Lives and Afterlives

Saint Patrick is a central figure in the medieval Irish Church. As the converter saint he was a central anchor through which Irish people came to understand their complicated religious past as well as their new place in the wider Christian world. This study considers some of the earliest and most influential writings focused on Saint Patrick, and asks how successive generations forged, sustained and redirected aspects of the saint’s persona in order to suit their specific religious and political needs.

In this book Elizabeth Dawson, for the first time, treats the Hiberno-Latin vitae of Patrick as a body of connected texts. Seminal questions about the corpus are addressed, such as who wrote the Lives and why? What do the works tell us about the communities that venerated and celebrated the saint? And what impact did these Lives have on the success and endurance of the saint’s cult? Challenging the perception that Patrick’s legend was created and sustained almost exclusively by the monastic community at Armagh, she demonstrates that the Patrick who emerges from the Lives is a varied and malleable saint with whom multiple communities engaged.

Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Preface
Chapter 1. Beginnings
Chapter 2. Tírechán
Chapter 3. Muirchú
Chapter 4. Beyond the seventh century
Chapter 5. Expanding the Tradition: Vita Secunda, Vita Tertia & Vita Quarta
Epilogue
Appendix
Bibliography
Index