OMNIUM SANCTORUM HIBERNIAE

Author: Michele Ainley

  • Feastdays of the saints: A history of Irish martyrologies

    Below is a book review  by Columban specialist Brian Lacey on a history of Irish Martyrologies by Pádraig Ó Riain. It was first posted in 2009 on my former blog and contains some useful background information on the historic Irish calendars of the saints:

    Pádraig Ó Riain FEASTDAYS OF THE SAINTS: A HISTORY OF IRISH MARTYROLOGIES Subsidia hagiographica 86, Société des Bollandists, Bruxelles, 2006. Pp. 416 + xxvii. Price 75 Euro. ISBN 978-2-87365-018-6.
    As Pádraig Ó Riain points out, in the early ninth century the monastery of Tallaght was known, along with that other well known Dublin place – Finglas, as one of ‘the two eyes of Ireland’. Tallaght is where we must start to look in any investigation in Ireland of the tradition of writings about saints called martyrologies. A martyrology, as Ó Riain tells us at the outset of this book, ‘is a list of names of saints, arranged according to the days of the year on which they died’. Usually these lists are ‘drawn from all over the Christian world’ and sometimes they have extra details such as the place where the saint is said to have died. These details can be of immense value for the understanding of both religious and political events in a local context.
    The earliest text of this kind known to us (the so-called Hieronymian martyrology drawn up either in southern France or northern Italy, but already with several Irish associations) dates to the late sixth or early seventh centuries, although it was clearly based on older lists and information. Having followed a slow and circuitous route, a shortened version of that text arrived in Tallaght around 828, as Ó Riain has newly worked out. However, by then it had accumulated – like a glacier that picks up traces of the landscapes over which it passes – influences from monasteries in Northumbria, Iona and Bangor (Co. Down). The copy that arrived in Tallaght had probably been deliberately requested as Ó Riain suggests, in response to a decision made at a church council in Aachen in 817 that every monastery should have a martyrology from which would be read out the daily list of saints. Once the copy arrived it immediately spawned two other texts, known to us now as the Martyrology of Tallaght and the metrical Maryrology of Óengus, which stand together at the head of the surviving Irish martyrological tradition. These were composed according to Ó Riain’s persuasive arguments in that order between 829 and 833, probably by the same author, Óengus a monk and bishop at Tallaght who is said in some sources to have been the son of Oengoba and the grandson of Oiblén.
    The Martyrology of Tallaght was, in origin, what we might call a working document (although it may have been venerated later as a relic, at Lorrha in Co. Tipperary) to which a number of local Irish ‘saints’ names were added, particularly those of figures linked with the contemporary church reform movement associated with the céile Dé. The Martyrology of Óengus was, however, a literary masterpiece: a sophisticated rendering into disciplined verse quatrains in Irish of the main elements of the earlier prose text. It was, as Ó Riain’s book points out, the first text of its kind anywhere in the Christian world. In an Armagh scriptorium in the late twelfth century, the already fairly lengthy text acquired a preface as well as extensive commentary and glosses. Before that, in the eleventh century, a copy of the original poem had been brought to the Irish Benedictine monastery in Regensburg (one of the so-called Schottenkloster) where it continued to influence other continental texts.
    Meanwhile, around the year 1000, a copy of a popular continental martyrology (the Martyrology of Ado, composed c. 855) had been made in a monastery in Metz, where, under the direction of its Irish abbot, the names of a number of Irish saints were added. A copy of that text was later made in Cologne (in a church also with strong Irish connections) from where it was brought to Dublin, most probably accompanied by a collection of relics for the foundation of Christchurch cathedral c.1030. It seems that this is ‘Dublin’s oldest known book’, as Prof. Ó Riain explained in a lecture to this Society in January 2004. Ó Riain teases out all the links and connections between these various texts and reconstructs their individual influences on the later Irish martyrologies: the Martyrology of Gorman, the Martyrology of Drummond, the Martyrology of Turin, the Martyrology of Cashel and, last in the series, the early seventeenth-century Martyrology of Donegal. He also places all these literary works in their appropriate ecclesiastical and cultural settings.
    This is a wonderful work of painstaking original and revisionary scholarship. The book, which is aimed in the first instance, of course, at a very specialist readership, nevertheless operates on several levels. It provides us with the first inter-connected history of the entire group of martyrologies from Ireland as well as those relevant places abroad that had strong Irish associations in medieval times. Indeed the book shows us that Irish influence on this genre of writing at a European level was quite extensive. The book also analyses the individual histories of each of the relevant texts. The evidence for Ó Riain’s new ideas and interpretations is presented in the very great detail necessary to explicate the thousand years of that tradition plus the several hundred years of subsequent study by modern ecclesiastical and secular scholars. The setting out of this detail might possibly deter the more general reader who is interested in these texts mainly for the light they throw on local studies, however that would be a great mistake. The excellent structure of the book – with each chapter divided into smaller sub-sections – means that such detailed passages can be passed over, if desired, without the reader having to lose the thread of the main narrative. In addition, throughout the book Ó Riain provides summaries and chapter conclusions, which can be read independently of the close arguments. His final epilogue, in which he summarizes the whole story again, is an epitome of clarity for such a complex subject over such a long period of history. In the appendices he also provides chronologies and diagrams that, once again, simplify and clarify the complex arguments involved in working out his overall thesis.
    Some of the chapters in this book are based on material previously published, both in Ireland and abroad. Those individual studies, however, have been revised and updated here. Together with the work being presented for the first time, this means that the book provides us with the first-ever comprehensive account of the whole subject. As Ó Riain points out, new editions are badly needed of several of the main martyrological texts that would take into account the results of modern scholarship. Until such editions appear this book also offers a guide as to how much we can rely on the existing versions.
    Pádraig Ó Riain has previously given us many valuable studies in the field of Irish hagiography and hagiology: his important edition of the Irish saints’ genealogies and his analysis of the dossier relating to Saint Finbarr being only two significant examples. The two pages in the bibliography of this book that list Ó Riain’s own relevant works are, again, only a sample of his industry. Paradoxically, for someone who has done so much to explain what the medieval writings about our saints actually mean, Ó Riain’s work can be characterised, in some respects at least, as iconoclastic, in that he frequently deconstructs the engineered medieval images in order to show us what really lies behind them.
    New books dealing mainly with the early medieval period in Irish history are relatively rare. In that sense it is, at least, a double pleasure to be able to welcome such a fascinating, readable and erudite account of this subject and to congratulate the Society of Bollandists, which since the seventeenth century has dedicated itself to the scientific study of saints’ Lives, for such an excellent publication.
    Brian Lacey

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  • The Legends of the Saints

    I have finally got a chance to read the classic textbook on the hagiographer’s art – The Legends of the Saints – in the reissued edition of the Four Courts Press. Below is their description of this seminal work:
    The Legends of the Saints
    Hippolyte Delehaye; with a new introduction by Thomas O’Loughlin
    Legends of the saints, facts about the saints. All too often these two are thought to be, or presented as being, the same thing. From the earliest times the stories of the saints have been a mixture of fact, pious fabrication and myth. Dr Delehaye showed how to strip off this facade with the tools of the impartial and stringently honest historian. Not that he underestimated the power and value of legend: ‘There is no question of our waging war on legends. It would be a senseless thing to do … the work of legend can be numbered amongst the great unconscious natural forces … As such one cannot ignore it. Only do not mistake it for history.’ Delehaye’s work was first published in 1905, when it was acclaimed as a classic study. But besides being a true work of scholarship, it is a book full of wit and humanity and a delight to read for sheer enjoyment.
    For almost a century Delehaye’s Les Légendes Hagiographiques has been the standard introductory textbook for anyone doing work which used Saints’ Lives. However, for more than thirty years it has been out of print. This is a reprint of the 1962 English edition, with a new introduction and bibliography of recent materials by Dr T. O’Loughlin (University of Wales, Lampeter).
    In his introduction O’Loughlin isolates four points which made this book revolutionary in its day, something that now Father Delehaye’s methodology has become standard we may tend to forget:
    First, that hagiography constitutes a distinct literary genre with its own rules and dynamics, and that within this category of texts there were specific textual units that repeatedly appear. In short, the vita is a narrative game where certain commonplaces are to be expected and which vary only in details between one life and another….
    A second notion central to The Legends is that whatever a vita tells us, it tells us more about the time of its composition – its theology, spirituality, politics – than of the time of the saint, and more about the mind of the hagiographer than of the mind of the saint. Again this seems so obvious as to be not worth stating… but at the time it was a revolutionary idea that took many years to really sink in. For example, it was not until 1962 that anyone in Ireland was prepared to apply this maxim of research to the legends of St Patrick. When it was applied it rendered a century of argument, all trying to link or unlink bits of the legends to the fifth-century Roman bishop, obsolete overnight…
    A third concept Delehaye repeatedly brought before the student was to ask why and for what reason did the hagiographer take up his pen? This notion of authorial intent is central to the historian working with texts. We understand a text to the extent that we understand the questions it answers and the points its author wants to make… we should not forget that this approach is recent and these are questions that troubled few before Delahaye’s time.
    Lastly, Delehaye repeatedly pointed out that the legend develops through the continuity of cultus. It is the repetition of story, the celebration of liturgy, and the pattern around tombs and other shrines that leads to the development of the hagiographical myth. And this cultic recollection is one of the most powerful forces in the development of the religious world that produces vitae with all their wonders.
    That is not to say, of course, that Delehaye’s work does not show its own age. O’Loughlin also points out that:
    the work was conceived in the age of ‘historical laws’… So Delahaye unhesitatingly spoke of ‘the law’ that explains that change, this growth, the adoption of that myth, or this sequence of miracles… Today we have far less trust that in the humanities we can understand our subjects in this way. We may see patterns, we many see phenomena repeatedly, and experienced observers may be able to guess outcomes, or explain what has happened over time, with a moment’s acquaintance; but this is not a deduction from a general law.
    Another, somewhat irritating, aspect of the work, but common at the time, is the assumption of a radical divide between the the world of the ‘scientific’ observer and the people observed. Thus we find references to ‘the popular imagination’, ‘the psychology of the crowd’, and ‘the brain of the multitude’. ‘It’ is the creator and bearer of superstition, false ideas and confusions; while the scholars are preserved immune from such things.
    O’Loughlin finds this model an inadequate one and laments that scholars are perhaps less immune than Father Delehaye imagined.
    I will close with another quote, this time from the man himself, in the preface to the third edition of his book. Delehaye recalled how one of his earliest copies was received:
    One of my first copies of The Legends of the Saints had a reception I was far from expecting. The friend who had recieved the complimentary copy informed me that he would put it in his library, but that he would never read it. “What do you expect?”, he said, “I love the legends of the saints, and I do not want anything to spoil my pleasure in them”.
    I think this perhaps illustrates the tension between reading the lives of the saints as a scholar and reading them as a believer. Yet, Delehaye was quick to reassure:
    All the learned societies can join together and proclaim that St Lawrence could not have been tortured in the way that is said; but till the end of the world the gridiron will be the only recognized emblem of that famous Roman deacon.
    Quite.

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  • The Protecting Corselet of Mary

    The prayer below was originally published by the great 19th-century scholar, Eugene O’Curry, who had learnt it from his father. When reprinted in The Irish Ecclesiastical Record, some additional verses were included from another source. The supplementary verses are mainly concerned with promises of protection to anyone who recites the prayer, this may strike the modern reader as smacking of superstition or sympathetic magic. Yet I have seen many examples of similar promises attached to some of our most famous hymns from the Irish Liber Hymnorum. One has to be careful, of course, of accepting that prayers which have reputedly come down from early times through a long oral tradition have done so intact. Whilst some of the imagery in this prayer is indeed reminiscent of that found in earlier Irish texts, other verses suggest a later origin. In verse 15, for example, there is a plea for the ‘distressed nobles of Erin’, this might be a reference to the ‘Flight of the Earls’ and the passing of the Gaelic order in the seventeenth century. Verse 17 certainly suggests that we are dealing with the Counter-Reformation rather than the ‘Celtic Church’! The introduction claims that the prayer is ‘some seven hundred or more years old’, this would take it back to the 12th century, as the prayer was published in the 1860s. Overall, however, I suspect this is a later work, there is a later medieval feel about it as a whole.
    THE PROTECTING CORSELET OF MARY.
    The late Professor O’Curry, in the last Lecture which he delivered in the Catholic University a few days before his lamented death in July, 1862, when speaking of the music of ancient Erin, referred to ” a beautiful ancient hymn to the Blessed Virgin, some seven hundred or more years’ old.” He added, with that simplicity which cast such a charm over all his words : “My father sang this hymn, and well too, almost every night, so that the words and the air have been impressed on my memory from the earliest dawn of life. This sweet poem consists of twelve stanzas of four lines each, beginning:’ Direct me how to praise thee.’
    The air of this hymn is not popular ; I never heard it sung but by my own father. I know it myself very well, and I know several old poems that will sing to it, such as the poems ascribed to Oisin, the son of Find Mac Cumhaill, and the great religious poem called ‘ The Festology of Oengus Ceile De written in the year 798.”
    Mr. Brian O’Looney, who with such untiring energy continues in the Catholic University the researches of the lamented O’Curry, has discovered a much larger number of stanzas than the twelve mentioned by the late Professor. To Mr. O’Looney we are indebted for the following translation in full of this most interesting monument of the piety of our ancestors, and of their devotion to the Immaculate Mother of God.
    1. Direct me how to praise thee
    Though I am not a master of poetry,
    O thou of the angelic countenance, without fault,
    Thou hast given the milk of thy breast to save me.
    2. I offer myself under thy protection,
    O loving Mother of the only Son,
    And under thy protecting shield I place my body,
    My heart, my will and my understanding.
    3. I am a sinner, full of faults,
    I beseech of thee and pray thee do it,
    O Woman Physician of the miserable diseases,
    Behold the many ulcers of my soul.
    4. O Temple of the Three Persons,
    Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
    I invoke thee to come to visit me
    At the hour of my judgment and my death.
    5. O Queen to whom it has been granted by the King,
    The Eternal Father, out of the abundance of His love,
    An inheritance to be the Mother,
    I implore thy assistance to save me.
    6. O vessel who carried the Lamp
    More luminous than the sun,
    Draw me under thy shelter into the harbour
    Out of the transitory ship of the world.
    7. O Flower of beauty, O Mother of Christ,
    O Lover of peace and mildness,
    I pray thee to hear me; may it ne’er occur to me
    In any trial to forsake thee.
    8. O Queen who refusest not any person,
    Who is pure in his deeds, morals, actions,
    I beseech Thee Christ to put me
    (From the wily demons) amidst the saints.
    9. O Queen of the Saints, of the virgins, of the angels,
    O honeycomb of eternal life,
    All surpassing power, presumptuous valour
    Go not far without thee.
    10. I am under thy shelter amidst the brave
    O protecting shield, without being injured by their blows,
    O Holy Mary, if thou wilt hear thy supplicant,
    I put myself under the shelter of thy shield.
    11. When falling in the slippery path
    Thou art my smooth supporting hand staff;
    O Virgin from the Southern clime,
    May I go to Heaven to visit thee.
    12. There is no hound in fleetness or in chase,
    North wind or rapid river,
    As quick as the Mother of Christ to the bed of death
    To those who are entitled to her kindly protection.
    13. O heart without sin, O bosom without guile,
    O Virgin Woman who hast chosen sanctity,
    In thee I place my hope of salvation
    From the eternal torture of the pain.
    14. O Mary, gentle, beautiful,
    O meekness mild and modest,
    I am not tired of invoking thee,
    Thou art my guarding staff in danger.
    15. Turn thine eyes, O Woman Friend,
    Upon the distressed nobles of Erin;
    To them restore the happiness of their lives
    And obtain from them from the Eternal Father:
    16. That every sinner of their numbers
    Who has fallen into sin and is in need of succour,
    Thou mayst redeem, O Virgin Lady,
    They are in misery until you do it.
    17. To the true Faith without dissimulation
    May the Kings of the world be obedient,
    Through the invocation of Mary, which is not weak,
    And may they renounce the false religion.
    18. To those who are in the pit of pain, in fire,
    Whose portion is suffering,
    Deign thy relief, O Mary,
    And Amen say, O cleric. [1]
    The following additional Stanzas follow here in Royal Irish Academy, MS. No. 23, c. 20,70.
    19. Every woman sick in childbirth,
    If she has this, or that it be read for her,
    She will get relief by the grace of God,
    And of Mary Mother of the only Son.
    20. Going to a sea voyage,
    Or going to a single-handed combat,
    Whosoever of the two hath justice on his side
    Shall return alive without danger.
    21. Every person who recites it from memory,
    And hears it with due reverence,
    And with sweet devotion to Mary,
    Shall get relief and protection.
    22. When you are rising in the morning,
    And when going into bed do it [recite it],
    And you shall have Mary as your friend
    To redress all your grievances [wants].
    23. A house is seldom burned
    Which is under protection of the shield
    Of the Virgin Mary,
    If appropriate reverence be given to her.
    24. Many are the countless virtues
    Of the protecting shield corselet of Mary,
    If we be in the state of grace,
    And pray to her at all times with devotion.
    [1] The following extract will serve to explain this stanza :
    “Mary and the virgin saints sit around the Lord God giving him praise and glory, and praying for the souls in trouble.” ” Saint Adamnan’s Vision.” Leabur na h-Uidre, p. 27 et seq. ; also, Scela lai Breta, Story of the Day of Judgment. Ibid. p. 31, col. I, et seq.
    The Irish Ecclesiastical Record, Volume 6, 1869, 320-322.

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