Life of St Columba by Adomnán: Manuscripts and Editions

Source: Richard Sharpe (ed. & trans.) Adomnán of Iona: Life of St Columba, London: Penguin 1995, 235-237

Texts from the seventh century very rarely survive in contemporary copies and have usually to be reconstructed by comparing several copies made at later dates, many of them probably copies of copies, several stages removed from the original. The Life of St Columba by Adomnán is one of the rare cases.

In 1621 an Irish Jesuit called Stephen White was Professor of Theology at the University of Dillingen in Germany. He had a keen interest in Irish history, and especially in the early history of the Irish church; whenever he had the opportunity, he searched the libraries within his reach for ancient manuscripts relating to Ireland. In the monastery of Reichenau, on an island in Lake Constance, he made his most important discovery – a small book containing Adomnán's Life of St Columba copied by a monk of Iona who gives his name as Dorbbéne. By a happy chance we know from the annals that Dorbbéne was one of the most senior members of the community when he died in 713. His manuscript could easily have been written ten years earlier, when, as an ordinary monk, he was engaged in the task of copying books. It may therefore have been seen in Iona by the author himself.

Reichenau was a popular destination with Irish monks who set out to live and study in the monasteries of France, Germany, and Switzerland. One of these travellers must have brought this book with him from Iona, perhaps in the eighth or ninth century, and it remained in the library at Reichenau for centuries. Stephen White was allowed to borrow the manuscript and at Dillingen he made a copy from the original. His copy was dated 31 May 1621; it is now lost.

Through Stephen White the complete text of Adomnán's Life became known to scholars: he supplied a copy to the Irish Franciscans at St Anthony's College, Louvain, who were then engaged in collecting and studying historical texts from Ireland. There John Colgan published the Life in 1647, the first edition of the complete text, in a book called Trias Thaumaturga, which dealt also with St Patrick and St Brigit. An abstract was made from White's copy by James Ussher about 1639. Ussher was archbishop of Armagh and the leading protestant authority on Irish church history, but he met White too late to be able to make full use of his text of Adomnán's Life. Some references were included in the addenda to Ussher's Britannicarum ecclesiarum antiquitates (1639), and Ussher's abstract has by chance survived, and is now in a private library in Wales. Another copy made from White's transcript formed the basis of the next published edition, in the volume of the Bollandists' Acta Sanctorum that covers the 9 June, the feast day of St Columba. Published in 1698 this edition is neither as accurate nor as carefully annotated as Colgan's.

Meanwhile, the manuscript written by Dorbbéne was presumably returned to Reichenau by Fr White. At some point, however, it became separated from the main collection of ancient manuscripts at Reichenau (now kept in the public library at Karlsruhe), but it turned up again in the eighteenth century in the nearby town of Schaffhausen, where it has been kept in the public library for some two hundred years. The manuscript is still there and has been used by the modern editors of the text. The Revd William Reeves published a monumental edition, to which I refer constantly in my notes, at Dublin in 1857. The later editions by Skene and Fowler, and the translations by Bishop Daniel MacCarthy (1860), A. P. Forbes (1874), J. T. Fowler (1895), and Wentworth Huyshe (1906) all used Reeves's text. A new and more exact text, founded on a very careful scrutiny of the manuscript in Schaffhausen, was brought out in 1961 by Dr Alan Orr Anderson and his wife Dr Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson. The scrupulous exactitude of this text was a remarkable achievement, and I have used it as the basis of my translation.

The Schaffhausen manuscript is conventionally designated as MS A, and its importance lies in the fact that it allows us to see the exact form in which the Life was originally read: the size of page, the handwriting, the spelling, even the punctuation. Yet it is not the only witness to the text. There are three copies now in the British Library, London, which agree closely on a text differing in a number of particulars from that of MS A. At several points these B MSS contain additional sentences, quite evidently by Adomnán himself; this gives them considerable importance, since it becomes apparent that Adomnán allowed copies to be made from his own working copy both before and after some final revisions. Where MS A and the B MSS differ in a minor way, the fact that MS A was written in Iona about 700 does not mean that it is necessarily a better witness than the B MSS, which must ultimately go back to the exemplar corrected and revised by Adomnán.

Of these B MSS, the most significant is B1, now London, British Library, MS Additional 35110. The book was copied at Durham towards the end of the twelfth century and then carefully corrected against the exemplar from which the copy was made. The library at Durham had been growing during the twelfth century, but as early as the 1150s it already included a copy of the Life, the copy that was used by Reginald, a monk of Durham who wrote Lives of several saints, including one of King Oswald of Northumbria. The copy from which Reginald quoted Adomnán is now lost, but it presumably served as the model from which B1 was transcribed about forty years later. Later still, perhaps in the late thirteenth or fourteenth century, B1 left Durham, for it bears the medieval library-mark of the Augustinian or Austin Friary at Newcastle. Another manuscript, B3, is related to B1: its text could have been copied from B1, for the two agree closely. B3 was written in the late fifteenth century at a house of Augustinian canons; shortly before 1609 it belonged to a nobleman in Co. Durham, Lord Lumley, whose books were soon afterwards transferred to the Royal collection, where it still is, London, British Library, MS Royal 8 D. IX. From this volume the B text was used by John Pinkerton in 1789, but without adequate attention; his edition, even at the time of its appearance, was of less use than Colgan's. The remaining witness to the B text, known as B2, is London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius D. III. The handwriting of this book is of a date similar to B1; its text agrees with B rather than A, but it is not as closely related to either B1 or B3, as they are to each other. In any case B2 was badly damaged by the fire that decimated the Cotton Library in 1731.

There is sufficient agreement between B1, B2, and B3 for us to suppose that they have a common ancestor, B. Because B contains passages written by Adomnán but missing from A, it is necessary to infer that A and B reflect two stages in the author's intentions. Where either one does not yield acceptable sense, it should be possible to correct it from the other. For this reason, I have commented in the notes at points where I have preferred the reading of B over that of A.

Copyright © Richard Sharpe 1995–reproduced on CELT by kind permission of the author. Updated by Benjamin Hazard, May 2005.

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