IMC 2017: Sessions

This session will explore the roles played by saints within the transmission of holiness, drawing on case studies ranging from Late Antiquity to the High Middle Ages. Particular focus will be given to their function as powerful intermediaries between heaven and earth, past and present, life and death. Moreover, the ways in which religious communities and centres of learning drew on representations of holiness will be examined, in order to consider how the texts written about saints communicated and conveyed a sense of holiness across time and space, and how saints could serve to legitimise the status quo. Veronika Wieser will explore the intellectual discourse of death, salvation and afterlife in Late Antiquity and focus specifically on saints (and their tombs) as powerful brokers between the divine and the earthly world. Graeme Ward will look at the reception of Jerome's De viris illustribus in Carolingian World chronicles, and explore how the life, death and writings of the 'Sacred Fathers' contributed to 9th-century notions of holiness within history. Diarmuid Ó Riain will examine how the depiction of St Rónán and his monastery at Dromiskin in the 12th-century Vita Ronani episcopi reveals the concerns and ambitions of a monastic community in north-eastern Ireland many centuries after the saint's death.