Steadfast Saints or Malleable Models? Seventeenth-Century Irish Hagiography Revisited

At one of the last sessions of the Council of Trent, the question of the role of saints within the Church was addressed. While the fathers upheld the value of venerating images and relics of the saints, they nevertheless admitted that there had been some abuses of their cults in the past. This led effectively to an effort to regulate and reform the process of canonization, by which saints were made, involving a greater control over the creation of saints by the authorities in Rome in order to avoid the further growth of dubious local cults that ranged from the benign to the bizarre.¹ In other words, recognition of the sacred was centralized.² In the wake of the Council, and amidst criticisms of the previously accepted view of sainthood from reformers within and without the Church alike, the official reaction of church authorities was indecisive. Thus, from the close of the Council in 1563 until 1588, when the Congregation of Sacred Rites and Ceremonies was established to oversee canonizations, there were no new saints officially recognized within the Catholic Church.³ One of the problems facing the Church was the prevalence of what was now considered to be questionable material in the lives of even the officially recognized saints. A more historically critical method of outlining the lives of saints was required if the idea of sainthood was going to retain any credibility in a rapidly changing Europe. In order to achieve this, the construction of new lives would have to attain certain standards and, concomitantly, old lives that were deficient in this area necessitated amendment. Peter Burke sees evidence of this new and more critical approach to the lives of saints in the work of Erasmus on the life of St. Jerome.⁴

It was, however, a Jesuit project, begun in Antwerp in 1607 and spearheaded by Father Heribert Rosweyde, that began a systematic attempt at collating and publishing what was hoped would be a more acceptable collection of the lives of the saints of the universal church.⁵ Rosweyde's Fasti sanctorum (1607), apart from giving an account of the manuscript lives of saints found in Belgian libraries, outlined a plan for the publication of eighteen volumes of the lives of the saints including a commentary volume and index volume.⁶ He did not live to see his plan implemented, however, and when he died in 1629, John Bollandus was placed in charge of the project in his stead.⁷ The group that worked with John Bollandus, known since as the Bollandists, published in 1643 two volumes of the lives of saints whose feastdays occurred in January, followed in 1648 by three volumes treating of the saints whose feasts occurred in February.⁸ Roughly around the same time, in 1645 and 1647 respectively, to be precise, John Colgan, an Irish Franciscan friar based at Louvain, published two volumes of Irish saints' lives, the first, entitled Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae (1645), treating of the lives of Irish saints whose feast days occurred in January, February, and March, and the second, Triadis Thaumaturgae (1647), comprising various lives of Patrick, Brigid, and Colmcille.

The works of Colgan marked the culmination of a long process, involving many individuals, that partly entailed the production of Irish saints' lives that would satisfy the expectations of Tridentine prelates such as John Roche of Ferns, who praised the life of Patrick in the new breviary as "modern, drawn out of the best writers, more seemly to be read than the ancient legend."⁹ Renewed interest in the publication of "more seemly" lives of Irish saints can be traced to the activity of Richard Stanihurst, whose Latin life of St. Patrick entitled De vita S Patricii, Hiberniae Apostoli was published at Antwerp in 1587.¹⁰ Based on both the works of Jocelin and Giraldus Cambrensis, this life also contained many additional patristic and biblical references that portrayed...