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Depictions of Ireland in the classical period tended to emphasise the peripheral geographical location of the island, its inclement climate and the perceived barbarity of its inhabitants, who, after all, lived outside the Roman Empire and had not thus benefitted from its civilising effect.

Strabo, for example, includes in his first-century Geography a colourful description of the island and its inhabitants, which he placed at the very northern edge of the habitable world:

 

 

Called Ierne or similar names in Greek sources, Ireland was alternatively referred to as Hibernia or Scotia in Latin texts during antiquity and in the early and high medieval periods. Writing in the early 3rd^rd century, Solinus similarly paints a picture of Irish depravity, immorality and bellicosity:

 

 

He also emphasises the geographical isolation of the island:

 

 

Ireland remained outside the Roman Empire, but from the first half of the 5^th century onwards written sources indicate that the Christian religion that was by now synonymous with Rome had begun to make inroads on the island, probably encouraged by trade contacts and migration between the island and the Roman world. 431 is the first secure date in Irish history, in which year Palladius was sent as bishop to the Irish believing in Christ:

 

 

The perception that the arrival of Christianity would see a barbarian people civilised is prominent in early accounts of the Christianisation process. Referring to Celestine’s role in suppressing the Pelagian heresy in Britain and in dispatching Bishop Palladius to Ireland, Prosper of Aquitaine commends the pope for having kept the insula romana Catholic and having made the insula barbara Christian:

 

 

The surviving Confessio of Ireland’s most famous early missionary, St Patrick, informs us that he was aware in the 5^th century that he was attempting to bring the Gospel to the ends of the earth:

 

His Confessio make clear that he believed that in converting the Irish to Christianity he was helping to fulfill the biblical imperative to preach the gospel to all peoples before the end of the world (Matthew 24.14, 28.19–20), and all the way to the uttermost part of the earth (Acts 1:8):

 

 

A pagan people de ultimis terrae were being transformed into plebs domini:

 

From this perspective, Ireland’s peripherality and previous paganism meant that it now had a special role in Christian salvation history, the conversion of the Irish helping to fulfilling the task of bringing the gospel to omnibus gentibus ante finem mundi and to the ends of the earth, ubi nemo ultra est.

 

In a letter to Pope Bonifatius written in 613, the Irish monastic pioneer and peregrinus Columbanus also refers to Ireland’s geographical peripherality but at the same time insists on the orthodoxy of Irish religious practice and its unbroken connection to the centre of Christendom, Rome, and to the papacy that had instigated the conversion of the Irish:

 

 

Dramatically evoking Ireland’s isolation in the choppy waters of the Ocean, he commends the papacy for having overcome these natural boundaries to successfully bring the word of God to the island. Columbanus further suggests that through the conversion of Ireland the Rome of Peter and Paul has now surpassed imperial Rome, reaching beyond the limits of the Empire to encompass even Ireland:

 

 

Ireland’s peripheral, oceanic location is again emphasised in the opening lines of Ionas of Bobbio’s Life of Columbanus. It begins with an anonymous poem, written by an Irish person, which dramatically evokes the maritime setting:

 

 

Ionas goes on to depict the Irish as especially pious, a notion that will become a commonplace in later centuries, while at the same time stating that they lack the “laws of other peoples”, perhaps a lingering implication of barbarity, a reference to Ireland’s place outside the dominion and laws of the former Roman Empire or a comment resulting from an awareness that distinct legal codes held sway in 7^th-century Ireland:

 

 

Columbanus, as we have seen, was keen to highlight the orthodoxy of the Irish Church and also defended the insular tradition of calculating Easter according to an 84-year cycle. The reluctance of many Irish churches to adopt the alternative Roman Easter reckoning would remain a source of controversy into the 8^th century, when the Irish monastic outpost at Iona finally adopted the Roman system.

 

One of the most famous documents produced during the Easter controversy was written by Bishop Cummian (of Clonfert?) circa 632, one of the Irish prelates in favour of adopting the Roman Easter in Ireland. His letter to Ségéne of Iona (abb. 623-652) and Béccán the hermit criticises those “at the end of the earth” who presume to know better than the rest of the Christian world:

 

 

 

The language used by Cummian echoes that contained in since-lost letter send by Pope Honorius (625–638) to the Irish. Bede supplies the text of this document in his Ecclesiastical History:

 

 

Bede also records exchanges at the synod held at Whitby/Streoneschalch in Northumbria in 664, where the merits of the different methods of calculating the date of Easter were discussed, with Wilfrid, leader of the Romanising party, arguing against those “in the two remotest islands of Ocean”, who would “foolishly attempt to fight against the whole world”:

 

 

Despite his criticism of their system for calculating Easter, Bede’s attitude to Ireland and the Irish was largely positive, and the praise and almost paradisiacal description of Ireland he included in the widely disseminated Ecclesiastical History contributed strongly to the rehabilitation of the image of the island and its inhabitants:

 

 

Bede’s benign view of the Irish stemmed from his awareness of the Irish role in the (re-) Christianisation of northern Britain in the 6^th and 7^th centuries and tied in with the notions we have already encountered in the writings and Life of Columbanus regarding Ireland’s status as a bastion of (orthodox) Christianity.  

 

While Ionas may still have alluded to a certain barbarity or lawlessness among the Irish, Walahfrid Strabo, writing a Life of St Gall in 833/4, believed that the Christianisation of the island had led to the terrible habits of the Irish commented on by Solinus and other classical authors being superseded. Furthermore, through the successful spread of the Christian faith from the eastern regions of India and Ethiopia to the western islands of Ireland and Britain, the biblical prediction of the pre-eminence of Christ over all peoples had come to pass:

 

 

Ireland’s peripheral geographical position again sees it ascribed a special role in salvation history. Indeed, while the Christian faith had spread westwards to Ireland, another description of the life of St Gall written by Ermenrich of Ellwangen in 850-855 vividly conveys how the missionary activity of Irish clerics in the early medieval period had seen the light of Christ brought from the western fringes to the centre of Europe:

 

 

The image of Ireland as a bastion of the Christian faith and a font of saints and pious clerics had taken hold. Over time, this was a perception that led inter alia to the partial equation of Irish ethnicity with sanctity and, in consequence, to spurious Irish origins being attributed to numerous Continental saints whose actual background was unknown. These pseudo-Irish saints included Fridolin of Säckingen, Manseutus of Toul, Plechelm of Guelderland, Magnus of Füssen, Fredianus of Lucca and Erhard of Regensburg. In the (9^th-century) Life of another, Wiro of (Roermond), the abundance of Irish saints is described thus:

 

 

 

 

Over the course of the early medieval period, Ireland’s perceived association with sanctity led to the insula barbara of the 5^th century being transformed into an insula sanctorum. The island’s topographical isolation could now provide the frame for an image of an area in which a concentration of sanctity and piety rather than of barbarity and depravity could be imagined. The use of the exact term insula sanctorum is attested from the 11^th century onwards, the first recorded use being found in the world chronicle written at Mainz in the 1070s by the Irish incluse Máel-Brigte or Marianus Scottus:

 

 

A century later, Jocelin of Furness wrote in his Life of St Patrick that the term insula sanctorum was one that was universally applied to Ireland due to great concentration of monastic life across the island that emerged in the wake of Ireland’s conversion:

 

 

This was not the only view of Ireland current in the later 11^th and 12^th centuries, however. In the context of the concerted movement towards ecclesiastical reform across Europe, practices prevalent in the Irish Church and Irish society, in particular with respect to hereditary church offices and to marriage, began to elicit criticism from reformers both within and outside the Irish Church. Despite the reorganisation of the Irish diocesan system and the introduction of Continental Orders to Ireland in the first half of the 12^th century, the middle part of the century saw the publication of a number of texts that were heavily critical of the Irish Church and society. Highly influential, largely due to the prominence of its author, was Bernard of Clairvaux’s Life of Malachy (Máel Maedóc Ua Morgair) of Armagh, written shortly after the latter’s death in 1148. Although Malachy, as is to be expected in a hagiographical work, enjoys a very favourable depiction, the Life is often highly critical of the Irish Church and Irish society and begins with a passage that asserts the crude barbarity of the Irish people:

 

 

Bernard paints a particularly bad picture of the inhabitants of Malachy’s diocese of Connor in north-eastern Ireland, who are described alternatively as beasts, barbarians and pagans:

 

  

Bernard’s negative opinion of the Irish people is also evident in the homily he wrote on Malachy’s death, where Malachy’s achievement in taming the “deadly barbarism” of the Irish people is again, around seven centuries after Parick’s Confessio, placed in the frame of wider salvation history, the subdual of this natio extera seeing Christ’s dominion being extended to the ends of the earth in accordance with Psalm II.8:

 

 

Bernard’s view of Ireland chimes with sentiments he expresses in a contemporary letter to Diarmait mac Murchadha of Leinster, whose achievement in founding a Cistercian house at Baltinglass is seen as all the more laudable considering that he is a king at the ends of the earth among barbarian peoples:

 

 

Bernard’s comments on Ireland in the Vita Malachiae had serious consequences, insofar as they set the stage for the rhetoric contained in the famous Laudabiliter, a papal bull sent by Pope Adrian IV to the English king Henry II in 1155/6. Here the pope approves Henry’s proposed military intervention in Ireland on the grounds that it will extend the boundaries of the Church, reveal the truth of the Christian faith to untaught and wild peoples and root out the weeds of vice from the Lord’s field:

 

 

While the English invasion did not come until 1169 and was instigated by Cambro-Norman barons rather than by Henry II, the importance of the perception of Ireland as a country in need of drastic ecclesiastical and moral reform in legitimising the military conquest is evident from texts and documents written in the aftermath. Strongly echoing Bernard of Clairvaux’s words in the Vita Malachie, a letter sent by Pope Alexander III to Henry in 1172 speaks of the enormous vices of the Irish people, of a barbarous and uncivilised gens, ignorant of the divine law, and of an undisciplined and untamed natio:

 

 

In his Expugnatio Hiberniae, the chief apologist for the invasion, Giraldus Cambrensis, cites genuine and forged papal documents in arguing for the legitimacy of the English invasion. Written in the 1180s, his other major work on Ireland, the Topographia Hiberniae, depicts 12th-century Ireland as a morally polluted society and — in stark contrast to earlier perceptions of the Irish as a particularly pious people — its inhabitants as less cultivated than all other peoples in the rudiments of the faith:

 

 

The barbaric habits of the Irish, Giraldus asserts furthermore, owe to their geographical isolation at the world’s end and the consequent lack of contact with civilised nations:

 

 

Parallel to this stream of negative depictions of Ireland in the 12^th century, a series of texts written by Irishmen abroad attempted to uphold the image of Ireland as an insula sanctorum. Several of these texts emanate from the Regensburg motherhouse of the so-called Schottenklöster, a group of Irish Benedictine monasteries founded in Germany and Austria between the late 11^th and early 13^th centuries. In the same year as the Vita Malachiae, the Visio Tnugdali, a vision of heaven and hell encountered by an Irish miles, was written at the motherhouse by an Irish monk named Marcus. This text, which would enjoy very wide dissemination, begins with a description of Ireland that begins with describing its location in the farthest western ocean before expanding on Bede’s paradisiacal portrayal of the island, albeit it also states that Ireland is famous for its cruel battles:

 

 

In the context of the need for ecclesiastical reform asserted in other 12^th-century texts, the author’s desire to inform an external audience of the (reformed) diocesan structure of the Irish Church is telling:

 

 

A collection of Irish Saints’ Lives created at the Regensburg Schottenkloster in the final quarter of the 12^th century includes a number of vitae newly written or redacted at the Irish monastery. In some instances, new introductory passages on Ireland were added to older Lives. The expanded opening of the Vita Ronani again emphasises the western location and fertility of Ireland. Interestingly, the author goes on to suggest that the inhabitants of Ireland are as distant from other nations in rite and habit as they are geographically. This Irish exceptionalism extends to their faith: no other gens is more constant in its divine worship, and only God knows how great the number of saints it has produced:

 

 

This notion of Ireland as an insula sanctorum reappears in the Life of Flannán of Killaloe that was written or rewritten at Regensburg:

 

 

The anonymous compiler of the collection also appears to have written the Vita Mariani Scoti, the Life of Muiredach Macc Robartaig, founder father of the Schottenkloster in Regensburg, around the year 1180. Mixing hagiography, foundation history and an apologia for the ‘Irish’ custom of peregrinatio pro Christo, the work celebrates the missionaries and peregrini that left Ireland for Britain and the Continent in the early medieval period and argues that the Irish Benedictine monks residing in the Schottenklöster of Central Europe belonged to this same tradition. In the prologue the author promises to share with his readers the reasons that moved his predecessors and brethren to leave their homeland and relatives in western parts and embark on their peregrinatio:

 

 

The patria they had left behind he later describes in paradisiacal terms:

 

     

Towards the end of the work, the author measures the achievement of the Irish monks in

establishing a monastery in Regensburg:

 

 

The consciousness of Ireland’s peripheral location is obvious. In the author’s view, the great geographical distance from the monks’ patria made their achievement in founding a monastery in the heart of the empire all the greater. Awareness of their geographical peripherality appears to have been a constant aspect of the self-image and mental map of Irish people on the Continent in the early and high medieval period, but in stark contrast to Giraldus’ assertion that Ireland’s remoteness had resulted in barbarity the Schottenklöster texts put a positive spin on the location of the patria at the ends of the earth.

 

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