Feastdays of the Saints. A History of Irish Martyrologies (review)

For the first three centuries of the Christian Church the cult of martyr saints and their relics hardly existed. By the end of the fifth century, the field was a growth industry. The extent of the change is to be seen in the contrasting reactions of the younger Augustine, dismissive of Donatist claims to special sanctity for the Christian departed, and the older Church Father, wearied alike by the senectus mundi and the Vandal siege of Carthage, in the last book of his City of God offering an elevated discussion of body and soul and the possibility of resurrection (as expounded by Plato, Cicero, and Porphyry) and then breaking off into an enthusiastic catalogue of the miracles allegedly wrought by St. Stephen at the local shrines of Hippo and Uzalis.

Though the phenomenon has been viewed by many (after Hume and Gibbon) as a sign of the "vulgarization" of religion in the post-Roman world, many scholars have seen the cult of saints and their relics as a direct descendant of pre-Christian mortuary practices (the pervigilia of the dead). On the other hand, Peter Brown and his followers have made radical claims for the originality of Christian commemorations. But are they right? It appears natural enough to trace the origins of the festal commemoration of sancti back to the consular laterculi or fasti of the pagan Roman world, and, by extension, to trace the linear descent of such texts from the Fasti of Furius Dionysius Filocalus (a.d. 354) [ed. Th. Mommsen, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 1 (1863) 332-357] through to the "Christianized" version of Polemius Silvius (a.d. 448/9), christiano odio imbutus, who used Filocalus's Fasti as his model, but stripped it of all pagan elements (except the names of the Egyptian months). Polemius Silvius was, according to that great Bedan scholar Charles W. Jones, a source for Bede's chronological writings.

Some have seen behind this new-found enthusiasm for the saints and their relics the hand of Pope Damasus—that great "tickler of noblewomen's ears" (auriscalpius matronarum), and patron of Filocalus, who carved many of the pope's most impressive verse inscriptions in Rome. Damasus's violent campaign in the early 380's to wrest the sedes apostolica from his rival required new tactics and new weapons; one of these was the power of the "very special dead," whose bones were all over Rome. The extent of his success is illustrated by the rapidity with which Ambrose—that other great Christian "impresario" (Peter Brown's term)—"miraculously" discovered the remains of SS. Gervasius and Protasius in Milan in 385, and turned them to a similar purpose. After that, it was just a matter of compiling lists of names of saints and martyrs (along the lines of the Notitia locorum sanctorum compiled early for Rome) and adding to them over time. Such a procedure might very well have produced the Martyrologium Hieronimianum. "There is perhaps no more horrible book in all of antiquity," wrote the Bollandist Victor de Buck in 1875, and who would gainsay a Bollandist in such matters!

It is more than a little odd, therefore, that the Irish—the last to join the fold of the Christian Church before the final collapse of the Roman Empire—should have preserved the names of none of their earliest martyrs (those newly-baptized converts whose massacre is reported by St. Patrick), and yet the oldest extant manuscript of Jerome's Martyrology, Paris, BN lat. 10837 (saec. viii) was written by Virgilius, an Irish member of the seventh-century mixed Anglo-Saxon-Irish community at Rath Melsigi (Co. Carlow), who, after a.d. 690, transferred to Echternach (Luxembourg) with its founder Willibrord; the Venerable Bede had a great deal to say about both.

Professor Ó Riain has for many years pioneered the study of the earliest Irish vernacular martyrologies and their relationship with that Rath Melsigi/Echternach book, and...