An Irish precursor of Dante

in the exordium the author represents Adamnán as the last in a series of holy men to whom analogous revelations had been vouchsafed, so in this peroration he declares the identi...

relates how He ‘raised many of the dead, who appeared unto many in Jerusalem,’ and then described Christ’s descent into Hades, which had been preceded by a visit of St. John Bap...

Few, if any, of the great masterpieces of literature, even of those which bear the most unmistakable imprint of an original mind, are ‘original’ in the vulgar sense of being inv...

than similar descriptions in Ariosto, Spenser, and Milton--we might almost add the Rape of the Lock. The same may be said of the City of Dis (548 _sqq._). In such passages as th...

the mediæval compiler was commonly a simple-minded person; for him, as for ‘honest Diggory,’ the ‘old grouse in the gunroom’ possessed an infinite variety which age could not wi...

The legend which forms the ground-plan of the Vision of Adamnán and of the _Commedia_ of Dante, can claim a pedigree of great antiquity that may be traced back along several wid...

Sources of the mediæval legend of the Vision of the Otherworld--The Classical Tradition--The Otherworld in the Greek poets--Influence of the Mysteries--The effect of initiation...

originally purported, not, indeed, to have been written by Adamnán, but to contain the account of a vision seen and already related by him. If this hypothesis be correct, then t...

lost in their mournful habitation, their own sufferings being augmented by the company of others in like case, and by a restless longing for the coming of Doom to end their susp...

The Irish Church at the close of the seventh century--Its missionary activity--Irish scholars and clerics on the Continent--The authorities for Adamnán’s life--His birth and par...