A creative, independent, Irish exegetical tradition was well established by the year 700 CE, influencing Northumbria but not Continental Europe. This book contains eight studies by the distinguished Irish biblical scholar, Martin McNamara, which he has published over the past twenty-five years, on the Latin biblical texts (Vulgate, Gallicanum and Jerome's Hebraicum) of the Psalter and commentaries on it in Ireland from 600 CE onwards. The oldest Irish Vulgate text, the Cathach of St Columba of Iona (died 597), shows signs of correction against the Irish recension of the Hebrew text. The central exegetical tradition is strongly Antiochene, being dependent on the commentary of Theodore of Mopsuestia (in Julian's translation), while another branch understands the Psalms as principally about David, rather than christologically or as about later Jewish history.

Irish scholars who arrived in Continental Europe in the early Middle Ages are often credited with making some of the most important contributions to European culture and learning of the time, from the introduction of a new calendar to monastic reform. Among them were celebrated personalities such as St Columbanus, John Scottus Eriugena, and Sedulius Scottus who were in the vanguard of a constant stream of arrivals from Ireland to continental Europe, collectively known as 'peregrini'. The continental response to this Irish 'diaspora' ranged from admiration to open hostility, especially when peregrini were deemed to challenge prevalent cultural or spiritual conventions. This volume brings together leading historians, archaeologists, and palaeographers who provide-for the first time-a comprehensive assessment of the phenomenon of Irish peregrini in their continental context and the manner in which it is framed by modern scholarship as well as the popular imagination.

In this first volume of the Royal Irish Academy's multi-volume A New History of Ireland a wide range of national and international scholars, in every field of study, have produced studies of the archaeology, art, culture, geography, geology, history, language, law, literature, music, and related topics that include surveys of all previous scholarship combined with the latest research findings, to offer readers the first truly comprehensive and authoritative account of Irish history from the dawn of time down to the coming of the Normans in 1169. Included in the volume is a comprehensive bibliography of all the themes discussed in the narrative, together with copious illustrations and maps, and a thorough index.

History and Salvation in Medieval Ireland explores medieval Irish conceptions of salvation history, using Latin and vernacular sources from c. 700–c. 1200 CE which adapt biblical history for audiences both secular and ecclesiastical. This book examines medieval Irish sources on the cities of Jerusalem and Babylon; reworkings of narratives from the Hebrew Scriptures; literature influenced by the Psalms; and texts indebted to Late Antique historiography. It argues that the conceptual framework of salvation history, and the related theory of the divinely-ordained movement of political power through history, had a formative influence on early Irish culture, society and identity. Primarily through analysis of previously untranslated sources, this study teases out some of the intricate connections between the local and the universal, in order to situate medieval Irish historiography within the context of that of the wider world. Using an overarching biblical chronology, beginning with the lives of the Jewish Patriarchs and ending with the Christian apostolic missions, this study shows how one culture understood the histories of others, and has important implications for issues such as kingship, religion and literary production in medieval Ireland. This book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval Ireland, as well as those interested in religious and cultural history.

This is Volume One of a two-volume collection that brings together contributions from cultural and military history to offer an examination of religious rites employed in connection with warfare as well as their transformative and power- and identity-building potential across political communities of medieval Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe. Covering the period ca. 900 and 1500, the work takes theoretical, textual and practical approaches to the research on religious warfare, and investigates the connections between, and significance and function of crucial war rituals such as pre-, intra- and postbellum rites, as well as various activities surrounding the military life of individuals, polities, and corporates. Contributors are Robert Antonín, Robert Bubczyk, Dariusz Dąbrowski, Jesse Harrington, Carsten Selch Jensen, Sini Kangas, Radosław Kotecki, Gregory Leighton, Kyle C. Lincoln, Jacek Maciejewski, Yulia Mikhailova, Max Naderer, László Veszprémy, and Dušan Zupka.

Horton brings together the latest research on the origins of the gospels and their transmission, and provides the only guide to the Chester Beatty Codex P45. Provides an introduction to the gospel genre and examining literacy among early Christians and all that is known about the origins and transmission of the gospels. Also focuses on the significance of P45, its place as the earliest Christian gospel-book, its unique readings, the earliest extant version of the gospel of Mark, and how the manuscript was found piece by piece by an American collector.

This study proposes a new view of glossing as a universal phenomenon. Starting from the Psalter, a centrepiece of devotion and education in early medieval Europe, it combines historical sociolinguistics, comparative philology, manuscript studies and cultural history in order to assess and compare the interface of Latin with Old Irish, Old English, Old Frisian, Old Saxon and Old High German within the context of its multilingual and textual culture. The close study of thirteen glossed manuscripts, such as the Anglo-Saxon Vespasian Psalter and the Old Irish Milan Glosses, reveals when and why scribes switched from Latin into the vernacular, how the vernacular was used in studying Latin, how glosses interact with construe marks and punctuation, and how such manuscripts were intended to be read in a period covering the seventh to the twelfth centuries and in an area stretching from Ireland to Central Europe. The book is an essential textbook for specialists in the growing field of glossing, and also reaches out to scholars of early medieval liturgy, education, palaeography and Christian literature.

This is the first comprehensive study of the contribution that texts from Britain and Ireland made to the development of canon law in early medieval Europe. The book concentrates on a group of insular texts of church law—chief among them the Irish Hibernensis—tracing their evolution through mutual influence, their debt to late antique traditions from around the Mediterranean, their reception (and occasional rejection) by clerics in continental Europe, their fusion with continental texts, and their eventual impact on the formation of a European canonical tradition. Canonical collections, penitentials, and miscellanies of church law, and royal legislation, are all shown to have been 'living texts', which were continually reshaped through a process of trial and error that eventually gave rise to a more stable and more coherent body of church laws. Through a meticulous text-critical study Roy Flechner argues that the growth of church law in Europe owes as much to a serendipitous 'conversation' between texts as it does to any deliberate plan overseen by bishops and popes.

Drawing on the work of leading figures in biblical, religious, historical, and cultural studies in Ireland and beyond, this volume explores the reception of the Bible in Ireland, focusing on the social and cultural dimensions of such use of the Bible. This includes the transmission of the Bible, the Bible and identity formation, engagement beyond Ireland, and cultural and artistic appropriation of the Bible. The chapters collected here are particularly useful and insightful for those researching the use and reception of the Bible, as well as those with broader interests in social and cultural dimensions of Irish history and Irish studies. The chapters challenge the perception in the minds of many that the Bible is a static book with a fixed place in the world that can be relegated to ecclesial contexts and perhaps academic study. Rather, as this book shows, the role of the Bible in the world is much more complex. Nowhere is this clearer than in Ireland, with its rich and complex religious, cultural, and social history. This volume examines these very issues, highlighting the varied ways in which the Bible has impacted Irish life and society, as well as the ways in which the cultural specificity of Ireland has impacted the use and development of the Bible both in Ireland and further afield.