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The significant role of the frontier between Ireland and the Roman Empire for conversion to Christianity is underappreciated. Centuries of interaction brought the Irish into contact with their neighbors in a multitude of ways, peaceful and violent. The frontier’s importance is attested through material culture and religious change. The mission of Palladius, the first bishop to Irish Christian communities whose career can be dated securely, should be situated in these contexts. Arguably, his activities can be illuminated through examining models of diplomacy and frontier management. These rescue him from St. Patrick’s long shadow; they suggest that Palladius was as much a political envoy as a Christian bishop.

Through a detailed exploration of decorated folios within the seventh-century Book of Durrow and a discussion of relevant liturgical literature and referential artistic material from the early medieval period, this article constructs a framework for conceptualizing how early Insular artist-scribes created and understood biblical manuscript illumination. The multifaceted nature of studying and copying liturgical texts directly reflected the popular concepts of memoria and meditatio, committing knowledge to the mind and gaining a spiritual transcendence from the transformative powers of the Word itself. The unification of text and image as exegetical literary device in the Book of Durrow reflected mnemonic and allegoric conventions that stemmed from British, Frankish, and Byzantine traditions proliferated in Ireland via the Columban monastic network. Far from being mere textual decorations, elaborately interlaced carpet pages, stylized initial lettering, and zoo-anthropomorphic motifs echoed emerging theological understanding of spiritual consciousness and demonstrated Irish monastic facility in adapting cross-cultural artistic influences.

This paper presents a list of freeholders of Kilfenora Diocese in County Clare from 1601. The fortuitous survival of this list shows a snap-shot of Gaelic social hierarchies and landholding in an area almost wholly unaffected by anglicizing changes. The value of the list is its survey of land denominations and proprietorship and its focus on the church lands of the Corcomroe division of the diocese. It is speculated here that the list was compiled by a cleric at the cathedral chapter of Kilfenora and that its purpose was to ascertain church lands and property in order to put the administration of the diocese—including its revenues from the diocesan temporalities—on a more sure footing.

This paper presents a new translation of a text found in the Laud collection of genealogical material that is here called “The Cíarraige Chiefdom Alliance.” This translation is complete and hews as closely as possible to the language of the original text, rendering social nuances more precisely. The discussion that follows proposes that the tale presents a wishful alternative reality to the ninth century political circumstances of the Cíarraige composite chiefdom with regard to their foes, the Iarmumu of Loch Léin. Whereas there is geographical and historical evidence from the annals that suggests that the Cíarraige had lost territory to an invasion by Iarmumu in the eighth century, the text situates their adversarial relationship in the sixth century and shows the Cíarraige gaining a measure of autonomy. The tale provides valuable insights into how relationships between dominant and subordinate complex Irish chiefdoms were negotiated in the early Middle Ages.

Five newly edited manuscripts reveal that the treatise De tonitruis purports to be adapted from the Irish language. In this essay, possible Irish affinities are explored and are found to lie, in increasing order of importance, in the ornate prose style, the recondite and culturally highly significant vocabulary, and the eulogistic citations of unnamed natural philosophers as authorities for thunder prognostics. In all these respects, De tonitruis differs from conventional European brontologies. Although it is surely not translated from the Irish language, the mark of Irish learning is distinctive.

This paper is essentially a textual version of the Robert Farrell Memorial Lecture, delivered by Aidan O’Sullivan, on Thursday, May 12, 2016, for the American Society for Irish Medieval Studies. The lecture was based on the co-authors’ collaborative research project, entitled “The Early Medieval and Viking Houses Project,” at UCD Centre for Experimental Archaeology, which was funded by UCD Research Seed Funding Scheme. To recognize the discursive approach taken in the lecture, only further readings are suggested below, which provide access to the some of the archaeological and historical details.

The medieval Lives of Ireland’s saints constitute one of the island’s largest bodies of evidence from the Middle Ages. These texts draw upon many sources for their textual inspiration, using models from the Bible, numerous apocryphal works, and from vernacular saga and romance to construct the image of the holy men and women they commemorate. In Ireland, these textual models often focus upon the Prophet Elijah and, by extension, his associate Elisha, a focus that has not previously been studied. These Elijan parallels not only reveal elements of the Irish hagiographers’ views of how to construct holiness, but also suggest the hagiographers’ arguments for the early Church as Ireland’s sole unifying spiritual and political force.