OMNIUM SANCTORUM HIBERNIAE

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  • Hiberno-Latin Culture

    Dáibhí Ó Cróinín introduces the Hiberno-Latin culture of the Irish monasteries in this essay.

    The coming of Christianity to Ireland in the fifth century brought about many changes in Irish society, one of the most profound being the introduction of the Latin language. Ireland had never been a part of the Roman Empire and therefore had never acquired the apparatus of Roman government, which included Latin as the everyday lingua franca not only of administrators but also of the population at large. The Rome that Irishmen revered was, in the words of the great Irish missionary Saint Columbanus, not the Rome of the Caesars but the Rome of the Saints Peter and Paul. Within a century of receiving formal Christianity, however, Irish scholars had acquired a remarkable mastery of Latin, but it was the Latin of the Bible and the church fathers rather than of Virgil. The image of Ireland as a haven of classical Latin literature (and even of Greek) in the decades following the fall of the Roman Empire has been greatly exaggerated, but the reality, while more modest, is no less impressive in its own way. Whether the initial impetus owed anything to the activities of the first continental missionaries, led by Bishop Palladius, is impossible to say; that Gallican mission has left no traces, either in surviving manuscripts or in any texts associated with Palladius and his followers. The only fifth-century writings to survive, Patrick’s Confessio and letter, left no mark on later Irish writings in Latin, except insofar as Patrick’s works display a mastery of what has been called biblical style by its discoverer, David Howlett, and that biblical style was to become a distinguishing feature of later Hiberno-Latin prose compositions. It is reasonable to suppose that there was continuity of Latin literacy from the fifth century on, but the hymn in praise of Patrick traditionally attributed to his disciple Secundinus (Audite omnes amantes) is now believed to be late sixth-century in date, and the work of Colmán Alo (of Lynally, Co. Meath, d. 610) rather than the fifth-century Secundinus. It already attests to a respectable grasp of Latin language and metrics. A possible rival in terms of dating is the remarkable poem Altus prosator (Ancient creator), a sort of “Paradise Lost” ascribed to Columba (Colum Cille), founder of the monastery of Iona (d. 597). However, that work is believed by modern scholars to be of seventh-century date.
    It is only with the figure of Columbanus, originally of Bangor, Co. Down, later founder of monasteries in Gaul and Italy (d. 615), that the first real evidence emerges of substantial writings in Latin by Irishmen. Six of his letters survive, along with a number of poems, sermons, and two monastic rules. He mentions two mentors by name, the British writers Finnian (Uennianus) and Gildas; the latter’s De excidio Britanniae has left definite traces on Columbanus’s prose style. The evidence of surviving manuscripts makes clear the debt to British teachers in the formative stages of the Irish Church, but Columbanus’s complete mastery of Latin, in a variety of different prose styles, as well as his command of both quantitative and stressed meters, demonstrates for the first time the full range of native Hiberno-Latin skills. This range finds expression in prose and verse compositions throughout the seventh century: saints’ lives and instructional literature, biblical commentaries and Latin grammars, canon law and handbooks of penance, besides a rich variety of poems devoted to biblical learning and computistics (the mathematics required to calculate the date of Easter), devotional hymns, and hagiography. One of the earliest of these compositions in date, Cummian’s letter on the Paschal question (632/633), is remarkable for its rich patristic sources (i.e., the writings of the church fathers—some of them unique) and for the collection of ten different Easter tables (the mathematical tables used to calculate the date of Easter) on which its author was able to draw. Sometime in the mid-seventh century the arrival in Ireland of Isidore of Seville’s writings spurred a massive production of Hiberno-Latin writing on every imaginable subject, and across the full spectrum of the monastic curriculum. Newly acquired grammatical texts from late antiquity led to a surge of renewed interest in that field also, and Irish writers perfected a new type of instructional handbook, the elementary grammar, for use with beginners in Latin, which led in turn to more advanced study using exegetical grammars. By combining the methods of biblical exegetes and Latin grammarians in one text, Irish teachers perfected an instructional technique that was clearly very successful. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the remarkably uniform language of these different authors. Though scholars have happily used the term Hiberno-Latin to describe the language of Irish texts from this period; in fact, Irish Latin was indistinguishable in grammar and syntax from its continental counterpart—a testament to the efficacy of teaching in Irish schools.
    Alongside the ordinary expressions of Latin culture in Ireland, however, there was also the extraordinary: the so-called Hisperica famina (Western sayings) make their appearance in the mid-seventh century. A “culture fungus of decay” (as one scholar, Eoin Mac Neill, described them), these bizarre colloquies are a pastiche of the pedantic hypercorrectness of some of the grammarians, and they mock the high-falutin’ language and vocabulary of the schools. They are probably not to be taken too seriously (and may not be Irish at all in origin). Another exotic flowering of Irish Latin culture, however, definitely is a native concoction: The bizarre writings of Virgilius Maro “the Grammarian” are an extraordinary rodomontade (bluster) of mock learning that pokes glorious fun at the pomposities of the self-same schoolmen. The fun was probably well intended, but Virgilius Maro’s more exuberant pronouncements made their way into the works of seriously minded computists and biblical commentators, with the result that continental men of learning, when they came face to face with such oddities in the eighth century, tended to look askance at Irish learning.
    What most impresses, however, is the sheer quantity of Hiberno-Latin writings in the seventh and eighth centuries and the range of their subject-matter. Hiberno-Latin authors drew on a huge variety of Late Latin, biblical, and patristic sources, in addition to unorthodox writings like the commentaries of the heresiarch Pelagius, and a remarkable number of biblical apocrypha nowhere else available. They also began to gloss their Latin texts in the vernacular, very quickly passing to full texts in Old Irish. The most remarkable example of this phenomenon is the Cambrai Homily (probably mid-seventh century), a bilingual Latin-Irish text combining excerpts from the gospels, Pauline Epistles, and Gregory the Great’s gospel homilies, with a parallel text in Old Irish whose language is extraordinarily archaic. The oldest known manuscript with bilingual Latin-Irish glosses dates to about 700, but the most famous is the Würzburg codex of about 800 containing Pauline epistles with a huge number of glosses in both Latin and Old Irish. This probably belonged to Clemens Scottus, master of the palace school at Aachen in Charlemagne’s time, who ended his days at the shrine of the Irish saint Kilian in Würzburg.
    Hiberno-Latin scholars enjoyed a very good reputation when they traveled across Europe, following in the steps of Columbanus. The eighth century saw the appearance on the continent of men like Dicuil (author of a remarkable cosmographical work, Liber de mensura orbis terrae [Book on the measurement of the earth], as well as computistical and grammatical texts), Dungal of Pavia, Muredach Scottus “most learned of all men” (in his own estimation, at any rate), and Joseph Scottus, friend of Alcuin. Even more remarkable, however, was the generation of scholars that followed them in the ninth century, especially Sedulius Scottus of Liège and his circle of friends, and the most famous of them all, Iohannes Eriugena (“Irish-born”). These men were the superiors of their continental contemporaries not only in terms of Latin learning but also in their knowledge of Greek. Eriugena in particular was by common consent the finest intellect of his generation. In their Latin poetry (and Greek poetry too in Eriugena’s case) Sedulius and Eriugena demonstrated a complete mastery of the language. Sedulius too, with his “Handbook for Princes” (De rectoribus Christianis), also established a genre that was to have lasting influence in the area of political philosophy. In Eriugena’s case his philosophical works (especially the Periphyseon: On the Division of Nature) reveal a mind that had no equal in Europe in his time, and a unique grasp of Greek philosophy.
    Bibliography
    Bieler, Ludwig. Ireland, Harbinger of the Middle Ages. 1963.
    Kenney, James F. Ecclesiastical. Vol. 1 of The Sources for the Early History of Ireland. 1929.
    Ó Cróinín, Dáibhí. Early Medieval Ireland, 400–1200. 1995.
    Dáibhí Ó Cróinín

  • Monasticism in the Early Middle Ages

    Below is a short but useful introduction to the subject of monasticism in early medieval Ireland by scholar Lisa Bitel.

    Irish Christians embraced monasticism as enthusiastically as they had accepted the Christian religion itself. As with the doctrines and rituals of Christianity, the Irish created a form of institutionalized ascetic life dependent upon continental originals but unique to the society and culture of Ireland. What is more, by the end of the seventh century Irish monks had thoroughly organized churches and parishes throughout the island according to monastic models, and had even begun to send missionaries abroad to bring Christianity to formerly Roman territories. They also built schools and scriptoria (copying rooms) where they began producing the artistic and scholarly works that made them famous throughout Christendom.
    Both bishops and monastic men and women helped to create Irish Christianity. Saint Patrick (d. 461? or 493?), the legendary missionary to Ireland and its primary patron saint, was a bishop, not a monk, but his two fellow patron saints, Saint Brigit of Kildare (d. 524?) and Saint Columba (Colum Cille) of Iona (d. 5??), were both heads of monasteries. Around 450, Saint Patrick himself made the first possible references to people pursuing ascetic vocations in his descriptions of “virgins in Christ” and “religious women,” including noble-women who endured harassment from their parents, Irish and British slaves, and widows (Confessio, sec. 41, 49, trans. De Paor 1998, pp. 250–253). No communities of nuns or monks appeared in Ireland for another thirty or forty years. Patrick’s female comrades in religion were probably following the advice of theologians such as Saint Jerome, who explained to Roman women exactly how to organize and educate themselves for an ascetic life in their own homes.
    The first monastic community in Ireland may have been created by women at Kildare under the leadership of Brigit. Cogitosus, a monk of Kildare around 670, wrote the earliest Irish saint’s life about Brigit. He suggested that she had established a church and a community of women, along with a bishop, at or near an old pagan center in the province of Leinster around 500. Kildare was patronized and staffed by the local nobility and royalty of the province. Abbesses and bishops usually came from leading families of the dynasty that controlled the kingship of Leinster or were the children of local chiefs. The monastery owned properties near its main church, and had tenants who provided income. The abbess of Kildare also demanded allegiance and revenues from other monasteries and churches scattered around Ireland dedicated to Saint Brigit, as well as from other local Leinster churches. Already a major pilgrimage site in the seventh century, Kildare had become by 650 a place of legal refuge, treasury of kings, and cultural center, where crowds flocked, as Cogitosus wrote, “for the abundance of festivals” and “to watch the crowds go by” (Vita Sanctae Brigidae, in Migne, PL 72, col. 789).
    By the time that Kildare had acquired a major church and island-wide fame, it had competition as the most flourishing site of Irish monastic practice. Around the time of Brigit, many founders of ascetic communities built their settlements and established their own reputations as saintly monks and nuns. In particular, a community dedicated to Saint Patrick at Armagh in Ulster had become his primary church and acquired dependent foundations of its own. In the late seventh century, via two lives of Patrick and a collection of jurisdictional statements called the Liber Angeli (Book of the angel), Armagh’s leaders claimed the governance of a paruchia (network of churches and monasteries) that spread throughout Ireland, inferior in authority and size to none. The Liber Angeli, supposedly handed to Patrick by an angel, declared that the bishop at Armagh had the right to adjudicate all rivalries and disputes among Irish monasteries and churches. Other paruchiae, especially those of Brigit and Columba (based on the Irish island monastery of Iona off the coast of Scotland) contested Armagh’s claims to authority, territory, and dues in the seventh century, but Armagh eventually won the battle for dominance. As a consequence, each monastery or convent in Ireland had its own patron among the hundreds of Irish saints, but supposedly all were obedient to the abbot of Armagh.
    Life in most Irish monasteries was challenging physically, intellectually, or both. No one built the stone cloisters typical of continental monasteries in Ireland until the Cistercians arrived in the twelfth century, and even then the Irish preferred their wattle and daub huts to the masonry angles of the European reformers. In the sixth and seventh centuries monasteries included everything from a single round hut built of sticks and mud to a collection of circular and rectangular buildings jostling together inside an encircling wall. Typically, though, every monastic settlement had three features: a church, a patron saint’s shrine in or near the church, and a circular enclosure of walls, ditches, or both. Monks combined and augmented these elements in myriad ways. At Reask in County Kerry a rounded stone wall enclosed pairs of connected, beehive-shaped huts of stone in one half of the enclosure; separated by a stone wall through the middle, the other half contained rectangular church buildings. Elsewhere, the entirely earthen enclosure and wooden buildings have disappeared, leaving only cross-inscribed slabs to mark especially sacred spots within the now-lost enclosures—the church doorway, the shrine, a well, or a cemetery. The seventh-century Hisperica Famina (Western sayings), a maniacally ornate Latin poem, described life in a prosperous community of monks. One passage compared a comfortable monastic building with its poorer cousin: “This hollow hall surrounds a clean chamber / which is continually swept with switches of birch, / nor does any kindling pile up there. / Here there is a foul-smelling room / that contains hardened grains of dirt, / nor do the leafy brooms sweep the aforesaid chamber” (Herren 1974, pp. 82–83). Some wealthier settlements, such as Armagh, included special housing for nuns, students, guests, kings and queens, and domestic animals. Beyond the gates of such major monasteries lay their farms, pastures for cattle and sheep, their forests, and perhaps a mill.
    Neither stone nor wood-and-earth huts would have afforded much comfort to brothers and sisters, who made do with pleasures of mind and soul. Wherever they lived, Irish monks and nuns, who had never known the Romans as rulers, took up Latin as part of their religious training. Monastic communities organized the study of this entirely foreign language, its grammar, and its major religious texts. They also formed their own idiosyncratic ways of making letters and manuscripts, thus initiating a distinguished tradition of book-learning and production. In addition to Bibles, psalters, and grammar books, Irish monks in the seventh and following centuries produced biblical commentary, prayers, letters, astronomical works, laws, penitentials, and many other texts in both Latin and Europe’s earliest written vernacular, Irish. They commemorated the lives of their monastic founders in biographies of saints, beginning with Cogitosus’s life of Brigit. They also wrote and rewrote the poetry and stories of their ancestors, the kings of ancient Ireland, and the myths of the pre-Christian era. Only the most prosperous communities could muster the supplies and labor to create a great library, or the gorgeously illuminated manuscripts for which Ireland became known (such as the seventh-century Book of Durrow, the earliest known decorated Irish manuscript); others had to borrow and copy what they could.
    The historian known as the Venerable Bede (672?–735), writing in the early eighth century, spread the reputation of Irish scholars, who were already taking in foreign students by then: “The Irish welcomed them all gladly, gave them their daily food, and also provided them with books to read and with instruction without asking for any payment” (Historica Ecclesiastica, III.27, trans. King 1930, p. 485). From large monasteries such as Bangor, where Saint Comgall first ruled, scholars such as Columbanus (543–615) went to continental Europe and Britain to gather and offer Christian learning. (Only men went into exile; religious women were expected to stay home and, at most, teach rudimentary letters to young boys and girls.) Columbanus left a rule and penitentials for the monasteries that he founded in southern France and northern Italy, along with poems and letters to Pope Gregory the Great, among others. His writings reveal not only an elegant style and the passion of a dedicated missionary but also the training in grammar and exegesis that he gained at home early in his career. Columbanus annoyed Gregory with arguments about the date of Easter and so angered local royalty that he found himself on a boat bound for Ireland, composing a mournful poem about his forced departure. But he ended his days as a saintly abbot in Bobbio, south of the Alps. Columbanus was among the first of what would be so many Irish missionary monks that eventually the Latin word for Irishmen, Scotti, came to represent wandering monks of any nationality.
    Bibliography
    Bede. Historica Ecclesiastica. Edited and translated by J. E. King. 1930.
    Bieler, Ludwig, ed. and trans. Patrician Texts in the Book of Armagh. 1979.
    Bitel, Lisa. Isle of the Saints: Monastic Settlement and Christian Community in Early Ireland. 1990.
    Cogitosus. Vita Sanctae Brigidae. PL 72, cols. 775–790.
    De Paor, Liam. Saint Patrick’s World. 1996.
    Gwynn, Aubrey, and R. Neville Hadcock. Medieval Religious Houses: Ireland. Reprint, 1988.
    Herren, Michael, ed. and trans. The Hisperica Famina. 2 vols. 1974, 1987.
    Hughes, Kathleen. The Church in Early Irish Society. 1966.
    Ó Cróinín, Dáibhí. Early Medieval Ireland, 400–1200. 1995.
    Ryan, John. Irish Monasticism: Origins and Early Development. Reprint, 1986.
    Sharpe, Richard. “Some Problems Concerning the Organization of the Church in Early Medieval Ireland.” Peritia 3 (1984): 230–270.
    Walker, G. S. M., ed. Sancti Columbani opera. 1957.

  • Hagiography

    I begin a series of postings of useful essays on various aspects of the history of the early Irish Church with this introduction to the writing of saints’ lives by Dorothy Ann Bray. I had posted most of these essays on my previous blog back in 2009, so it is probable that the original links may now only be recoverable through the Wayback Machine. I originally sourced this piece here.


    Hagiography



    The composition of hagiography (saints’ lives) in
    Ireland begins with three major works that date from the mid- to the late
    seventh century, when the three major monastic foundations of Kildare, Armagh,
    and Iona had firmly established themselves and were expanding their territories
    and influence. The first is the Vita Sanctae Brigidae (Life of Saint
    Brigit of Kildare) by a monk whose name is given as Cogitosus. Cogitosus’s life
    of Brigit dates from about 650     C.E. and has
    long been considered the earliest hagiographical work in Hiberno-Latin. Another
    life of Brigit, the anonymous Vita Prima Sanctae Brigidae (First life of
    Saint Brigit, so called because it is the first of Brigit’s biographies
    recorded in the Acta Sanctorum Bollandiana—the major collection of saints’
    lives first compiled by the Société des Bollandistes in Belgium in the
    seventeenth century), also has a claim for early composition, and there is a
    continuing debate over which of these two is the earlier. The relationship
    between these two lives has yet to be resolved, and while both seem to draw
    upon similar sources, their composition is different. Cogitosus’s biography
    offers only a very brief summary of Brigit’s birth, parentage, and early career
    in a conventional hagiographical manner and concentrates instead on a series of
    miracle stories (including the well-known story of how the saint hung her wet
    cloak on a sunbeam), leading to a lengthy description of Brigit’s church and
    monastery. Cogitosus’s aim seems to be the promotion of the monastic community
    as much as that of its founder and patron; the miracle stories underline
    Brigit’s sanctity and divine power while the great size, wealth, and political
    and religious importance of her community are emphasized. The Vita Prima,
    on the other hand, offers a more lengthy series of miracle stories and
    anecdotes, including the famous birth tale in which Brigit is the daughter of a
    nobleman and a slavewoman, whom he sells at his wife’s insistence. The woman is
    bought first by a poet, then by a druid; the child is born on the threshold of
    the dairy at dawn and washed in new milk. Both versions mix biblical references
    and scripturally based miracles with folkloric material.


    The work of Cogitosus was followed shortly by
    that of Muirchú, a monk of Armagh, who composed a life of Saint Patrick around
    680     C.E. In his preface he refers to the
    hagiographical work of his “father” Cogitosus (no doubt meaning his
    spiritual father) and aims in his composition to do as Cogitosus did for his
    patron and founder. Muirchú’s work contains more biographical material than
    does Cogitosus’s and details Patrick’s early life and mission to Ireland;
    however, much of it is based on legend rather than history, although he clearly
    used some historical sources, including Patrick’s own Confessio
    (Confession). Nevertheless, Muirchú’s life of Patrick became the basis for
    subsequent lives of Patrick. A contemporary document by a bishop, Tiréchan,
    provides further hagiographical material but is a collection of memoranda
    concerning Patrick and a list of his foundations rather than any kind of
    biography.


    The third great hagiographical work of the
    seventh century is the life of Columba (Colum Cille) by Adomnán, ninth abbot of
    Iona, written between 685 and 689     C.E.
    Adomnán’s life of Columba represents Irish hagiographical writing at its
    finest; his work shows not only biblical influence but the influence of major
    continental writers, such as Sulpicius Severus and Gregory the Great, in both
    his hagiographical form and Latin style. While Adomnán incorporated both
    written sources and the oral tradition of Saint Columba in his life, much of
    the work also documents the history and constitution of the Irish church in its
    early days. The life is divided into three parts: The first part tells of
    Columba’s life and career, the second of his miracles and prophecies, and the
    third of angelic visions. Despite the legendary and folkloric material, Columba
    emerges in this life less as a magical figure and more as an historical
    personage. Like Muirchú’s life of Saint Patrick, Adomnán’s life of Columba
    became the basis for subsequent biographies of the saint in both Latin and
    Irish, culminating in the massive Betha Colaim Chille (Life of Colum
    Cille) compiled under the direction of the Donegal chieftain Manus O’Donnell in
    1532. The works of Cogitosus, Muirchú, and Adomnán also reflect their
    respective communities’ concerns with promoting the cults of their founders and
    establishing their territorial rights, thereby increasing their influence and
    income. Armagh and Kildare, both episcopal sees, rivaled one other for
    preeminence in the Irish church; Armagh and its founder saint, Patrick,
    eventually gained ascendance.

    The Irish church witnessed an expansion of monastic
    communities in the seventh and eighth centuries that led to an increase in
    hagiographical composition. This was aided in part by a renewal of asceticism
    and a spiritual reform led by a new order who called themselves céli Dé
    (culdees) or “companions of God,” centered at the monastery of
    Tallaght. The lives of saints from this period emphasize the saints’ ascetic
    practices and virtues of self-denial, individual prayer, and meditation; the
    life of the anchorite, alone in his cell with only God’s creation for company,
    is valorized, as is the saint’s spiritual guidance. Irish hagiographers often
    ascribed to their subjects a strong empathy with the natural world and its
    creatures; the saints of the sixth and seventh centuries had shown this
    affinity with nature and wild animals, and this characteristic continued in the
    hagiography of the reform period, finding also new expression in the religious
    poetry of the time. Devotion to the saints was also an important ideal in this
    movement, and two major martyrologies, the Martyrology of Tallaght and
    the Martyrology of Oengus, are associated with the céli Dé.

    During the eighth and ninth centuries more
    hagiographical texts began to appear in the vernacular, including the Old Irish
    life of Brigit (Bethu Brigte), which dates from the late eighth to early
    ninth centuries, and the Tripartite Life of Saint Patrick (Vita Tripartita)
    of the late ninth century, which represents the last major Patrician text of
    the Irish church. The Tripartite Life marks another change in the
    characteristics of Irish hagiography—it exhibits a strong concern with the
    rights and property of Patrick’s church rather than with spiritual teaching.
    The lives of the saints from this period onward follow suit in showing such
    interest in their saints’ churches, and the miracle stories become more
    fantastic and flamboyant to demonstrate the power of the saint, who appears
    much the same as a saga hero.

    The majority of the lives written in the
    vernacular are in Middle Irish; many are direct translations from Latin
    originals and date from around and after the twelfth century. But dating is
    notoriously difficult, since the manuscript versions of the lives of the
    saints, in both Latin and Irish, cannot be dated with confidence before the
    late twelfth century. This is partly owing to the incursions of the Vikings in
    the late eighth to the tenth centuries, but also to the ravages of later eras.
    From the sixth century Irish monks had traveled to Europe as pilgrims and
    missionaries, and a few, such as Saint Columbanus in the late sixth to early
    seventh centuries, founded several monasteries in France, Germany, and
    Switzerland. Many Irish monks fled to these continental Irish monasteries in
    the wake of the Vikings, taking their manuscripts with them. Irish
    hagiographical writing continued, however, both in Ireland and in Europe—the Navigatio
    Sancti Brendani     (Voyage of Saint Brendan), one of the most widely read
    works of the Middle Ages, was composed on the continent around the tenth
    century, probably by an Irish monk in exile, and was later translated into
    several vernacular languages.

    In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the
    Irish church moved closer to conformity with the continental church and
    participated in the reform movement that was associated with the Benedictine
    abbey at Cluny. This paved the way for new orders, such as the Cistercians, to
    enter Ireland. One of the main leaders of this movement in Ireland was
    Máel-Máedóc Úa Morgair, or Saint Malachy; an account of his life was composed
    after his death in 1148 by his friend, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. Although the
    great heyday of Irish saints and Irish hagiography had passed, the lives of the
    saints remained an important part of Irish history and identity. As the Normans
    became increasingly absorbed into Irish society and culture, Irish literature
    and learning rebounded. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the major
    collections of saints’ lives—the Codex Insulensis, the Codex
    Salmanticensis,     and the Codex Kilkenniensis—were compiled. The Book
    of Lismore,     a private collection made for Finghín MacCarthaigh Riabhach
    (MacCarthy Reagh) and his wife Catherine, containing lives in Irish, was
    compiled in the late fifteenth century.

    The English conquest in the sixteenth
    century, however, halted further hagiographical production. The traditional
    historians of Ireland tried to continue the task of preserving and copying
    existing manuscripts, while Irishmen hoping to join the priesthood had to
    journey to Europe for their training. In the early seventeenth century the
    Irish ecclesiastics on the continent, alarmed that their national history was
    threatened with extinction, began to collect and publish Irish manuscripts; the
    main proponents were Henry FitzSimon (c. 1566–c. 1645), Luke Wadding
    (1588–1657), Peter Lombard (c. 1555–1625), and Stephen White (1574–1646). At
    the College of Saint Anthony in Louvain, a group under the leadership of Hugh
    Ward (1590–1635), encouraged by Luke Wadding and assisted by Stephen White,
    undertook a major plan for a Thesaurus Antiquitatem Hibernicarum
    (Thesaurus of Irish antiquities). The first object was to collect at Louvain as
    many Irish historical sources as possible, including hagiographical sources,
    both from Europe and from Ireland. This task was discharged by John Colgan
    (1592–1658), Patrick Fleming (1599–1631), and Michael O’Clery (d. 1645). The
    mission of collecting and copying in Ireland all the manuscripts in Irish
    pertaining to religious history fell to O’Clery, who between 1626 and 1642
    assembled and transcribed a prodigious number of manuscripts, many of which
    contained hagiographical material. The third volume of the whole design,
    published at Louvain in 1645, contains the lives of Irish saints whose
    festivals fall within January, February, and March; the second volume,
    published in 1647, contains documents pertaining to Saints Patrick, Brigit, and
    Columba. Both were edited by Colgan. Another collection of lives in Irish was
    copied by Domnall Ó Dineen in 1627, possibly for the Irish scholars at Louvain,
    though it remained in Ireland.

    From the collections of Irish material made
    by these scholars and from the great Latin collections, most of the modern
    editions of Irish hagiography were made. The O’Clery collections now reside in
    the Bibliothèque royale in Brussels. Several manuscripts that remained in
    Ireland found their way into the collections of antiquarians, such as Sir James
    Ware (1594–1666) and Sir Robert Cotton (1570–1631), and from thence went
    eventually to the British Library and the Bodleian Library at the University of
    Oxford (including the great codices under the Rawlinson collection). Other
    manuscript sources reside in the libraries of Trinity College, Dublin and the
    Royal Irish Academy. The study of Irish hagiography has gained added impetus
    not only from modern editions but from advances in the study of the language
    and history of early Ireland; a large body of scholarship has appeared in
    recent years, making these texts accessible to the modern reader and returning
    them to their rightful place in Irish literary and religious history.



    Bibliography
    Anderson, A. O., and M. O. Anderson, eds. and
    trans. Adomnán’s Life of Columba. 1961. Reprint, 1991.
    Bray, Dorothy Ann. A List of Motifs in the
    Lives of the Early Irish Saints.     1992.
    Connolly, Seán. “Vita Prima Sanctae
    Brigidae.” Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland
    119 (1989): 5–49.
    Connolly, Seán, and Jean-Michel Picard.
    “Cogitosus: Life of St. Brigit.” Journal of the Royal Society of
    Antiquaries of Ireland     117 (1987): 5–27.
    Heist, W. W. Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae.
    1965.
    Herbert, Máire. Iona, Kells, and Derry:
    The History and Hagiography of the Monastic Familia of Columba.     1988.
    Howlett, D. R., ed. and trans. The Book of
    Letters of Saint Patrick the Bishop.     1994.
    Hughes, Kathleen. The Church in Early
    Irish Society.     1966.
    Hughes, Kathleen. Early Christian Ireland:
    An Introduction to the Sources.     1972.
    Kenney, J. F. The Sources for the Early
    History of Ireland: Ecclesiastical.     1929. Reprint, 1979.
    Ó hAodha, Donncha, ed. and trans. Bethu
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