The Age of Monks and Empires · c. 450-664 · Ireland, Iona, Northumbria
Insular / Irish Monastic Christianity
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About This Movement
Ireland was never Roman, and the church that took root there in the fifth century organized itself accordingly — around monasteries and their abbots rather than around city bishops, with monastic families and founder-saints anchoring whole regions. Patrick's two short surviving letters, a defence of his own life and a furious protest at the enslavement of his converts, are the only certainly authentic voices from the beginning, and they are startlingly personal. Two things it produced were absorbed by the wider church. Peregrinatio, the practice of leaving home permanently for God's sake, which sent Columba to Iona in 563 and Columbanus into Gaul and Italy, where he founded Luxeuil and Bobbio and argued with Frankish kings. And the penitentials, handbooks assigning particular penances to particular sins, which quietly turned confession into something private and repeatable. Its own way of calculating Easter and its distinctive tonsure eventually collided with Roman practice, and at Whitby in 664 the Northumbrian king ruled against the Irish reckoning.
Sources
- Patrick, Confessio and Epistola ad milites Corotici (ed. Bieler; multiple translations; confessio.ie) (primary) — The only two certainly authentic voices from fifth-century Ireland; Royal Irish Academy's confessio.ie gives text, translations and manuscript images free online.
- Columbanus, Letters, Rules and Penitential (ed./trans. G. S. M. Walker, Sancti Columbani Opera, 1957) (primary) — The Irish peregrinus's own words c.590-615, incl. his monastic rules; Latin with facing English (Scriptores Latini Hiberniae 2); reprinted, and texts online via CELT.
- Adomnan, Life of St Columba (trans. Richard Sharpe, 1995) (primary) — Iona's own account of its founder (d. 597), written c.700 - close but retrospective, and needs careful critical reading as hagiography; excellent annotated Penguin translation.
- The Irish Penitentials (ed./trans. Ludwig Bieler, 1963) (primary) — Finnian, Cumméan and kin - the tariffed-penance documents that show pastoral practice on the ground; Latin/English (Scriptores Latini Hiberniae 5); library access.
- T. M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (2000) (secondary) — The standard scholarly synthesis for the whole window incl. Iona and the paschal controversy to 664; Cambridge UP paperback.
- Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 2, ch. 2, 'Germanic and Celtic Christianities' (Knut Schaferdiek) (reference) — Reference-tradition chapter covering Celtic (incl. Irish/British) Christianity to c.600.