by Bernadette Cunningham
In Ireland, as throughout western Europe, in the age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation many scholars turned their attention to writing ecclesiastical history. The encounter between the existing seanchas tradition, European national histories and the emerging religious tensions of the age provided the inspiration for new ways of interpreting the past. The debate over which was the true Christian church had a strong historical element. Each side of the confessional divide was keen to demonstrate that theirs was the true successor of the church of Christ.
The study of the lives of saints, bishops and others whose careers formed part of the story of the evolution of the Christian church became an important element of historical writing. In Ireland, for example, scholars from both the Catholic and Protestant traditions sought out sources that could be used to shed light on the story of St Patrick, Ireland’s national apostle. Writing from a Catholic perspective, Richard Stanihurst’s Life of Patrick was published in Antwerp in 1587, Robert Rochford’s English adaption of Jocelyn’s Life of Patrick, together with lives of Brigit and Colum Cille, was published at Louvain in 1625, while Thomas Messingham’s compilation of Irish saints’ Lives, with its particular emphasis on Patrick, Brigit and Colum Cille, was published at Paris in 1624.
Similarly, collections of saints’ Lives compiled in Ireland by the Franciscans Mícheál Ó Cléirigh, Thomas Strange, John Goode and others during the 1620s were used by John Colgan in his Latin editions of Lives of Irish saints, published in Louvain in the 1640s. From a Protestant perspective, James Ussher wrote extensively on the sources for the life and work of St Patrick in his 1639 ecclesiastical history of Ireland, and Sir James Ware’s Latin Life of Patrick was published in London in 1656.
