In this volume Gordon Barthos provides useful English translations of two Latin texts from the hagiographical dossier of St Brendan of Clonfert, the sixth-century Irish monastic founder and literary protagonist of a marvellous sea-voyage. St Brendan (often known by his sobriquet “the Navigator,” in order to distinguish him from St Brendan of Birr) has a large body of literature devoted to him, in Latin and Irish, not least the famedNavigatio Sancti Brendani (“Voyage of St Brendan”), which was one of the most widely-read travel narratives in early medieval Europe. Barthos has chosen to translate the fourteenth-century Latin Vita Sancti Brendani (“Life of St Brendan”), preserved in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson B485, which represents an expansive attempt by its compiler to draw together a large amount of earlier material, including the Navigatio, a version of which the compiler embeds in the middle of the Vita. The result is what Barthos describes as Brendan’s story “in its most developed stage in Latin” (21). However, certain episodes that seem (perhaps) to be doublets, along with stylistic issues, such as occasional switches in the narrative from third to first person and back again, have led to a poor critical reception for this particular version of Brendan’s Life, with the editor of the Rawlinson text, Charles Plummer, describing the embedding of theNavigatio within the Vita as “crudely done,” and James F. Kenney criticizing the “clumsiness” of the compilation (17). Barthos tries to rehabilitate the compilator’s reputation to an extent, arguing that the Vita has a deliberate chiastic structure (18-20). But even he sees a problem in episodic doubling (or mirroring, or echoing, perhaps, since none of the supposed “doublets” are totally identical), rather than taking the text seriously on its own terms. Given that the Navigatio is structured around cyclical, liturgical time, there may be other ways of thinking about repetition and supposed “inconsistencies” in this version of Brendan’s Vita.
First, though, a word on the second text which is translated in this volume, namely, the lengthy Oratio (“Prayer”) ascribed to Brendan, which was provisionally dated by its editor, Pierre Salmon (in CCCM XLVII), to the eighth century. The prayer is an example of the Irish lorica (“breast-plate”) genre, which uses a range of rhetorical devices, such as anaphora, to create rhythmic and incantatory invocations of divine protection. Someloricae were written for protection on journeys or against specific physical dangers, but the focus of the Oratio Sancti Brendani is largely on the remission of sins, “past, present, imminent” (88) and therefore protection from post-mortem punishment. Salmon’s edition, based on the copy preserved in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek MS Clm 13067, an eleventh-century manuscript from Waulsort Abbey in what is now Belgium, provides the basis for Barthos’s translation, which helpfully identifies all the biblical passages referenced in the prayer. With its extensive invocation of examples of divine deliverance throughout salvation history, from the “just martyr” Abel to the Acts of the Apostles (90-97), the lorica deserves further study as evidence of scriptural learning and exegesis in an early medieval Irish milieu, but the remainder of the present review will focus on theVita Sancti Brendani, since it represents the most substantial part of Barthos’s volume.
Barthos’s stated aim is to produce a translation of the fourteenth-century version of theVita Sancti Brendani that is “readable” rather than literal (31), and in this he is successful: if the primary purpose of Toronto’s Mediaeval Sources in Translation Series is to provide texts that can be assigned to students who do not have access to the original Latin, then the volume has succeeded admirably. The success of the apparatus, which includes an introduction, textual notes, and three appendices, is more uneven. Barthos’s translation is based on the edition by Plummer (in his Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae) and at the end of the introduction Barthos offers some minor but useful corrections to Plummer’s text from his own reading of the Rawlinson manuscript. The section of the introduction that deals with the themes of the Vita (21-6) is similarly helpful, particularly where Barthos explores aspects that are foregrounded or expanded in the Rawlinson manuscript in comparison with the other Latin Lives of Brendan. Barthos’s conclusion is that the Rawlinson text of the Vita is specifically the product of an ethnically-polarized fourteenth-century Irish Church. This adds contemporary bite to the scene where Brendan heads to Britain and meets Gildas, who is “made to acknowledge that he, a British cleric, is not a fit judge for his Irish counterpart” (22). Gildas refers to Brendan and his companions as representatives of “a holy and hardworking people of God” and even describes Brendan as “the apostle Peter, as it were, restored to the flesh” (76). In Barthos’s view, the episode “serves to assert the worth of Irish clergy in the context of friction between the Anglo-Norman and Irish churches” (23), and it is notable that, in another episode set in Britain, Brendan has “a wondrous vision, which he did not reveal to the brothers, save that Britain would embrace a most grievous heresy before the Last Judgment” (78). The heresy is not identified: it is tempting to think that it might be a reference to some specific controversy of the fourteenth century, such as Lollardy, but the author may simply have sought to cast aspersions on the orthodoxy of the British church in contrast with that of his Gaelic saint, who is so pure as to be no less than another St Peter.
Where Barthos’s notes and discussion are weaker is in consideration of the relationship between the Latin Life and the large corpus of vernacular source material that precedes it. The Irish hagiographical tradition was thoroughly bilingual from the seventh century onwards, and it is impossible to isolate Latin texts from that context without it resulting in a partial and distorted view. I will discuss two examples here to show how greater engagement with vernacular literature in the textual notes could have shed some light on aspects of the Vita. The first is the episode in which Brendan reports having been asleep at sea when his watchman awoke him, having seen a figure of a “very dark man,” “as black as charcoal or a raven,” in the midst of a cloud coming towards the boat. The man states that he is a sinner and entreats Brendan to pray for him. Brendan does so, and three days later the man reappears, but now his appearance is hyacinth in hue and his lament less mournful. The brothers continue to pray for him for another three days, and he appears for a third time, with his body shining “like the sun,” and he enters heaven, after revealing that his name was Colmán and he had been a “most irascible and disruptive brother” in life, thereby demonstrating the salvific power of prayer for the dead (84-5). The only parallel for this story that Barthos offers in his notes is Bernard of Clairvaux’s Life of St Malachy, in which the Irish saint prays for his sister, but there are parallels from Irish vernacular literature which Barthos does not mention. In particular, there is a tenth-century narrative about the ghost of the deceased king Máel Sechnaill son of Máel Ruanaid appearing, also in a dark and blackened form, before the bishop of Clonmacnoise, and similarly requesting post-mortem prayer for his soul. He appears six months later, in a speckled or dappled form, and requests further prayer. At the end of the year he reappears, shining brightly like the sun, and enters into the kingdom of heaven. A version of this story is preserved in the fourteenth-century religious miscellany known as the Leabhar Breac and offers a close comparandum to the story of St Brendan and Brother Colmán.
Another tenth-century Irish narrative about the power of prayer sheds light on a different episode in Brendan’s Life, but is again not mentioned. After Brendan had completed his voyage and returned to Ireland, there are some further episodes which appear to be framed as reminiscences on Brendan’s part. They are voyage episodes he used to tell people, additional to the voyage proper. One of these involves him landing on an island and encountering a very elderly monk, “little more than living bones.” The man warns Brendan and his companions to flee the island, because it is inhabited by a “an ancient cat....that has grown huge.” The monks retreat to their boat, “and they saw the beast swimming after them in the sea, and it had eyes as large as glass platters” (73). After Brendan prays for divine intervention, this giant cat is attacked by another beast, and both sink to the bottom of the sea, never to be seen again. The elderly man explains that he is the last survivor of a group of twelve men who came from Ireland, bringing the cat, “much beloved by us,” with them. The cat became enormous from eating a surfeit of fish, but God did not allow the cat to harm the monks, who seem to have died from natural causes. Brendan celebrates the Eucharist with the man, and then he dies happily and is buried among his companions. This Latin account tells, from Brendan’s perspective, the same story that is told, in Irish and from the elderly man’s perspective, in a tenth-century narrative preserved in the Book of Leinster. In the vernacular account there are three Irish monks, not twelve, but they indeed set sail with a kitten, to find their “desert in the ocean.” The kitten catches a great many fish, which the men refuse to eat, preferring to seek sustenance from God. The man’s companions gradually die, leaving him alone to achieve an advanced age, saying prayers, particularly the Hymnum Dicat, which he recites one hundred and fifty times per day. Eventually St Brendan arrives on his island, gives him Holy Communion, and the man dies. What this tale does not tell us is that the kitten apparently grew up to be a giant killer cat. That Barthos does not refer to this tale in his notes adds to the sense that they are at best uneven and partial, more grounded in Latin than in Irish. Some absences in the secondary literature include Kaja Ritari’sPilgrimage to Heaven on the Navigatio Sancti Brendani, Patrick McAlary in Peritia 33 (2022) on the identification of the “Brendan” in Cummian’s Paschal Letter, and Elva Johnston in Peritia 14 (2000) on St Íte of Killeedy.
There are three main ways in which people tend to approach the supernatural aspects of Brendan’s voyage: one is to accept its marvellous nature as conforming to the literary tropes of travel literature and ethnography from the Middle Ages--the foreign and the fantastical were inextricably linked. Another approach is to read the voyage allegorically and to see the islands and their features and dimensions as drawing on ecclesial symbolism from the rich reservoir of exegesis: this is supported by the way that the narrative explicitly centres on the liturgical year. A final approach is what we might call a “rationalizing” method, which seeks to “explain” the fantastical--so the shining, crystal pillar that Brendan is described as seeing must have been a tabular iceberg, for example. As Barthos notes, the latter approach is most often found in popular literature, which has often taken this literary voyage very literally indeed, leading to re-creations of Brendan’s supposed boat and rather pointless arguments about whether or not Brendan reached North America. Medieval hagiography can test our levels of credulity in various different ways, not only in relation to the miraculous: a beast battling a giant cat in the ocean? No problem. The spirit of a dead monk undergoing a prayer-related colour-change? Absolutely fine. Two successive episodes that feature similar characters in comparable situations? Now, that’s a problem: surely the author could not have intended this! Here, the limits of plausibility in hagiography are located not in questions of thaumaturgy, but in more mundane ideas about a hagiographer’s literary competence and medieval compilatory practice. The Rawlinson text of the Vita Sancti Brendani has been criticized precisely because it has been perceived as being poorly structured, with repetition that must surely be unintentional, the result of bad organization or lack of skill on the part of its compiler. But if we were to turn to the Irish vernacular corpus, we might see features such as the so-called “encyclopedic tendency” (most famously visible in the first recension of Táin Bó Cúailnge), where multiple versions of the same story, with slight differences in chronology or characters, are deliberately included and juxtaposed, and this might help us to look more favourably on the work of the compiler of the fourteenth-century Vita Sancti Brendani. It is to be hoped that this accessible and lucid translation serves as a stimulus to further study of the text and its debt to the Latin and vernacular literatures on which it draws.