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This paper examines the series of text-image devices found in the Book of Armagh (Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS 52), at the explicit to the Gospel of John (fol. 103r), the tituli to the Book of Revelation (fol. 159v), and the Revelation explicit (fol. 170r), to suggest how the manuscript might originally have been used in meditative reading. By setting them in the context of early medieval monastic spirituality and contemplative practices, it explores how these devices might present the reading of scripture as a path to salvation.

This essay explores the role of intertextuality in the commemoration of Patrick, Cuthbert and Acgilbert in three texts that share an identical phrase. These texts are: Muirchú’s Vita sancti Patricii, and Bede’s Vita sancti Cuthberti and Historia ecclesiastica. The rhythmic phrase relates to themes of mission, grace, and conversion across the three texts.

This paper re-examines the Irish annals’ records of the Viking raid on Inis Phátraic and the desecration of Saint Dochonna’s shrine in ad 798. Former interpretations placed this island in either Ireland or the Isle of Man, with major consequences for early Irish-Sea Viking-Age historical research, but without detailing their respective arguments.

The Carolingian-era vita of Betharius of Chartres offers a pithy description of an otherwise-unattested ecclesiastical council c. ad 600. This study evaluates the hypothesis that the Council of Sens met in response to a request by Pope Gregory i, and that its agenda included an investigation of the Irish monastic reformer Columbanus.

The view that Karlsruhe Cod. Aug. clxvii was first compiled in Ireland before being brought to the Continent, where, having been for some time in northern France, it was eventually brought to the monastery of Reichenau on Lake Constance, is re-examined here and substantiated through further evidence. It is also suggested here that the monastery of Glendalough is likely to have been the original home of the manuscript. Using additions to the calendar as evidence, a date from about 835 is proposed for its presence in northern France, followed by its arrival in Reichenau before 850, if not already by the early 840s, or earlier.

The Vita Secunda Fursei collated by Arnulph of Lagny, recounting the seventh-century saint’s Galway origins, is discredited because of its late eleventh century date. Through analysis of 1) placenames, archaeology, genealogies and Connacht history, 2) an early Vita Prima Fursei embedded in Arnulph’s text, and 3) Arnulph’s methods, this paper concludes that the Vita Secunda deserves rehabilitation.

The so-called ‘Royal Prayer-book’ (London, British Library, MS Royal 2.A.xx) contains several related prayers for staunching a flow of blood. One of these entries contains several portions of Greek text written in Greek characters. This paper suggests that these Greek sections come ultimately from a background of Greek incantations and amuletic texts, which were likely transmitted through Late Antique medical sources.

Penance in the middle ages functioned as a form of satisfaction for sins not only before God, but society. Consequently, it is a recurring theme in medieval sources, including those from early Ireland. It features in penitential books, canon law, conciliar acta, monastic rules, hagiographies, and in the vernacular legal literature. This article will argue that: (1) when sin carried social repercussions, such as in the cases of murder, theft, and those that were sexual in nature, the concepts of sin and crime were often treated interchangeably in most texts; (2) in the cases of ‘social sins’ penance could sometimes function as a form of punishment, such as exile or forced peregrinatio; (3) penance was valued by the Irish literate elite and it may have become an important aspect of early Irish society by the late seventh and eighth centuries.

The Book of Dimma is an Irish pocket gospel book dated to the (late) eighth century. Recent scholarly views are that the first three gospels were commissioned by Dianchride of the Múscraige near Roscrea (or even written by him); that the name of the scribe Dimma that was written over erasures was a fraud inspired by a hagiographical tale in the Life of St Crónán of Roscrea; and that it is unknown when the Gospel of John was added to the other three gospels. These and other views are challenged and alternative explanations are proposed.

Two Lives of St Cybi of Holyhead, Anglesey, in a manuscript of the late twelfth century, recount how the saint spent a period in Ireland. Though superficially following a common hagiographical narrative trope - peregrinatio, with founding of churches - this story is very peculiar in that Cybi is repeatedly persecuted by a second saint, and ultimately forced to withdraw. This paper discusses the Irish geography of the narrative and its possible significance.

Almost all the fundamental facts about the Amrae, the most intriguing and the most difficult of early Irish texts on Columba of Iona, are disputed: its date, its authorship, whether it is a poem or prose, for what audience or readership it was intended, and even the meaning of the title. Hitherto, discussion has been hampered by the absence of a reliable critical edition, one that takes into account all the surviving copies and situates them in the manuscript tradition of the text. This task has been admirably performed by Bisagni. His edition includes a book-length introduction which advocates an early ninth-century date for the main text of the Amrae, locates its composition at the Columban monastery of Durrow, and interprets it as a response by the Columban familia to the threat posed to its interests by the church of Armagh in a period when Áed Oirdnide of Cenél nÉogain reigned as king of Tara. Bisagni’s arguments are considered in the light of the text he has provided.

In his letter to Pope Gregory i, Columbanus quoted a passage from Gennadius’s Liber ecclesiasticorum dogmatum. This article presents an overview of the textual history of the quotation in Columbanus’s letter and of the Easter chapter in the Liber ecclesiasticorum dogmatum. It will be suggested that the competing systems for the dating of Easter influenced the reception and transmission of Gennadius’s text from an early phase of its history. The appendix provides an overview of the manuscript witnesses of the Liber ecclesiasticorum dogmatum, noting the key variations in the Easter chapter for a representative sample.

The two earliest Latin commentaries on the Catholic Epistles probably come from seventh-century southern Ireland and both suggest that christians only owe obedience to kings who actively punish the wicked and praise the good. This may reflect an ideology of punitive christian kingship which seems particularly prominent in Munster during the second half of the seventh century.

This paper examines how Adomnán deploys scripture and the landscape of Iona to depict Columba as a Christ-like figure. This re-casting is done not just for spiritual/religious reasons but in pursuit of clear ecclesiological and political goals in the context of an increasingly hostile ecclesiastical and secular environment.

Verses in Saltair na Rann include a list of late-tenth-century kings and events along the north-eastern Atlantic coast. Those stanzas suggest an increasing international awareness by writers in the British Isles, and appear to be an independent work by an author connected with Northern Britain.

The last five years have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest in the life and activities of the famous sixth-/seventh-century Irish missionary, Columbanus (d. 615). That research has led to a re-evaluation of the saint’s personal impact on his contemporaries and the long-term influence of his foundations on the development of the continental Church in Gaul and Italy.

This paper examines what have been termed ‘abortion miracles’ attributed to the hagiographies of St Brigit of Kildare. Of the early vitae of St Brigit, two have survived in their entirety: the seventh-century Life of St Brigit by Cogitosus and the Vita Prima Sanctae Brigitae. ‘Abortion miracles’ in hagiographies are largely unique to Ireland and past scholars have theorised their existence and placement as a defiance of early Christian morality, while others have theorised their inclusion to demonstrate the value of chastity in early medieval Irish Christianity. This paper refocuses the argument by separating medieval abortion as an act of maleficium, or ‘malevolent magic’, as described in the Irish penitentials, and argues that the miracles found in Irish hagiography are medicines of penance, called wombhealing.

This article argues for a common episcopal culture in the pre-Norman Irish Sea region in which clerical fighting was relatively unproblematic. Several factors caused previously acceptable clerical participation in warfare to stand out as ‘rogue’, bringing expectations of episcopal behaviour in line with norms in parts of Europe that were becoming culturally dominant.

This article presents two stones with short inscriptions in Early Irish that were discovered by Brian Callaghan of the Moybologue Historical Society at Moybologue Old Graveyard and at Enniskeen Graveyard, in 2017 and 2019 respectively. Both sites are on the Cavan-Meath border and are approximately 10.5 km distant from each other.

Scholarly consensus maintains that the British writer Gildas was effectively ignorant of fifth-century events and therefore had no idea where to properly fit the famous passage known as the gemitus Britannorum into his quasi-historical diatribe. This study found that the four distinct groupings of twenty-three, twenty-three, twenty, and twenty-two words that comprise the passage are actually palaeographical evidence of a loose bifolium. By determining the format of the autograph, it will be shown that textual corruption occurred during transmission due to factors both primary (loose folia in the exemplar) and secondary (copyist innovation). This paper also offers a proposed textual reconstruction of the displaced segment, which shall greatly affect our both our appreciation of Gildas and our ability to use his narrative as a reliable historical source.

This article offers a sympathetic appraisal of the career of Donnchad mac Briain, an overlooked eleventh-century king of Munster. In addition, it is argued that his association with the Crown of Ireland and position as a genuine and supposed ancestor of various Gaelic and Anglo-Irish families (as portrayed in bardic poetry and genealogies) suggests that he possessed a positive legacy during the medieval and early modern periods.

Edition, translation, and analysis of three poems composed probably about AD 681 in honour of his late master by the earliest datable Anglo-Latin poet, probably at Lindisfarne.

This article examines the earliest surviving adaptation of the Long Latin Visio Sancti Pauli in the West with a view to shedding light on the context and milieu in which this text was transmitted and adapted. It is argued that the text points to transmission in an Hiberno-Frankish milieu in which the paenitentialia minora also circulated, together with an Insular collection of homilies. Based on the text as it stands in StG1, Rhaetia or Northern Italy after 721 AD may be the likeliest place for the earliest reception and adaptation of the Visio Sancti Pauli.

Fourteen excerpts from a text modelled on a world chronicle survive as quotations in the late seventh- or early eighth-century Collectio Hibernensis. This chronicle-like text associated with the name Origen - arguably an Irish sage with a patristic pseudonym - might also have been a source for the Historia Brittonum. Is this the earliest ‘chronicle’ from Ireland or a figment of seventhcentury imaginative Insular scholarship?

An Anglo-Saxon named Lutting composed three Anglo-Latin poems that praise his magister Bede, who died 9 February 681. The epitaph for Bede contains the earliest recorded use yet identified in Northumbria, perhaps even in the Insular world, of Anno Domini chronology derived from the use of Dionysiac Paschal tables of the kind favoured by the ‘Roman’ party at the ‘synod’ of Whitby (664).

A diagram in the first quire of the Codex Amiatinus features five textual captions arranged in cruciform formation, one for each book of the Pentateuch. These are taken from Jerome’s first letter to Paulinus of Nola (Epistle 53) which was written in 394 AD. This article examines the diagram’s colours, geometric structure, manuscript location and script. It suggests that the Pentateuch diagram should be regarded as a highly original piece of visual exegesis designed to celebrate the contribution made by Jerome to the transmission of the Latin Bible and point the viewer towards typological interpretations of Old Testament figures and events.

Most medieval depictions of the crane (Grus grus) emphasise its nobility and importance for falconry; however, medieval Welsh poetry provides a topos of an ugly, greedy creature. This paper contrasts the two attitudes and suggests possible origins with reference to classical literature, naturalistic observation and Marxist interpretations of class conflict.

Recognition of an offence in early Irish law entailed not punishment but compensation by payment. Some of these offences were also regulated in the penitentials and in canon law, posing the question of how penance and payment intertwined and to what communities they catered. This paper investigates the influence of this perceived duality in the paradigm of liability and sin from a legal perspective.

The Pelagian heresy was the last great controversy of the Western Church in Late Antiquity. Its outcome shaped the future of that Church for centuries to come and its various theological positions were still being debated at the time of the Reformation. Central to the controversy were the figures of Pelagius and Augustine, with their respective supporters. In recent times, however, the debate has taken a dramatic new turn: the very existence of ‘Pelagianism’ as a body of ideas has been flatly denied, and the theological beliefs supposedly espoused by Pelagius himself have been dismissed as fabrications conjured up by Augustine and his followers as part of a massive conspiracy. This radical new theory offers the opportunity to reassess the scholarly discussion of the question over the last fifty years and to offer a verdict on the latest theory about Pelagius and Pelagianism.

This paper examines the connections between the penitential works attributed to Gildas and David and those of the anonymous author of the Poenitentiale Ambrosianum and Cummian. It argues that the penitential attributed to Gildas should be regarded as a genuine work by Gildas and that the Ambrosianum be considered as ‘the book of David’, from which excerpts were made. Attempts by Cummian to combine these two authorial traditions in seventh-century Ireland point to the continuing strength of a British Church, against the image presented by Bede.

Annalistic obituaries of abbots who had resigned their positions frequently display their former titles without reference to the fact that these were no longer current. We may infer from this that some of the obits of churchmen, to whom multiple offices were ascribed without indication as to whether or not they were extant at the time of death, may actually record the positions held throughout their careers. Consideration of the demands of office and distances between churches substantiates this conclusion in a number of instances. Analysis of certain clerical obituaries allows us to reconstruct, tentatively, the career-paths of their subjects.

Stair Mlaise ar Dhartraighibh, a poem of 14 verses, by a fourteenth-century author called Sighraidh Ó Cuirnín, gives an account of the rents to be paid by the Uí Mhithighéin to the Uí Thaithligh in their capacity as comarbaí [coarbs] to Saint Molaise (d. 562) on Daimhinis [Devenish Island, Co. Fermanagh].

Was Áth an Tearmainn at Cloghvanaha, Shrule, Co. Mayo? Shrule abbey held the ford to Iar-Connacht of the Uí Fhlaithbertaig, powerful opponents of the Uí Chonchobair. If Toirrdelbach Mór’s inauguration site and the Cong-Tuam diocesan boundary were identical, Shrule was key to dividing and controlling the Uí Fhlaithbertaig, politically and ecclesiastically.

This article takes a fresh look at how the memory of the ‘Old North’ was used and reshaped in early medieval Welsh sources. Although their value as historical evidence for the northern kingdoms is uncertain, these sources give us precious insight into how early Welsh writers perceived themselves as a people. Focusing on Historia Brittonum and Armes Prydein Vawr this study demonstrates the multiplicity of memories of the ‘Old North’ in early medieval Wales, with writers freely adapting the past to their present ends.

This article considers the primary terms for burial places in the medieval Irish sources. It investigates why the etymology of modern Irish reilig differs from terms for graveyards and cemeteries in other major European languages. It is proposed that both the cult of relics and bilingualism played roles in the evolution of the term.

This work examines Elizabeth Duncan’s 2015 argument that Hand H represents six hands rather than one hand as postulated by R. I. Best in 1912 and suggests that Best’s original argument is correct and that the variation both Duncan and Best see in Hand H is a result of writing on abraded vellum and trying to make textual additions fit within the columns of the MS.

The expansion of Tigernán Ua Ruairc, king of Uí Briúin Bréifne, into the province of Meath in the mid-twelfth century ultimately led to his eclipse of the Uí Máel Sechlainn. His control of the region caused the Anglo-Norman baron Hugh de Lacy to assassinate him, with the aid of an exiled noble of Bréifne. This article investigates the motives, personalities, and locations concerned in the assassination, and shows that the Irish noble involved in killing Ua Ruairc was an Ua Ragallaig, not another Ua Ruairc, as previously thought.

This article explores the composition history of the Stowe Missal in order to establish when and where the Irish language material contained therein was added to the manuscript. It is argued that the Stowe Missal was likely copied in early ninth-century Tallaght and that most of its Irish sections were added by the manuscript’s original scribe.