Jonas of Bobbio and the legacy of Columbanus : sanctity and community in the seventh century
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Bibliographic Information
Jonas of Bobbio and the legacy of Columbanus : sanctity and community in the seventh century
（Oxford studies in late antiquity）
Oxford University Press, c2018
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Revision of author's doctoral thesis "Jonas of Bobbio and the 'Vita Columbani' : sanctity and community in the seventh century."
Includes bibliographical references (p.275-299) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Jonas of Bobbio, writing in the mid seventh century, was not only a major Latin monastic author, but also an historical figure in his own right. Born in the ancient Roman town of Susa in the foothills of the Italian Alps, he became a monk of Bobbio, the monastery founded by the Irish exile Columbanus, soon after his death in 615. He became the archivist and personal assistant to successive Bobbio abbots, travelled to Rome to obtain the first papal privilege of
immunity, and served as a missionary priest on the northern borderlands of the Frankish kingdom. He spent the rest of his life in Merovingian Gaul as abbot of the double monastic community of Marchiennes-Hamage, where he wrote his Life of Columbanus, one of the most influential works of early medieval
hagiography.
This book, the first major study devoted to Jonas of Bobbio, his corpus of three saints' Lives, and the Columbanian familia, explores the development of the Columbanian monastic network and its relationship to its founder. The Life of Columbanus was written following a period of crisis within the Columbanian familia and it was in response to this crisis that the Bobbio community in Lombard Italy commissioned Jonas to write the work. Alexander O'Hara presents the
Life of Columbanus as a subtle and clever critique of the changes and crises that had taken place in the monastic communities since Columbanus's death. It also considers the life of Jonas as reflecting many of the changing political, cultural, and religious circumstances of the seventh century, and his writings as instrumental in
shaping new concepts of sanctity and community. The result of the study is a unique perspective on the early medieval Age of Saints and the monastic and political worlds of Merovingian Gaul and Lombard Italy in the seventh century.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Reading Jonas
1. Conflicting Visions of Community: The Legacy of Columbanus
2. New Rules: The Agrestius Affair and the Regula Benedicti
3. An Italian Monk in Merovingian Gaul
4. Stilo texere gesta: Jonas the Hagiographer
5. Jonas and Biblical Stylization
6. The Miracle Accounts
7. Sanctity and Community
Epilogue
Appendices
Distribution of Biblical quotations and allusions in Jonas's hagiography
The Use of the Bible in the Vita Vedastis
The Use of the Bible in the Vita Iohannis
The Use of the Bible in the Vita Columbani
Miracle Accounts in the Vita Columbani
Miracle Accounts in Adomnan's Vita Columbae
Miracle Accounts in Book II of Gregory the Great's Dialogues
Miracle Accounts in the Vita Vedastis
Miracle Accounts in Vita Iohannis
Miracles in Muirchu's Vita Patricii
The Manuscripts of the Vita Columbani
Graphs of Miracle Accounts in Vita Columbani
Bibliography
by "Nielsen BookData"
