The bishop and the monk: Desiderius of Vienne and the Columbanian movement

This paper analyses the uses made by hagiographers and chroniclers of the character of Desiderius of Vienne. Desiderius, a bishop in Merovingian Burgundy, was the protagonist of two seventh‐century Lives, and appears in numerous other hagiographical works and chronicles. Desiderius also figures prominently in works composed within the context of Columbanian monasticism, most notably Jonas of Bobbio's Vita Columbani. His appearance in these works paints a multifaceted picture not only of his own political activities, but also of the agendas of the hagiographers themselves, who exploited his literary image to further their ends. It is the contention of this paper that despite the frequent mentions of Desiderius in Columbanian compositions, he did not, in fact, play a part in the Columbanians' success.     

Laughing at a saint? Miracle and irony in the Vita Gangulfi prima

This article examines the Vita Gangulfi prima, a text which was frequently copied and widely circulated in the Middle Ages. It argues that the text can be understood as an ironic discourse on miracle stories in hagiographical texts: the central message of the Vita is that meek and penitential living leads to sanctity, and not the enjoyment of stories about miracles. At the same time, the Vita presents the reader to some extent with a performance of this idea. The reader who sees through to the Vita's ironic intent is encouraged to laugh at the saint and thereby comes to comprehend the very sin for which the various characters in the Vita are punished, while the text simultaneously depicts penitence as the way out of this sinfulness. The Vita's critique of miracle stories made an eccentric contribution to a discourse which was also carried on in a number of other hagiographical texts of the early tenth century.     

Reconstructing Kilmainham: the topography and architecture of the chief priory of the Knights Hospitaller in Ireland,c.1170–1349

ABSTRACT

For almost 400 years the Knights of St John of Jerusalem – the Knights Hospitaller – maintained a priory in Kilmainham, Co. Dublin, as their principal residence in Ireland. Nothing survives of it above ground. The priory's early history and topography are mainly shrouded in mystery, but a fourteenth-century registrum illuminates the workings of its community and the character of its members, and provides valuable evidence relating to the appearance of its architecture and layout when it was at the peak of its prosperity. Yet the registrum has never been subjected to detailed scrutiny. Recent research on the Hospitallers in Ireland on the one hand, and on the organisation of domestic space in medieval contexts in Ireland on the other, has prompted this comprehensive appraisal of the evidence in Kilmainham's registrum.     

Roman soil and Roman sound in Irish hagiography

ABSTRACT

Irish hagiography displays considerable interest in communication between Ireland and Rome, particularly as this featured saints, popes and relics. While people and objects travel between the two places, there is also concern to circumvent the distance involved. This article discusses an episode of miraculous communication in the Irish Life of St Colmán Élo. Here messages and messengers travel from Rome, but time and space are also telescoped through aural and material means: the sound of the bell marking the death of Pope Gregory the Great and a gift from him of Roman soil to be spread on Colmán Élo’s cemetery. The article considers how the two elements function within their hagiographical context to connect Rome and Ireland, and how these places shaped the account. The roles of bell and soil both draw on their associations in Ireland and relate to papal communication as this was experienced and imagined more widely.     

Autobiography and Hagiography in Byzantium

This article explores the interaction between hagiography and autobiography in Byzantine literature. As the most productive narrative genre, hagiography influenced the structure and content of autobiographical accounts. On the other hand, for some vitae the protagonist's autobiographical account constituted the primary written source. A hagiographical work, again, may have a highly autobiographical character insofar as the author refers to himself as the saint's associate who eye-witnessed the saint's exploits. In many cases the hagiograph's autobiographical remarks are sprinkled over the whole narrative. Other authors present the life, or part of it, in a separate section, located usually toward the end of the text. The present study also points to common features in hagiographical autobiography and other forms of autobiographical writing, that constitute the conventions of a standardized way of written self-representation in Byzantium.     

Challenging the Quimera (Sirena) Negra: Unamuno Reads Pardo Bazán

This article examines the literary relationship of Emilia Pardo Bazán and Miguel de Unamuno by analyzing Unamuno's 1905 review of La Quimera, as well as his tribute to Pardo Bazán on the occasion of her death in 1921. These two critical pieces, together with Unamuno's Dos madres and La tía Tula, reveal that while Unamuno dismisses Pardo Bazán's realism in his discussion of her works, he develops in his own fiction alter egos who struggle with dominant female figures, just as he competes with Pardo Bazán's model of authorship.     

A Portuguese East Indiaman from the 1502–1503 Fleet of Vasco da Gama off Al Hallaniyah Island,Oman: an interim report

Two Portuguese naus from Vasco da Gama's second voyage to India, left behind to disrupt maritime trade between India and the Red Sea, were wrecked in May 1503 off the north‐eastern coast of Al Hallaniyah Island, Oman. The ships, Esmeralda and São Pedro, had been commanded by da Gama's maternal uncles, Vicente and Brás Sodré, respectively. A detailed study and scientific analysis of an artefact assemblage recovered during archaeological excavations conducted in Al Hallaniyah in 2013 and 2014 confirms the location of an early 16th‐century Portuguese wreck‐site, initially discovered in 1998. Esmeralda is proposed as the probable source of the remaining, un‐salved wreckage.     

Patriarch Methodius,the Author of the Lost First Life of Theodore of Stoudios

Through his hagiographical writings, Patriarch Methodius of Constantinople played a crucial role in shaping the canonical narrative of the iconophile resistance during the first half of the 9th century. This article makes the case that Methodius not only wrote the Lives of the confessors Theophanes of Sigriane and Euthymius of Sardes, he was also the author of the now lost first Life of Theodore of Stoudios, which then served as the model for the extant Vita B by the Studite monk Michael.     

Translations at the Court of Hákon Hákonarson: a well planned and highly selective programme

This article deals with the translations of Old French works completed at the court of Hákon Hákonarson, king of Norway. The first one was probably completed in 1226 and some 40 followed: translations of epic poems, courtly romances and lais, adventure romances and a fabliau. In all cases, we ought to speak of adaptations and not of word-for-word translations.

Together, these literary works form an outstanding corpus, elaborated mainly for didactical purposes and in order to support Hákon Hákonarson's project to build a monarchy à l'européenne. For that, some literary works were selected and – in their adaptations – some ethical and social values promoted while some others were not; and some great literary works were intentionally ignored and remained untranslated.     

Durán of Huesca (c. 1160–1230): A Waldensian Seeking a Remedy to Heresy

Despite the debates about the nature of medieval heresy, especially the Cathars and the Waldensians, in recent scholarship, very little attention has been given to Durán of Huesca, a Spanish Waldensian who wrote two anti‐heretical treatises before and after he was reconciled with the Roman Church in 1207. This article examines how Durán's decisions to join the Waldensians and later to return to the Catholic Church were motivated by his commitment to defending the sacraments and the Incarnation against what he saw as dualist heresy. That his major decisions were in response to this heresy suggests that while old scholarship might overemphasise the cohesiveness of heresy in the south of France, it is important not to dismiss the existence of explicit heretical belief altogether. Moreover, the centrality of the Incarnation and the sacraments in Durán's shifts in association reveals that the Waldensians were active, rather than passive, participants in shaping how the Church hierarchy and other dissident groups perceived and categorised them.     

Strange associations: Elizabeth Bowen and the language of exclusion

Since The Last September was first published in 1929, the novel's style has been a major source of controversy amongst Elizabeth Bowen's critics, many of whom align the work with reactionary feeling among the Anglo-Irish community in early 1920s Ireland. This longstanding view ignores, I think, a complex but critically overlooked aspect not only of The Last September but also of Bowen's many opinions about the novel form: the author's fascination with the language of exclusion. In this essay I argue that Bowen's use of literary devices in The Last September that rely on exclusion – including ellipses, euphemism, rumour, overheard conversation, narrative digression, and lying – dramatise the ways in which war disorients figurative language and, in so doing, subverts and transforms the apparently stable metaphors through which the Anglo-Irish sought to reconcile events occurring in September 1920, that fitful last September of the Republic's colonial ties to England, with their historical role as settler-colonialists in Ireland. Further, Bowen's experimental style disorients the reader, thereby undermining any confidence in the legitimacy of Ascendancy protocol, or the morality of British colonialism, or the militant expression of Irish nationalism, and leads instead to an emergent, though ultimately unfulfilled, cosmopolitan vision of late modernist Ireland.     

Mothers and others in Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls

This essay responds to critical assertions that the absence of functional maternity in Edna O'Brien's famous 1960 novel The Country Girls reflects O'Brien's frustration with the cloying myth of ‘Ireland-as-motherland’. While I agree that O'Brien centrally considers the imbrication of femininity with nationality in a culturally conservative post-independence Ireland and enumerates the devastating lived effects of this discourse on Irish women, I argue that The Country Girls offers a potentially productive step beyond lamentation or complaint: namely, a nascent transnational poetics. I contend that the novel hinges on a character heretofore neglected by the criticism – Caithleen Brady's Austrian landlady, Joanna – and suggest that O'Brien slyly positions Joanna as Caithleen's potential surrogate mother, framing a ‘foreigner’ as a source of subversive family ties. Joanna's presence, I believe, indicates an effort on O'Brien's part to negotiate a political response to both gendered oppression and literary parochialism (the much-remarked climate of censorship that marked the newly independent Ireland's intellectual culture): the notion that community and security might be transformatively relocated in strategic ‘translocal’ networks rather than within the confines of the nation-state. Joanna signifies O'Brien's look beyond Mother Ireland – a desire to open the country to both global feminisms and transnational textualities.     

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE: NEW RECORDINGS OF MEGALITHIC ART IN NORTH‐WEST IRELAND

In this paper new and previously known passage tomb art in north‐west Ireland is recorded using an innovative recording technique. The use of this method, which involves vector drawing from digital photographs taken with oblique lighting (VeDPOL), has clarified and increased the instances of megalithic carving in the north‐west of Ireland. At two monuments – Listoghil and Heapstown Cairn – the new recordings have allowed us to contextualize the art within the broader corpus of passage tomb motifs. Additionally, it is proposed that one of the carvings from Listoghil is of later prehistoric origin and not Neolithic as previously believed. Finally, and most importantly, this paper highlights a group of motifs recently found at Cairn B in the Carrowkeel‐Keashcorran complex. This discovery demonstrates for the first time that megalithic art was a feature of all four major passage tomb complexes in Ireland.     

On the metrics and origin of Rig-Vedic ná ‘like,as’

Summary Beginning with the synchronic metrical distribution of ná and ná ‘NEG’, we attempted to formulate, first, certain principles of Rig-Vedic exegesis (which we applied to several obscure or hitherto imperfectly understood passages), and second, a theory concerning the origin of the comparative function of ná. Unlike previous explanations, the theory described above accounts in a systematic way for the formal, functional, and metrical features of ná. We considered, in addition, the following theoretical points: possible implications of ná phraseology for the historical analysis of Rig-Vedic meters; the lack of universal principles, as yet, for predicting the direction and nature of secondary marking in the case of functional split of a particle; the interaction of secondary phraseological patterns with original phraseology, resulting in synchronic irregularity in metrical distribution. Finally, we suggested that the syntactic behavior of ná and ná ‘NEG’ confirms the theory presented here concerning the origin of ná.     

The flight of Carthach (Mochuda) from Rahan to Lismore: lineage and identity in early medieval Ireland

This paper explores the different ways in which the career of Carthach – Carthagus in Latin, also known as Mochuda or Mo‐Chutu – was remembered in both Latin and Irish accounts, in particular his expulsion from Rahan, where he was abbot for forty years, and his re‐establishing that community at Lismore, where he died c.637. It argues that the Life of Carthach legitimizes his foundation at Lismore, by celebrating its initial establishment at Rahan, and by connecting him through a chain of prophecies to Íte, Brendan, Comgall, and above all Colum Cille. In this Life, Patrick is never mentioned, quite unlike the Life of Declán, which claimed Ardmore as the original bishopric of the Déise region. Carthach's expulsion from Rahan, provoked by loss of political support from local princes, took place just as other abbots of the region were hesitating to adopt the Roman date of Easter, in the manner of much of southern Ireland. Carthach, part of a group sympathetic to Gregory the Great and Roman practice, was perceived by his admirers as being connected to a line of saints that helped define the particular identity of the church at Lismore.     

The Poeta Saxo at Paderborn: episcopal authority and Carolingian rule in late ninth‐century Saxony

This paper argues that the Poeta Saxo's epic poem about Charlemagne was composed at the bishopric of Paderborn as part of a wider literary programme that included both the Translatio sancti Liborii and the Vita sancti Liborii. Near the close of the ninth century, when Paderborn's renown and resources were at their lowest ebb, these three works articulated an image of episcopal authority, touted the pre‐eminence of Paderborn, and made a bid for royal patronage.     

Just this Once: urban Ireland in film

By focusing on the city of Dublin as both setting and character, Once, written and directed by Dublin native John Carney, portrays urban Ireland in the global context. Using a series of replacements – replacing population loss with in-migration, and replacing parochial ideals with multicultural ones – the film re-places Dublin, both representing the city it has become and providing space for continuing growth and change. For Dublin, as elsewhere, change enters as global flows of information and people become part of the city. Rather than conforming to the traditional global power of American culture, Bord Scannán na hÉireann (Irish Film Board) is striking its own global poses, producing and distributing films that construct an urban Irishness for international audiences. In my article, I examine how this award-winning Irish film constructs Irish urban identity in the face of globalism's cultural flattening.     

The marriage plot and the plot against the Union: Irish Home Rule and endangered alliances in Henry James's “The Modern Warning”

By the period of the Irish Home Rule crisis – in which Catholics and liberal Anglicans lobbied for limited self-government while northern Presbyterians campaigned to keep Ulster wholly within the Union between Ireland and Great Britain of 1800 – certain of those of pre-Famine northern Irish Protestant origins (the “Scots-” or “Scotch-Irish”) identified with the position of their Presbyterian brethren in Ulster. This identifiably Ulster Protestant engagement with the Home Rule debate is detectable (and generally overlooked) in the Scots-Irish Henry James story “The Modern Warning”. Moreover, equally discounted is the fact that James's story deploys the Irish literary convention of the marriage plot as metaphor for political union in order to grapple with a moment in which that alliance is – in the unionists' view – in danger. This article concludes that the political-union-as-marriage trope still sporadically returns at moments of political crisis in the British Isles, as occurred during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum debate.     

Gast! A Breton moment in Cré na Cille,and why it matters

Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s famously difficult Irish language novel Cré na Cille contains a cluster of Breton words that have not all been recognised as such. These words are a clue that the French-speaking airman, arguably the only character in the novel with a significant “arc”, is in fact supposed to be a Breton. His immersion in Gaelic Ireland, his frustrated hope of fulfilment in philological studies and pan-Celticism and his ultimate lapse into patriotic Frenchness mirror the experiences of Breton nationalists of the 1940s – some of whom were helped by Ó Cadhain himself to take refuge in Ireland after the Second World War – and represent a subtle critique of Brittany’s pan-Celticist hopes within the novel’s larger multifaceted critique of Irish rural life.