Irish and British saints of the early medieval period

[The Lawspeaker]

Irish and British saints of the early medieval period

By Catherine Swift - University of Limerick, Irish studies

You are no longer aliens or foreign visitors; you are citizens like all the saints and part of God’s
household. You are part of a building that has the apostles and prophets for its foundations and Christ Jesus himself for its main cornerstone. As every structure is aligned on him, all grow into one holy temple in the Lord and you too, in Him, are being built into a house where God lives in the Spirit.
Letter to Ephesians 2:19-22

Irish saints tend to be studied en masse. This approach is traceable back to John Colgan and his Franciscan colleagues at Louvain in the 1640s, through the local traditions collected by the researchers for the Topographical Department of the Ordnance Survey Office in the 1830s and 1840s, the early twentieth-century editions and translations of the Anglican prelate Charles Plummer down to Richard Sharpe’s Medieval Irish Saints Lives (1991) , Dorothy Anne Bray’s List of Motifs in the Lives of the Early Irish Saints (1992) and the various publications of Pádraig Ó Riain (culminating in the recent magisterial Dictionary of the Irish Saints in 2011). Throughout, emphasis has been laid on the sheer number of holy men and (to a rather lesser extent) holy women from Erin’s green isle.

[Mortimer]

The most famous is probably st. Patrick

[Jacques de Imbelloni]

Brendan

Saint Brendan of Clonfert (c. AD 484 – c. 577) (Irish: Naomh Bréanainn or Naomh Breandán; Latin: Brendanus; Icelandic: (heilagur) Brandanus), also referred to as "Brendan moccu Altae", called "the Navigator", "the Voyager", "the Anchorite", and "the Bold", is one of the early Irish monastic saints and one of the Twelve Apostles of Ireland.[1] He is primarily renowned for his legendary quest to the "Isle of the Blessed", also denominated "Saint Brendan's Island". The Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis ("Voyage of Saint Brendan") can be described as an immram, i. e., Irish navigational narrative.

Saint Brendan's feast day is celebrated on 16 May by the Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Orthodox Christians.

[Grace O'Malley]

I really like Catherine Swift's lectures. My mother was named after St Brigid and it is interesting to read Catherine's interpretations on her. Irish people really took to the idea of the white martyrdom which meant leaving your country and people you love for Christ. Many monasteries were started in Europe because of this ideal. I don't think enough people know of the contributions of Early Irish Christianity to Europe.