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This article investigates the manner in which Gildas’s De excidio Britanniae was being read at the Canterbury school of Theodore and Hadrian in the seventh century. Beginning with a discussion of the historical milieu of the Canterbury school, the textual history of the De excidio, and the evidence of the text’s presence at this center, this article examines the glossae collectae preserved in the Leiden Glossary that have been identified as Gildasian in an effort to gain insight into the intellectual and cultural concerns of the Anglo-Saxon scholars working there. This study argues that Gildas’s text was likely used within a pedagogical context in support of the reform agenda undertaken by Theodore and that the glossae collectae in Leiden appear to be the result of multiple independent systematic readings of the text.

In his twelfth-century travel narrative, the Topographia Hibernica (The Topography of Ireland), Gerald of Wales writes of an encounter between a priest and a pair of Irish werewolves, who ask the priest to administer the viaticum to the sickly she-wolf before her death. Observing the werewolves’ devout words and sincere demeanor, the priest complies, but his actions are later questioned in a synod. Postcolonial scholarship interprets Gerald’s account as a pro-Norman depiction of the Irish as barbarians, which is a tenable reading in the first recension of the text. However, such an interpretation is complicated by passages Gerald adds in four subsequent recensions. This article offers a corrective reading by examining the content of Gerald’s later recensions that has been repeatedly overlooked, and by suggesting that the episode is most significantly shaped by Gerald’s identity as a clerical reformer, rather than as a court writer seeking to debase the Irish.

The Miracula Sancti Columbani offers a unique monastic perspective on monastic/aristocratic conflict in tenth-century Italy, in an area and period in which other narrative sources are lacking. It recalls a translatio strategy to Hugh of Provence’s royal court in 929 in response to the incursions of Bishop Guido of Piacenza. When these events were redacted decades later, a different sort of diocesan threat presented itself-this time by Bishop Giseprand of Tortona, who used his position as abbot of Bobbio to alienate lands. The Miracula reveal a shift in the nature of episcopal ambition towards private patronage, and a proactive (if ever-changing) relationship between “royal” monastery and sovereign, during a time when the landscape of royal power was shifting. Cultic innovations and accompanying hagiographic material provide an often-neglected perspective onto the agency of institutions and the use of institutional memory and the public sphere to negotiate and contest their rights.

The sources for late antique and early medieval canon law collections consisted primarily of synodal acta and papal decretals. Although these collections fell short of addressing the growing legal requirements of expanding Christian communities, new sources could not be introduced without first securing their authority. The earliest collection to offer both new sources and new methods of legislation, was the late seventh- or early eighth-century Irish Hibernensis. It concludes with a book consisting entirely of novel sources, which highlights ostensible contradictions between canons. This book is the earliest recorded example of sic et non in the Latin West. The present article analyzes this book with the aim of establishing how the Hibernensis addressed the problem of innovation versus authority. My analysis evokes modern legal theory and explores the efficacy and limitations of drawing on theory as a means of shedding light on early medieval canon law material.

This article considers the cultural implications of the distinctive use of Old Testament personal names by Brittonic-speaking peoples (Welsh, Breton, and Cornish) in the centuries down to ca. 1100. An argument is made that the origin of the tradition is early, developing among the Britons in the Roman and sub-Roman periods. The case is made for the geographic dispersal of the practice, for the constructedness of British ecclesiastical identity, and the maintenance of the tradition among successive communities of the Brittonic-speaking peoples despite their other differences.

This article provides dates for the Topographia Hibernica's five versions based on manuscript information and internal textual analysis. The results correct the assumption that Gerald of Wales revised the Topographia intermittently until the end of his life. Instead, the versions are placed within concrete contexts as both reactive to specific events and received by specific audiences: Version I (and to an extent II) can be located in the Angevin court prior to Henry II's death, while Versions II, III, and IV are directed at a clerical audience. A letter accompanying many Version III texts directs it to William de Vere, bishop of Hereford, while a new discovery of extracts from the Topographia in William de Montibus's Similitudinarium links Version IV with the pastoral care movement at Lincoln during Gerald's first “retirement” there. Version V was again directed at the Angevin court, to King John around 1209, urging renewed action in Ireland.

Computistical studies of the past centuries have primarily focused on the works of well-known individuals, while anonymous texts have been widely left unconsidered, leading to an immense overrating of the scientific achievements of the scholars known by name. Only within the past few years have the intellectual milieus that produced and influenced the known authors received some attention. This article defines on a textual basis Irish and Anglo-Saxon scientific milieus between Isidore of Seville and the Venerable Bede by providing a survey of all known computistical works of this period. On this basis, the Irish scientific contribution to the Carolingian educational and intellectual renaissance is assessed before the more general desiderata in the modern study of early medieval computistica are outlined at the end of this paper.

This article reads the medieval Welsh prose tale Branwen ferch Lŷr as a narrative of kinship relations gone wrong. Using as a critical tool Frederic Jameson’s notion of the text as a space where social contradictions can be explored and resolved on a fictive level, this reading stresses how the international politics of dynastic alliance highlight the tensions already present in families in which the kinship status of half-siblings is ambiguous and inheritance practices in flux. In contrast to the traditional “peaceweaver” model, which posits marriage alliances as a method of solving existing feuds between two peoples, this reading argues that the exogamous alliance in Branwen serves to bring out conflicts previously existing within the circle of the original family. These conflicts stem from the medieval Welsh ideology of kinship operative in Branwen, which, while purportedly protective, ultimately destroys the British royal family and their hold on power.

The Collectio canonum Hibernensis is an eighth-century Hiberno-Latin compilation of patristic ‘florilegia’ that was brought to England by Breton ecclesiastics and employed by Anglo-Saxon reformers as a canonical resource. This article addresses the Hibernensis as an Irish product that was subsumed into the corpus of continental regulatory materials which then circulated throughout the Anglo-Saxon centers and assisted in the articulation of the ideological framework for the English Benedictine Reform in the tenth and eleventh centuries. This discussion delineates the ways in which the Hibernensis was transmitted throughout the English centers, in company with Anglo-Saxon and continental regulatory materials alike (including the Amalarian Liber officialis, the Regularis Concordia and Wulfstan’s Canon Law Collection), and shows that the Hiberno-Latin text was employed in the regulatory scholarship of Oda of Canterbury (the Constitutiones), Ælfric of Eynsham (the Letter to Brother Edward), and Wulfstan of York (the Institutes of Polity).

Taking as its point of departure Tacitus's observation of the homogeneity of the Germanic tribes, this article probes his idea about the Northern peoples, examining the physical characteristics of ancient Norwegians and the mingling of Norwegians and Celts in Iceland during the period of settlement and beyond. Among the problems explored are self-perception, awareness of "the other," naming patterns, and cooperation between the two groups, including marital and reproductive strategies. Features of dark hair, dark skin, and dark eyes were found occasionally in Norway, but they became more common in Iceland as blond Norwegians mingled with darker Celts from the western islands in the North Atlantic. Since Norwegians brought few of their women to Iceland in the beginning, Celtic women were largely responsible for funneling Celtic genes into the Icelandic population either directly or indirectly. After considering also the mixture of dark and blond peoples in the Orkneys, the article in conclusion pursues the Icelandic colonization of Greenland and Vinland, where the Norse discontinued their forefathers' practice of mingling with people of different appearance.

The Navigatio sancti Brendani has been variously interpreted as a monkish transatlantic voyage, a continental devotional piece with an Irish setting, an allegorical pilgrimage, and an allegory of monastic life. This article explores the monastic allegory in the context of the early Irish church, suggesting a link with the célí dé reform in examining the type of monasticism evinced in the text, as well as its genre in Irish literary tradition (the text as an immram). The eschatological theme, as disclosed by apocalyptic imagery, is also linked to the metaphor of the voyage as a life journey. On the level of a physical voyage, the text evokes the physical and geographical reality of the early Irish church; on the spiritual level, the voyage evokes the aims and outlook of the reform movement of the ninth century, especially attitudes toward pilgrimage, using the familiar immram genre. The Irish Christian and Irish monastic background to the Navigatio is thus reinforced.

Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae, much the most detailed Latin grammar available to early medieval Europe, began to replace the Ars grammaticae of Donatus about 800, and remained dominant until the mid-twelfth century. Section 1 of this article deals with the key figures who established that dominance in the Carolingian era, how they studied Priscian, and developed commentaries on the text. Section 2 contrasts the more sophisticated interests and techniques of the "modern scholars" of the eleventh and earlier twelfth centuries. The last of these was Petrus Helias. Subsequent students of Priscian, in their concern to elevate grammar to the scholastic level of logic, found the analysis of the Institutiones as a complete text irrelevant to their new concerns.

Although it has long been assumed that the Middle Welsh tale Branwen Uerch Lyr, the Second Branch of the Mabinogi, is primarily a pastiche of story-elements from the mythological and literary traditions of medieval Ireland, many of the narrative elements of Branwen belong to the large, migratory stock of international folktale motifs and are better seen in the broader context of the traditional tale. It has also been thought that the narrative structure of Branwen is essentially that of a "calumniated wife" tale, though in fact most of the defining elements of such tales are missing from the Welsh narrative. The basis of Branwen is instead another traditional story of the Middle Ages, the "peaceweaver" tale, the best examples of which appear not in Celtic narrative but in the stories of Hildeburh and Freawaru in the "digressions" of Beowulf. The Old English poem and the Middle Welsh tale both give us versions of a fundamental and widespread medieval story of the exogamous dynastic marriage which tries but fails to overcome social feud and political antagonism.