Making Europe: Columbanus and his legacy project

Conor Newman

               (Excavations at Cleenish, Co. Fermanagh, directed by Dr Ros Ó Maoldúin)

This project, and its associated network, grew out of a PRTLI-funded project at NUI Galway, Columbanus: Life and Legacy that Conor co-directed with Dr Mark Stansbury (Classics: NUIG), and involves scholars from France, Italy, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The Project organised three international conferences in 2015, to commemorate the fourteen hundredth anniversary of the death of this important Irish saint in Bobbio (AD615). The proceedings of the conferences are being published as a three-volume set by Presses Universitaires de Rennes. The first volume, L’Eredita de San Colombano, (ISBN 978-2-7535-5920-2) edited by Professor Eleonora Destefanis, comprises papers from the Bobbio Conference (Nov. 2015) and includes papers by Conor Newman and Cormac Bourke on the Bobbio and Clonmore reliquaries, arguably earliest native Christian metalwork from Ireland. Proceedings from the Luxeuil-les-Bains (Sept. 2015) and Bangor (June 2015) conferences are pending. Conor is co-editing the Bangor volume with Mark Stansbury and Emmet Marron, and will contribute a paper on the wider, early Christian landscape setting of the island monastery of Cleenish which, as one of three field-schools, was surveyed and excavated as part of the project. The wider landscape includes the remarkable assemblage of sculpture and metalwork from the area of lower Lough Erne.

Publications associated with this project include:

Eleonora Destefanis (ed.) L’Eredita de San Colombano. Memoria e Culto Attreverso il Medioevo (Rennes: 2017)

Alain Dubreque and Sébastien Bully (eds) Colombane et son influences. Moines et Monastères de haut Moyen Âge. (Presses Universitaires de Rennes: in press)

Conor Newman, Mark Stansbury and Emmet Marron (eds) Identity in Early Medieval Europe. (Presses Universitaires de Rennes: forthcoming)