Cumann Comnae: Constructing Christian Identities in The Book of Lismore’s Homiletic Saints’ Lives
type: CreativeWork
description: Building from the premise that hagiographical texts provide important literary accounts of affective religious experiences in the medieval centuries, this dissertation examines the nine homiletic saints’ lives in the fifteenth-century Book of Lismore. Specifically, the focus is on representations of the Eucharist, the axiomatic sacrament of Latin Christendom in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and how writers of and audiences for these Middle Irish texts perceived, or were intended to apprehend, the role of Communion in constructing and affirming their Christian identities. Throughout this work attention is drawn to parallels with and divergences from European Eucharistic orthodoxy and orthopraxy in the period contemporary with the texts’ composition. This dissertation is divided into six chapters: the first two offer important historical, literary and theological context for the texts which are the foundation of this enquiry, together with new insights into the scholarly profit to be derived from including vernacular hagiography in the corpus of texts mobilised in the study of theological developments of this period; the next three chapters examine specific dimensions of Christian identity - clerical, gender and lay; the sixth and concluding chapter synthesises the analysis of the foregoing sections. Chapter I outlines the significance of the Eucharist in medieval religious life and its relationship to the reform impetuses of the long twelfth-century. The categorisation of the nine Lismore Lives as homilies is not uncontested and this work offers a comprehensive defence of that classification by reference to the extant corpus of Irish homiletic literature and internal structural and stylistic features of the core texts. A section of the chapter addresses questions of dating and advances arguments that situate seven of the nine texts broadly within the period 1050–1200, by amalgamating and augmenting existing research undertaken on individual saints’ Lives. In Ch…
abstract: Building from the premise that hagiographical texts provide important literary accounts of affective religious experiences in the medieval centuries, this dissertation examines the nine homiletic saints’ lives in the fifteenth-century Book of Lismore. Specifically, the focus is on representations of the Eucharist, the axiomatic sacrament of Latin Christendom in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and how writers of and audiences for these Middle Irish texts perceived, or were intended to apprehend, the role of Communion in constructing and affirming their Christian identities. Throughout this work attention is drawn to parallels with and divergences from European Eucharistic orthodoxy and orthopraxy in the period contemporary with the texts’ composition. This dissertation is divided into six chapters: the first two offer important historical, literary and theological context for the texts which are the foundation of this enquiry, together with new insights into the scholarly profit to be derived from including vernacular hagiography in the corpus of texts mobilised in the study of theological developments of this period; the next three chapters examine specific dimensions of Christian identity - clerical, gender and lay; the sixth and concluding chapter synthesises the analysis of the foregoing sections. Chapter I outlines the significance of the Eucharist in medieval religious life and its relationship to the reform impetuses of the long twelfth-century. The categorisation of the nine Lismore Lives as homilies is not uncontested and this work offers a comprehensive defence of that classification by reference to the extant corpus of Irish homiletic literature and internal structural and stylistic features of the core texts. A section of the chapter addresses questions of dating and advances arguments that situate seven of the nine texts broadly within the period 1050–1200, by amalgamating and augmenting existing research undertaken on individual saints’ Lives. In Ch…
author: Pigott, Julianne
language: en
keywords: Medieval Ireland, hagiography, saints, Eucharistic theology
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/34104ebd-9da4-45a9-8a88-3c29af0155b3/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2019-10-26
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:08Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.43544