Abstract
In 1625, when Robert Rochford OFM prepared a compendium of the lives of Ireland’s three principal saints, Patrick, Brigid and Colum Cille, he chose authoritative texts that he believed would be above criticism. His printed book comprised abridged versions of Jocelin’s life of Patrick, Cogitosus’s life of Brigid, and Adomnán’s life of Colum Cille. His choices were deliberate. In his dedicatory epistle, Rochford explicitly stated that
I meane to produce nothing, but what hath beene delivered from the pens of famous Authors, who either for their antiquity claime veneration, or for their learning deserve credit, or for their sanctity challenge authority. Every author I will alleadge by name, speaking in his genuine sense if not in his proper words’.1
He required his saints’ lives to be authoritative, because he was using them as historical evidence for Irish Christianity, and as a defence of Catholicism against heresy. Rochford was explicit about his objective. He offered his book to his readers in the hope that ‘amidst the swelling billowes of boyling waves of enraged heresy, you may stick fast to the irremovable rock of the Roman Church, by the strong cable of true and ancient religion’.2
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Notes
Jocelinus, The Life of the Glorious Bishop S. Patricke, 1625, ed. BB [Robert Rochford], English Recusant literature 210 (London, 1974), ‘Epistle dedicatory’, p. iii (recté iv).
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Cunningham, B. (2014). Catholic Intellectual Culture in Early Modern Ireland. In: hAnnracháin, T.Ó., Armstrong, R. (eds) Christianities in the Early Modern Celtic World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137306357_11
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