Jonas of Bobbio and the Legacy of Columbanus: Sanctity and Community in the Seventh Century by Alexander O'Hara (review)

Biographers sometimes are consigned to remain overshadowed by the historical figures they describe. This is a pity, not only because they often are interesting historical figures in their own right, but also because their social and political context shaped the biographies that tend to be our most valuable windows into the past. Any attempt to bring a neglected biographer into the scholarly limelight is therefore laudable, especially if this concerns the complicated genre of hagiography in a century that still seems to have trouble shedding a negative reputation, which is the case with the seventh century. Alexander O'Hara does all of the above successfully in the book under review: he brings to life Jonas, the seventh-century monk, hagiographer, and author of the Vita Columbani, and in doing so he draws our attention to a neglected prism for understanding the accomplishments of Saint Columbanus.

Columbanus (543–615 ce) traditionally is known as the last figure in the so-called "Age of Saints." As a monk and missionary from Ireland, he founded, among other things, the abbeys of Luxeuil in what is now central France and of Bobbio in what is now northeastern Italy. His ideas of strict, penitential communities of monks that had to be independent of the episcopal hierarchy contributed to what has been called "Hiberno-Frankish" monasticism, while his notions of a Latinate Christian commonwealth that transcended the political and ethnic boundaries of his time caused him to be interpreted as a precursor to European unity. O'Hara dealt with the latter aspect of Columbanus' legacy in an edited volume (Columbanus and the Peoples of Post-Roman Europe, Oxford, 2018), which is the second work in his trilogy of studies on Columbanus and Jonas of Bobbio, the first one being an annotated translation of Jonas's three saints' lives (TTH, no. 64) and the third one being the monograph currently under review, which is based on the author's doctoral dissertation. In this book, O'Hara builds on recent Merovingian scholarship which modified the traditional narrative of the "Age of Saints" and demonstrated that political and ecclesiastical elites in the Burgundian, Frankish and Lombard polities of the sixth and seventh centuries influenced the development of European monasticism as much as, if not more than, the zeal of missionaries like Columbanus. This book represents a significant and well-crafted continuation of such previous scholarship, but it is much more than simply an attempt to politicize religious and monastic history.

The chronological arc of this monograph takes the reader from Columbanus' peregrinatio at the tail-end of the sixth century to the death of Jonas in 659. In the first two chapters, O'Hara lays out very clearly how aspects of Columbanus' monastic vision—such as an emphasis on penance and specific tonsure prescriptions—caused severe discord among his followers, but that Jonas deliberately depicted Columbanian communities as ideal and apostolic. In the third and probably most impressive chapter, the different layers of Jonas' identity are beautifully woven into the political and the ideological landscape of the early seventh century. Jonas's upbringing and education in Susa, a town in northern Italy that had remained in Byzantine hands until 574, gave him an Italian perspective on the wider world, an awareness of the multi-ethnic configuration of western Europe (he self-identifies neither as Frankish nor as Lombard), but it also explains his elementary knowledge of Greek, his profound knowledge of classical Latin phraseology, and his use of classical pagan sources, all of which was not common in the seventh century. At the same time, Jonas was deeply religious and was part of the so-called "peccatization" of Christian life (a new emphasis on sin and penance), so much so that he not only joined a Columbanian monastery but also wrote a lengthy hagiography about its founder, became a...