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Diormit: Columba's right-hand man

Diormit: Columba's right-hand man The Innes Review vol. 60 no. 2 (Autumn 2009) 164–169 DOI: 10.3366/E0020157X09000511 Reading the literature produced by a saint’s cult, it is always worth watching out for references – sometimes veiled, sometimes explicit – to relics associated with that saint. The vitae, poetry, liturgy and stories associated with a saint should be read as the surviving literary echo of a cult which once embraced far more than literature: feasts, church dedications, altar dedications, processions, pilgrimages, fairs, devotional poetry and song, holy places such as wells or rocks, personal names in honour of the saint, and the cult of relics, to name a few in no particular order – mostly the sort of thing that was largely suppressed in the sixteenth century in Scotland under the rubric of ‘monuments of idolatry’. If we imagine a saint’s vita as having crystallised out of this kind of ‘solution’ of energetic devotional practices, it makes sense to study the vita for indications of what this ‘solution’ might have looked like. Reading Adomnán’s Life of Columba in this way may point us towards one aspect of his cult which has hitherto not been commented on.1 The Life [VC] is divided into three books. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Innes Review Edinburgh University Press

Diormit: Columba's right-hand man

Innes Review , Volume 60 (2): 164 – Nov 1, 2009

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Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Copyright
© The Scottish Catholic Historical Association
Subject
Short articles; Historical Studies
ISSN
0020-157X
eISSN
1745-5219
DOI
10.3366/E0020157X09000511
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

The Innes Review vol. 60 no. 2 (Autumn 2009) 164–169 DOI: 10.3366/E0020157X09000511 Reading the literature produced by a saint’s cult, it is always worth watching out for references – sometimes veiled, sometimes explicit – to relics associated with that saint. The vitae, poetry, liturgy and stories associated with a saint should be read as the surviving literary echo of a cult which once embraced far more than literature: feasts, church dedications, altar dedications, processions, pilgrimages, fairs, devotional poetry and song, holy places such as wells or rocks, personal names in honour of the saint, and the cult of relics, to name a few in no particular order – mostly the sort of thing that was largely suppressed in the sixteenth century in Scotland under the rubric of ‘monuments of idolatry’. If we imagine a saint’s vita as having crystallised out of this kind of ‘solution’ of energetic devotional practices, it makes sense to study the vita for indications of what this ‘solution’ might have looked like. Reading Adomnán’s Life of Columba in this way may point us towards one aspect of his cult which has hitherto not been commented on.1 The Life [VC] is divided into three books.

Journal

Innes ReviewEdinburgh University Press

Published: Nov 1, 2009

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