Two seventeenth-century Lives of St Patrick: their sources and composition

Abstract

Two Lives of St Patrick were produced during the effort to preserve Irish hagiographical texts in the wake of the Reformation: the Latin translation of the Middle-Irish Tripartite Life by John Colgan, and an abbreviated reworking of that text copied out by Míchéal Ó Cléirigh. This article identifies the sources of these Lives with new precision, showing that the texts of Patrick’s Life circulating in the early seventeenth century were little different from those that survive today. It also addresses how the constituent sources of these Lives were put together, and characterises the interventions their authors made within them.