 medieval manuscripts from nearly all the European countries. In many cases, the feasts of the Irish saints were celebrated by proper newly composed offices, which include, as far as is known, more than 150 proper chants.