TLRH | Freemen out with the Tribe

Monday, 15 November 2021, 7 – 8pm Freemen out with the Tribe: Exiles for Christ from Saints Patrick to Kilian Online Lecture by Dr Alexander O'Hara, Department of Celtic Languages & Literatures, Harvard University in association with the Trinity Long Room Hub. The event will be chaired by Dr Ciaran O'Neill, Deputy Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub. This year marks the 15th centenary of the birth of Saint Columcille/ Columba of Iona, born in 521 in Co. Donegal into the royal Uí Néill dynasty. In 563 he left northern Ireland for northern Britain where he established a monastery on the island of Iona in the Hebrides where he died in 597. Columba and his monks from Iona played a key role in the Christianisation of what would become Scotland and northern England. Columba was considered to be a peregrinus pro Christo, 'an exile for Christ' who left his homeland for the uncertainty of life in a foreign country following the biblical precedent of Abraham. This lecture frames Columcille within the development of this concept of exile from the time of Saint Patrick to the eighth century and how this played an important role in the development of Irish ethnic identity in the seventh century. About the speaker Dr Alexander O’Hara is a Research Fellow in the Loyola Institute, Trinity College Dublin. He is a historian of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages specialising in monastic history and theology, the medieval cult of the saints and medieval Latin literary culture. He is the author of Jonas of Bobbio and the Legacy of Columbanus: Sanctity and Community in the Seventh Century (Oxford University Press, 2018), editor of Columbanus and the Peoples of Post­-Roman Europe (Oxford University Press, 2018), and translator of Jonas of Bobbio: Life of Columbanus, Life of John, and Life of Vedast (Liverpool University Press, 2017). He is co-editor of St Sunniva: Irish Queen, Norwegian Patron Saint (Bergen, 2021), a collected volume on the medieval cult of the Irish saint Sunniva, patron of Bergen and Western Norway. He is a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Scholar in the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University for 2021-'22. Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/