Peritia

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 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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).

The Irish/Latin bilingual notes in Princeton MS. Garrett 70 are edited with a discussion of the linguistic details found therein. The eDIL entry for impide ‘intercession’ is updated. Additionally, a linguistic profile of the late eleventh century is created based on the Regensburg manuscripts and other contemporary autographed manuscripts.

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.

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 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.