Alexander O'Hara's study of Jonas of Bobbio developed out of a doctoral thesis completed at St Andrews in 2009. As the author notes, it is also a companion-piece for a volume of collected essays, edited by O'Hara himself, on Columbanus and the Peoples of post-Roman Europe, that derived from a conference held in Vienna in 2013. It is, thus, part of a wider study of Columbanus and his hagiographer. And there is a yet broader context for O'Hara's work--the 1400th anniversary of the death of Columbanus, which provided the raison d'être for conferences held at Bangor, Bobbio and Luxeuil in 2015. Some of the papers delivered at those conferences, which appeared in print too late to be available to the author, are of relevance to arguments presented in O'Hara's monograph.
Even without the volumes from the centenary conferences, this is an appropriate time for a monograph on Jonas. There has been steady and escalating development in the relevant scholarship, and for the five decades from 1965 to 2015 O'Hara provides a survey of the historiography that has fed most directly into his own work. Unfortunately that half-century excludes the important conference held in Luxueil in 1950. More surprisingly O'Hara's survey does not explicitly register the conference on Columbanus and Merovingian Monasticism held in Dublin in 1977, the proceedings of which were published in 1981. Not does it consider Yaniv Fox's monograph on Columbanian monasticism (Power and Religion in Merovingian Gaul), published in 2014, although the book is subsequently referred to on numerous occasions--sometimes (as on p. 150) without a footnote. In fact, there are a good number of occasions when a secondary work is referred to, but no note is provided (see for instance the reference to Albrecht Diem on p. 135). Even so, O'Hara provides a useful survey of the publications that feed most directly into his study.
He then moves relatively quickly through the career of Columbanus and the changes that took place at Luxeuil after his departure from his Gallic foundations and at Bobbio after his death. Since O'Hara's concern is with Jonas rather than with Luxeuil or Bobbio, or indeed with Columbanus, this is reasonable, although on some points, as for example the association of the Hieronymian Martyrology with Luxeuil, the arguments might usefully have been set out more extensively. The work of Felice Lifshitz is properly registered, but she was neither the first nor the last to deal with the subject. On the question of the introduction of the Regula Benedicti to Bobbio, and its possible association with the Regula Magistri, O'Hara gives appropriate space to Marilyn Dunn's arguments, but might reasonably have said a little more about the cases that have been made for an earlier dating of the Rule of the Master.
O'Hara becomes more expansive when he turns to Jonas. He stresses the significance of the hagiographer's birthplace, Susa, noting that it was a city that passed from the Byzantines to the Franks, and was never Lombard. He lingers on the question of Jonas' odd, Biblical, name, and on his missionary work--though he says surprisingly little about his position within the Bobbio community, or his visit to Rome in the company of abbot Bertulf, preferring to emphasise the miraculous cure of the abbot in the course of the journey. He spends more time on the probable identification of Jonas as abbot of Marchiennes-Hamage and his likely authorship of the Regula Cuiusdam ad Virgines.
Consideration of Jonas' career is followed by an assessment of his hagiographical writings, which provides a useful assessment of his sources, although strangely O'Hara fails to note José Martín-Iglesias' discussion of the anonymous Vita Desiderii, which he argues was written in 617. The discussion of sources is followed by consideration of Jonas' audience, which effectively restates work already published by the author.
The chief contribution of the current monograph, however, is its consideration of Jonas' use of the Bible, which O'Hara examines in the light of Marc Van Uytfanghe' division of Biblical quotation into comparative, didactic, operative, apologetic and demonstrative functions. The result is to stress Jonas' concern with God's providence, and to highlight his literary/historical approach to the Bible, rather than the figurative/allegorical approach that is to be found in the hagiography of Gregory I and Gregory of Tours. O'Hara suggests that this use of the Bible, which conforms to the Antiochene tradition, may well have been inspired by Irish scholarship.
Equally valuable is the categorisation of Jonas' miracle accounts, which O'Hara analyses in the light of the methodologies developed by Louis Deroulet and Pierre-André Sigal. He contrasts what he calls the horizontal miracle accounts of Gregory of Tours and Venantius Fortunatus, which tend to concentrate on healing, with what he calls vertical miracle accounts, which focus rather on the transcendent. It is into this category that most of Jonas' miracle stories fall, and in this, again, Jonas seems to be writing in line with Irish hagiographical tradition--although it is certainly not unique to the Irish.
The final chapter takes up the idea of Albrecht Diem, that Columbanus was effectively the last of the late-antique viri Dei, and explores the shift from charismatic holy man to monastic community. Such a shift has been floated by a number of scholars, and O'Hara's reading contributes neatly to a growing body of scholarship which advocates this reading of spiritual history.
In short O'Hara provides an eminently readable and elegantly written sketch of Columbanus' life, but it is for his reading of Jonas as an author that this will prove most valuable.