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
Brigte. 1978.
Plummer, Charles, ed. and trans. Bethada
Náem nÉrenn: Lives of Irish Saints. 2 vols. 1922. Reprint, 1968.
Plummer, Charles, ed. Vitae Sanctorum
Hiberniae. 2 vols. 1910. Reprint, 1968.
Sharpe, Richard. Medieval Irish Saints’
Lives. 1991.
Sharpe, Richard, trans. Adomnán of Iona:
Life of St. Columba. 1995.

Dorothy Ann Bray