This compilation of Irish medieval apocryphal texts is composed mostly of visions, dreams, and supernatural occurrences which helped shape the early English Christian church landscape, faith, and belief. The index consist of The Vision of Laisren, The Incredible Vision Of St. Drytheim, The Vision Of Tundale, Irish Passion Of St. Christopher, The Dream Of The Rood, Liber Monstrorum, The Avenging Of The Savior, The 15 Tokens Of Doomsday, Tidings Of Doomsday, The Tidings Of The Resurrection, The Vision Of Alberic, The Beheading Of John The Baptist, The Mother's Lament At The Slaughter Of The Innocents, The Legend Of Veronica, and In Taking Bithnua, The Tongue Of Angels also known as The Ever-new Tongue.

What happened to Adam and Eve after their expulsion from paradise? Where the biblical narrative fell silent apocryphal writings took up this intriguing question, notably including the Early Christian Latin text, the Life of Adam and Eve. This account describes the (failed) attempt of the couple to return to paradise by fasting whilst immersed in a river, and explores how they coped with new experiences such as childbirth and death. Brian Murdoch guides the reader through the many variant versions of the Life, demonstrating how it was also adapted into most western and some eastern European languages in the Middle Ages and beyond, constantly developing and changing along the way. The study considers this development of the apocryphal texts whilst presenting a fascinating insight into the flourishing medieval tradition of Adam and Eve. A tradition that the Reformation would largely curtail, stories from the Life were celebrated in European prose, verse and drama in many different languages from Irish to Russian.

The Corpous Apocryphum Hiberniae is organised by a number of distinguished specialists, including Father Martin McNamara, MSC. Some of the Apocrypha are preserved only in Old Irish. To focus research on the Apocrypha Hiberniae is to bring into view the milieu of Old Ireland, its links with the Holy Land, and the complex and creative traditions that enlivened the earliest Christians who endeavoured to imagine the lives of Jesus, his family, and his earliest followers. Most of this information has only recently become more widely known, making this work a fascinating and invaluable resource.

This work describes the whole literary and scholarly output of the whole of the Irish middle ages (4th-17th centuries), in Latin and in the vernaculars, and tries to do so as comprehensively as possible, esp. in biblica, liturgica, computistica, hagiographica and grammatica. The book focuses both on individual manuscripts and on textual transmission. In the case of manuscripts, it gives succinctly information and a detailed bibliography, always chronologically arranged. In the case of texts, it lists the manuscripts in which they occur or, on occasion, where such a list can be found, together with a bibliography of relevant publications. In the case of both, there are running cross-references to the standard works of reference. Concordantiae, at the end of the volume, reinforce that. The 'Index Manuscriptorum' is the most comprehensive attempt so far to list the MSS written by the medieval Irish or transmitting their texts. It should allow new work on the fortuna of Irish MSS and texts and their influence throughout the middle ages. The chapters on MSS and texts written in Irish provide the treatment of several areas: annals, genealogies, vernacular law, early poetry, bardic poetry and metrics.--See publisher's website.

How does a written literature come into being within an oral culture, and how does such a literature achieve and maintain its authority? Joseph Falaky Nagy addresses those issues in his wide-ranging reading of the medieval literature of Ireland, from the writings of St. Patrick to the epic tales about the warrior Cú Chulainn. These texts, written in both Latin and Irish, constitute an adventurous and productive experiment in staging confrontations between the written and the spoken, the Christian and the pagan. The early Irish literati, primarily clerics living within a monastic milieu, produced literature that included saints' lives, heroic sagas, law tracts, and other genres. They sought to invest their literature with an authority different from that of the traditions from which they borrowed, native and foreign. To achieve this goal, they cast many of their texts as the outcome of momentous dialogues between saints and angelic messengers or remarkable interviews with the dead, who could reveal some insight from the past that needed to be rediscovered by forgetful contemporaries. Conversing with angels and ancients, medieval Irish writers boldly inscribed their visions of the past onto the new Christian order and its literature. Nagy includes portions of the original Latin and Irish texts that are not readily available to scholars, along with full translations.

Charles Wright identifies the characteristic features of Irish Christian literature which influenced Anglo-Saxon vernacular authors. As a full-length study of Irish influence on Old English religious literature, the book will appeal to scholars in Old English literature, Anglo-Saxon studies, and Old and Middle Irish literature.

This book is an exploration of the post-New Testament figure of Simon Magus spanning the patristic era, Middle Ages, and the early modern period as found in art, vernacular literatures, heresiologies, theological texts, hagiographies and homilies.