Homiletic Lives of Irish Saints

Abstract

The Latin accounts of the lives and works of Irish saints have been a mainstay of historical and literary scholarship on medieval Ireland for centuries. Their vernacular counterparts are, with few exceptions, far less studied. This dissertation examines a particular subset of these vernacular Lives: namely, those given the form of a homily, and which focus on the Life of an Irish saint. These Lives, twelve in number, were designed for annual recitation on the feast-day of their subject. They begin with a reading of a pericope from the Bible, along with an allegorical interpretation of that passage; they then continue with a narration of the saint’s life and deeds, and conclude with a brief peroration expressing the hope that the speaker and audience should reach Heaven and dwell there for all time. It has been argued that these Lives once formed part of a homiliary compiled at Armagh in the late eleventh century. This dissertation shows that this hypothesis is untenable. The close (often verbatim) similarities between these twelve Lives reflect, rather, the church of Armagh’s potent influence in the northern half of Ireland, as authors from Mayo to Meath used and adapted a template pioneered many years earlier in the hagiography of Patrick, Armagh’s patron saint. To support this claim, I investigate the source material for the homilies, much of which, as I show, has roots in Irish exegesis composed in the early Middle Ages; many of the homilies, moreover, were reliant on works produced at Armagh in later centuries. I also demonstrate, for the first time, the relationships between the various manuscripts that contain these Lives at the level both of individual texts and of the collections in which they usually circulated. Finally, I provide fresh transcriptions of five Lives, all either previously unedited, or edited only from defective manuscripts. Taken together, the following chapters offer an overview of the entire lifespan of the genre, from the origins of the homilies in seventh-century exegesis down to the final stages of their reworking in the early eighteenth century.