OMNIUM SANCTORUM HIBERNIAE

ALL THE SAINTS OF IRELAND

  • Latin and Old Irish Literacy

    This essay outlines the development of Hiberno-Latin culture and the part that literacy played in the growth of Irish Christianity.

    Anthony Harvey
    The oldest physically surviving examples of Irish-language literacy are a few hundred inscriptions written in the Morse code–like alphabet called ogham. Almost all of these simply record names of people. They are found carved on large stones across southern Ireland (particularly Cork and Kerry) and in Irish-influenced parts of western Britain, and they date from about the fourth century C.E. to the seventh. For the invention of the ogham alphabet itself, a dating only a little earlier than that of the first extant inscriptions has been proposed, but it is certain that only a fraction of the earliest evidence has survived, so the script may have originated as soon as the influences inspiring it began to be felt in Gaeldom. The main such influence is believed to have been the Roman alphabet. This was used primarily for writing Latin (some of the stones in Britain give a Roman-letter “translation” into Latin of the Irish name that appears in ogham). By the second century C.E. at the latest, the Roman invasion of Britain had brought Latin, as a potentially culture-affecting force, to the shores of the Irish Sea (and probably across it; there is known to have been Roman trade with Ireland and arguably some transient settlement). Although Ireland was and remained outside the Roman empire, it may therefore have been as early as this that educated but hitherto illiterate Irish-speaking circles first gained the fairly minimal access to Latinity that they needed for the ogham script to be devised.
    Whether or not some knowledge of Latin reached Ireland before the Christian gospel did, the language was necessarily involved in the establishment of the religion there: Irish churches could not have been part of Catholic Christendom, as they were, without using some Latin right from their foundation. Of Latin works known to have been written in early Ireland, the oldest that survive in terms of composition (not in physical terms; they are probably copies of copies) are two letters authored by the Briton Saint Patrick, probably in the fifth century. As Christianity was believed until recently to have been first introduced to Ireland by Patrick, he and his epistles have conventionally been seen as marking the necessary introduction of Latin literacy to the island as well. But not only does the ogham phenomenon precede his traditional dates, Irish Christianity is now recognized to do so too. So unless Patrick was actually active before the fifth century, Latin reached Ireland first.
    Weak as Latin culture still was in Ireland in Patrick’s day, his sixth-century successors established it firmly. The Latin of the writing tradition that they set up is known to have been pronounced in a markedly British fashion; thus they too were from Britain. These evangelists were doubtless inspired in many cases by the zeal that appears to have swept the larger island after the publication there of De excidio Britanniae (The ruin of Britain), a prophetic call for reformation in church and state by their compatriot Gildas. His ability to compose this erudite work a century or more after the fall of Rome shows that Latin learning was still strong in Britain at that time, and the prestige the work conferred probably played a major part in invigorating the stylish and productive British-Latin tradition that continued down to Norman times. Elements of that tradition surviving from the seventh century fall into a penitential genre, which spread to Ireland: We have Hiberno-Latin examples from the same century. By the year 700, Ireland had produced a significant body of Latin in other genres, too, that has come down to us, albeit preserved in later manuscripts.
    Accomplished authors responsible include Cummian (computistics), “Augustinus” Hibernicus (theology), Virgilius Maro Grammaticus (idiosyncratic philological discourse), and Cogitosus and Muirchú (hagiography), as well as anonymous writers of poetry and legal and historical works. Indeed, the debt of Hiberno-Latin culture to the outside world was being actively repaid during that period: Seventh-century English scholars frequently traveled to Ireland for further study, while influential Irishmen such as Saint Columbanus (d. 615) had begun to spearhead a continent-wide monastic movement that did much to keep Latin learning alive on a wider stage in troubled times.
    As soon as Celtic scribes began to write Latin texts on vellum, they probably included Latinized versions of Celtic names (Patrick and Gildas both did this). But the first extant manuscript material to constitute real Celtic-medium writing consists of explanatory glosses added in Irish to Latin texts penned from the early seventh century onwards. Given their ancillary nature, these physically earliest examples have been seen as reaching us from a stage not long after the actual beginning of the (manuscript) writing of Irish. However, Irish glosses in a famous Würzburg manuscript, though themselves of the eighth century, show traces of a spelling system whose invention must predate the introduction of British-Latin pronunciation by Saint Patrick’s successors. Indeed, this system shows links with ogham orthography. Can it have originated in the same period? Ogham on stone was formerly felt to have been a pagan phenomenon that gave way to the Christian practice of writing manuscripts in Roman letters on vellum. But some ogham stones also display Christian crosses. Since ogham’s straight strokes are ideally suited to carving, the choice of alphabet may actually have been determined more by the medium than by the culture. So the same people who carved inscriptions using ogham may also have written on vellum using the Roman alphabet. The ogham was Irish-language; any contemporary Roman-letter material will have been primarily Latin-medium, but may it have included Celtic as well? It is true that some of the stones survive while no physically contemporary manuscript texts do; but then, only ten manuscripts (in either language) went on to survive on Irish soil from even as late as 1000 C.E., and hundreds are known to have existed by then.
    At all events, once Irish-medium manuscript literacy was established in a form that comes down to us, it can be seen blossoming in a variety of genres, including theological tracts, saints’ lives, legal material, poetry, and ultimately the great prose tales. Early Irish literacy also displays an astonishing assurance. By the year 700 fully bilingual material was being written, showing that (uniquely for a vernacular) Irish-medium literacy was esteemed equally with Latin. It cannot be coincidence that, during the mainstream Old Irish period that followed, this literacy went on to constitute the earliest and, for its day, by far the largest body of nonclassical vernacular written material in Europe (a distinction often, but erroneously, claimed for Old English).
    Bibliography
    Harvey, Anthony. “Latin, Literacy, and the Celtic Vernaculars around the Year AD 500.” In Celtic Languages and Celtic Peoples, edited by Cyril J. Byrne, Margaret Harry, and Pádraig Ó Siadhail. 1992.
    Harvey, Anthony. “Problems in Dating the Origin of the Ogham Script.” In Roman, Runes, and Ogham, edited by John Higgitt, Katherine Forsyth, and David N. Parsons. 2001.
    Howlett, D. R. The Celtic Latin Tradition of Biblical Style. 1995.
    Jackson, Kenneth. Language and History in Early Britain. 1953. Reprint, 1994.
    Lapidge, Michael, and Richard Sharpe. A Bibliography of Celtic-Latin Literature, 400–1200. 1985.
    McManus, Damian. A Guide to Ogam. 1991.
    Stevenson, Jane. “The Beginnings of Literacy in Ireland.” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 89 C (1989): 127–165.

  • 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.