CELT document L201080

The Liber Angeli

Witness list

  • A: Book of Armagh (for details see above under 'Primary Manuscripts').

unknown

Edited by Whitley Stokes

Whole text

 p.352

LIBER ANGUELI INCIPIT.

 20 b 1Quondam itaque sanctus Patricius de Alti Mache urbe ad multitudines utriusque sexus humani generis babtizandas, docendas atque sanandas iuxta fontem in orientali praedictae urbis parte prope herentem pie perrexit.

Et ibi ante lucem multas undique ad notitiam fidei confluentes expectauit. Subito ergo eum sopor prostrauit, eo quod prius pro Christo uigiliis nocturnis fessus fuisset.

Et ecce tam cito uenit anguelus ad eum de caelo, et excitauit eum leniter de sompno. Et dixit sanctus Patricius: “Ego adsum. Numquid inique gessi nuper in conspectu Altissimi? Si accidit, ueniam peto a Deo.”

Respondit anguelus: Non. Sed missit me summus Omnipotens ad te .i. ad animi tui consulationem post conuersionem Hibernensium per te ad sé in fidem: qnos ei adquaessisti per durissimum laborem et per tuam ualde praedicationem, gratia Spiritus Sancti lucidissimam, uniuersis gentibus fructuossam, cum esses semper laboriossus multis temporibus, in multis periculis a gentilibus, per frigus et aestatem, essuriens et sitiens,  20 b 2 deambulans impiger quotidie de gente in gentem ad utilitatem multarum gentium. Scit ergo Dominus Deus tuum praesentem locum, quem praesto uidemus in alto positum cum parua celula, angustum, ab aliquibus quoque regionis habitatoribus coartatum, et suburbana eius non sufficiunt cunctis ad refugium. Idcirco constituitur terminus a Domino uastissimus urbi Alti Machae, quam dilexisti prae omnibus Hibernensium telluribus, id est, a pinna montis Berbicis usque ad montem Mis, a monte Miss usque ad Bri Erigi, a Bri Erigi usque ad Dorsos Breg certe, si uolueris, erit huius magnitudinis. Ac deinde donauit tibi Dominus Deus uniuersas Scotorum gentes in modum paruchiae, et huic urbi tuae quae cognominatur Scotorum lingua Ardd Machae.

 p.353

Dixit sanctus Patricius, prostrata facie deorsum in conspectu angueli: “Gratias ago Deo meo, Domino sempiterno, qui dignatus est tantam gloriam donare clementer famulo suo.”

Item sanctus dixit: “Quosdam tamen electos, sancte Domine mi, per Spiritum Sanctum, praeuideo in hac insola, per ineffabilem tuae clementiae pietatem et per praedicationis tuae laborem, orituros mihi caros quasi proprios corporis mei editos, tibi quoque amicos deuote seruituros, qui hautem uidentur aliquid sibi proprie diocessis ad utilitatem necessariac famulationis aeclessiis seu monosteriis suis post me. Idcirco perfecte et iuste debeo a Deo habundantiae donationem mihi certe deditam dimittere commoniter  21 a 1 perfectis Hiberniae relegiossis ut et ego et ipsi diuitiis bonitatis Dei pacifice perfruemur haec uniuersa mihi concessa caussa diuinae caritatis.”

Item ait: “Nonne ergo mihi sufficit quicquid deuote uouerint ac uoluerint Christiani homines offerre de regionibus atque oblationibus suis per arbitrium suae libertatis?”

Item: “Nonne utique contentus sum esse apostolicus doctor et dux principalis omnibus Hiberionacum gentibus, praesertim cum peculiare censum retineo recte reddendum et a summo mihi etiam illud est donatum uere decenter debitum super liberas prouinciarum huius insolae aeclessias. 1 Et uniuersis cynubitarum 2 similiter monasteriis sine ulla dubitatione ius decretum erit rectori Airdd Machae3 in perpetuum.”

Receptio archiepiscopi, heredis cathedrae meae urbis, cum comitibus suis numero quinquaginta, exceptis perigrinis et infirmis doloribus uariis atque inprobis et caeteris, sit digna refectio aptaque unicuique eodem numero tam digne in die quam certe similiter in nocte.

 p.354

In ista uero urbe Alti-Machae homines Christiani utriusque sexus relegiossi ab initio fidei huc usque pene inseparabiliter commorari uidentur, cui uero praedictae tres ordines adherent uirgines et poenitentes in matrimonio legitimo aeclessiae seruientes. 4

Et his tribus ordinibus audire uerbum praedicationis in aeclessia aquilonalis plagae conceditur semper diebus dominicis.

In australi uero bassilica aepiscopi et presbiteri 21 a 2 et anchoritae aeclessiae et caeteri relegiossi laudes sapidas offerunt.

De speciali reuerantia Airdd Machae et honore praesulis eiusdem urbis dicamus.

Ista quippe ciuitas summa et libera a Deo est constituta, et ab anguelo Dei et ab apostolico uiro sancto Patricio episcopo specialiter dedicata.

Praeest ergo quodam priuilegio 5 omnibus aeclessiis ac monasteriis cunctorum Hibernensium uel superna auctoritate summi pontificis illius fundatoris. Nihilominus 6 uenerari debet honore summorum martyrum Petri et Pauli, Stefani, Laurendi et caeterorum. Quanto magis quoque ualde ueneranda atque dilegenter ab omnibus honoranda! 7

Pro sancta ammiratione nobis beneficii prae omnibus in[en]errabilis 8 quod in ea secreta constitutione exstat sacratissimus sanguis Iesu Christi, Redemptoris humani generis, in sacro lintiamine simul cum sanctorum reliquiis in aeclessia australi ubi requiescunt corpora sanctorum perigrinorum de longue cum Patricio transmarinorum caeterorumque iustorum.

Idcirco non licet causa praedictae auctoritatis eius 9 illam mittere consortem ab ulla aeclessia Scotorum, neque ab ullo praesule uel abbate, contra heredem illius, sed a se recte supra iuratur supra omnes aeclessias et illarum antestites, si uera necessitas poposcerit.

 p.355

Item: omnis aeclessia libera et ciuitas ab aepiscopali gradu uidetur esse fundata in tota Scotorum insola, et omnis ubique locus qui Dominicus 10 appellatur, iuxta clementiam Almipotentis Domini, sancto doctori, et iuxta uerbum angueli, in speciali societate Patricii pontificis atque heredis  21 b 1 cathedrae eius Aird Machae esse debuerat, quia donauit illi Deus totam insolam, ut supra diximus.

Item: scire debemus Omnis monachus uniuscumque aeclessiae, si ad Patricium reuerterit, non denegat proprium monachi uotum maxime, si ex consensu abbatis sui prioris deuouerit.

Itaque non uituperandus neque excommonicandus quicumque ad aeclessiam eius perrexerit caussa amoris illius, quia ipse iudicabit omnes Hibernenses in die magno terribilis iudicii in praesentia Christi.

Item: de honore praesulis Airdd Machae episcopi praesedentis cathedram pastoris perfecti.

Si ipse praedictus pontifex ad uesperum peruenerit loco quo receptus fuerit, praebeatur ei uniali uice reffectionis dignae consulatio praedictorum hospitum numero centum cum pabulis suis illorum iumentis, praeter hospites et infirmos et eos qui iectant infantes super aeclessiam et caeteros seu reprobos et alios.

Item: qui non reciperit praedictum praesulem in hospitium eundem, et reclusserit suam habitationem contra illum, septem ancellas 11 siue septem annos poenitentiae similiter reddere cogatur.

Item: quicumque contempserit aut uiolauerit insignia consecrata eiusdem agii, 12 id est, Patricii, duplicia soluet.

Si uero de contemptu aliorum insignium reddita fuerit, duas ancellas - de consecratis summi praedicti doctoris Patricii reddentur.

 p.356

 21 b 2Item: quicumque similiter per industriam atque iniuriam uel nequitiam malum quodque opus contra familiam seu paruchiam eius perficerit, aut praedicta eius insignia dispexerit, ad libertatem examinis eiusdem Airdd Machae praesulis recte iudicantis perueniet caussa totius negotionis, caeteris aliorum iudicibus praetermissis.

Item: quaecumque causa ualde difficilis exorta fuerit atque ignota cunctis Scotorum gentium iudicibus ad cathedram archiepiscopi Hibernensium, id est, Patricii, atque huius antestitis examinationem recte refferenda. Si uero in illa cum suis sapientibus facile sanari non poterit talis caussa praedictae negotionis, ad sedem apostolicam decreuimus esse mittendam, id est, ad Petri apostoli cathedram auctoritatem Romae urbis habentem.

Hii sunt qui de hoc decreuerunt, id est, Auxilius, Patricius, Secundinus, Benignus.

Post uero exitum Patricii sancti alumpni sui ualde eiusdem libros conscripserunt.

Fundamentum orationis in unaquaque die dominica in Alto Machae ad Sargifagum Martyrum 13 adeundum ab eoque reuertendum, id est “Domine clamaui ad te,” usque in finem. “Ut quid Deus repulisti” in finem, et “Beati inmaculati” usque in finem bene dictionis, et duodecim 14 ψalmi graduum. Finit.

Inter sanctum Patricium Hibernensium Brigitamque columpnas amicitia caritatis inerat tanta, ut unum cor consiliumque 22 a 1 haberent unum. Christus per illum illamque uirtutes multas peregit.

Vir ergo sanctus Christianae virgini ait: “O mea Brigita, paruchia tua in prouincia tua apud reputabitur monarchiam tuam: in parte autem orientali et occidentali dominatu in mea erit.”

Document details

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Title statement

Title (uniform): The Liber Angeli

Author: unknown

Editor: Whitley Stokes

Responsibility statement

Electronic edition compiled by: Roman Bleier

Funded by: Trinity College Dublin Long Room HubKing's College London and CENDARI: Collaborative European Digital Archive Infrastructure

Edition statement

. This digital transcription of the Liber Angeli was produced during a CENDARI research fellowship at King's College London.

Extent: 2660 words

Publication statement

Publisher: CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts: a project of University College, Cork

Address: College Road, Cork, Ireland—http://www.ucc.ie/celt

Date: 2015

Distributor: CELT online at University College, Cork, Ireland.

CELT document ID: L201080

Availability: Available with prior consent of the CELT programme for purposes of academic research and teaching only.

Notes statement

Trinity College Dublin Library, Ms. 52, Book of Armagh - Liber Ardmachanus (L.A.); Provenance: ca. 807 A.D., Armagh

Source description

Primary Manuscript

  • Dublin, Trinity College MS 52, Book of Armagh, fo. 20 va–fo. 22 ra (Stokes's numbering: 20 b 1 - 22 a 1). The manuscript was written c. 807 in small Irish minuscule and probably three scribes were involved copying it. The Liber Angeli was copied by Ferdomnach, a master scribe of Armagh. The text is within a section called the Patriciana, containing texts related to St Patrick.

Selected editions and translations

  1. Whitley Stokes (ed.), The Tripartite Life of Patrick, with other documents relating to that Saint with translations and indexes, Rolls Ser. 8vo, Part I. cxcix + 267 [8] pp. facs. Part II. 269–676 (London 1887).
  2. John Gwynn (ed.), Liber Ardmachanus = The Book of Armagh (Dublin 1913).
  3. Edward Gwynn (ed.), Book of Armagh, the Patrician Documents, in Facsimiles in Collotype of Irish Manuscripts, 3 (Dublin 1937).
  4. Kathleen Hughes (ed.), The Church in early Irish society (London 1966) pp 275-81.
  5. Ludwig Bieler and Fergus Kelly (edd. and trans.), The Patrician texts in the Book of Armagh, edited with introduction, translation and commentary (Dublin 1979) pp 184-91.
  6. David Howlett, The structure of the Liber Angeli, Peritia, 12 (1998) 254-70.
  7. Franz Fischer and Anthony Harvey (edd.), Saint Patrick's Confessio HyperText Stack (Dublin 2011) (http://www.confessio.ie/) (accessed: 20.10.2015) [facsimile images of the Patrician section of the Book of Armagh].

Additional Reading

  1. Charles Graves, On the date of the MS called the Book of Armagh, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 3 (1844) 316–24.
  2. Edmund Hogan, "Patrician Documents", Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 8, 3rd ser. (1887) 229–42.
  3. Whitley Stokes and John Strachan (eds.), Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus: a collection of Old Irish glosses, scholia, prose and verse, volume 2 (Cambridge 1903) 238–243.
  4. J. B. Bury, Sources of the Early Patrician Documents, English Historical Review (1904) 493–503.
  5. Elias Avery Lowe (ed.), Codices Latini Antiquiores: a palaeographical guide to Latin manuscripts prior to the ninth century II (Oxford 1934).
  6. Paul S. Grosjean, Analyse du Livre d'Armagh, Analecta Bollandiana 63 (1944) 33–41.
  7. Thomas F. O'Rahilly, Review: The Life and Legend of St Patrick: Problems of Modern Scholarship by Ludwig Bieler, Irish Historical Studies, 8, 31 (1953) 268-79.
  8. Kathleen Mulchrone, Ferdomnach and the Armagh Notulae, Ériu 18 (1958) 160–3.
  9. Daniel A. Binchy, Patrick and his biographers: ancient and modern, Studia Hibernica 2 (1962) 7–173.
  10. Ludwig Bieler, The Book of Armagh, in Liam de Paor (ed) Great books of Ireland (Dublin 1967) 51–63.
  11. Francis John Byrne, Review The Church in Early Irish Society by Kathleen Hughes, Irish Historical Studies, 17, 65 (1970) 121–3.
  12. James F. Kenney, The sources for the early history of Ireland: ecclesiastical; an introduction and guide (New York 1979).
  13. Joseph F. Kelly, Review of The Patrician Texts in the Book of Armagh by Ludwig Bieler, Speculum, 56, 3 (1981) 585–7.
  14. Richard Sharpe, Palaeographical considerations in the study of the Patrician documents in the Book of Armagh, Scriptorium: International Review of Manuscript Studies, 36 (1982) 3–28.
  15. Richard Sharpe, The Patrician Documents, Peritia 1 (1982) 363–9.
  16. Richard Sharpe, Some problems concerning the organization of the Church in early medieval Ireland, Peritia, 3 (1984) 230–70.
  17. Michael Lapidge and Richard Sharpe, A bibliography of Celtic-Latin literature 400-1200 (Dublin 1985).
  18. Jane Stevenson, Literacy in Ireland, the evidence of the Patrick dossier in the Book of Armagh, in: The Uses of Literacy in Early Mediaeval Europe, Rosamond McKitterick (ed) (Cambridge 1990) 11–35.
  19. David N. Dumville, The afterlife of Liber Angeli, in: Saint Patrick A.D. 493–1993 (Woodbridge, Suffolk 1993) 253.
  20. Liam De Paor, Saint Patrick's world: the Christian culture of Ireland's apostolic age (Blackrock and Dublin 1993)
  21. Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, Early Medieval Ireland, 400-1200 (London and New York 1995) 158.
  22. Joseph Falaky Nagy, Conversing with angels and ancients, literary myths of medieval Ireland (Ithaca, NY 1997).
  23. T.M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge 2000) 421–8.
  24. Michael Richter, Ireland im Mittelaler, Kultur und Geschichte (Münster, Hamburg und London 2003; 1st ed. 1983) 101–7.
  25. Clare Stancliffe, Religion and society in Ireland, in: The new Cambridge medieval history I, c. 500–c.700, Paul Fouracre (ed) (Cambridge 2005) 397–425.
  26. Thomas O'Louglin, Discovering Saint Patrick (London 2005) 112–6.
  27. Thomas O'Loughlin, Armagh, in: Celtic culture, a historical encyclopedia, 1, John T. Koch (ed) (Santa Barbara 2006) 80.
  28. Elva Johnston, Literacy and Identity in Early Medieval Ireland, Woodbridge 2013.
  29. Edel Bhreathnach, Ireland in the medieval world, AD 400-1000: landscape, kingship and religion (Dublin 2014) 192–212.

The edition used in the digital edition

Stokes, Whitley, ed. (1887). The Tripartite Life of Saint Patrick, with other documents relating to that Saint, edited with translations and indexes (Vol. II)‍. 1st ed. cxcix + 267 [8] pp. facs. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.

You can add this reference to your bibliographic database by copying or downloading the following:

@book{L201080,
  title 	 = {The Tripartite Life of Saint Patrick, with other
                                documents relating to that Saint, edited with translations and
                                indexes (Vol. II)},
  editor 	 = {Whitley Stokes},
  edition 	 = {1},
  note 	 = {cxcix + 267 [8] pp. facs.},
  publisher 	 = {Her Majesty's Stationery Office},
  address 	 = {London},
  date 	 = {1887}
}

 L201080.bib

Encoding description

Project description: CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts

Sampling declarations

The text of this electronic edition represents pp. 352–356 of Stokes's printed edition. Footnotes are integrated into the markup.

Editorial declarations

Correction: Text proofread twice by Roman Bleier.

Normalization: The electronic texts represents Stokes's edited text from the Book of Armagh. Stokes marked column and page breaks in the Book of Armagh. This is normalised in the electronic edition and tagged mls n="". Stokes's footnotes were encoded as editorial notes and marked note type="auth" n="". In the print edition footnotes start on every page as a new sequence (starting with 1). In the electronic edition this was changed to one continuous sequence (1-10). Notes by the editor of the electronic edition are marked note resp="RB".

Quotation: Direct speech is tagged q. Words highlighted in the print edition are encoded in hi rend="".

Hyphenation: Hyphens marking the continuation of a word in the next line are silently removed.

Segmentation: Stokes's paragraphs and page breaks are encoded.

Interpretation: Names are not tagged.

Profile description

Creation: The Book of Armagh was probably copied at Armagh ca.

Date: 807

.

Language usage

  • Text is in Latin. (la)
  • Witness list and footnotes contain English. (en)
  • Main text and footnotes contain Greek. (gr)

Keywords: religious; prose; medieval; angel

Revision description

(Most recent first)

  1. 2015-10-28: Proofing of main text. Items added to bibliography. (ed. Roman Bleier)
  2. 2015-10-26: Whole file proofed. Transcription was proofed against Gwynn's diplomatic edition. The TEI was validated against CELT DTD. (ed. Roman Bleier)
  3. 2015-10-22: Revision of header following the model of the Confessio edition (L201060). Bibliography added. (ed. Roman Bleier)
  4. 2015-10-21: Revision of TEI markup following the model of the Confessio edition (L201060). Quotes, citations and notes marked up. (ed. Roman Bleier)
  5. 2015-10-18: Adding of TEI markup. (ed. Roman Bleier)
  6. 2015-10-15: Initial text capture. (ed. Roman Bleier)

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  1. A marginal correction of the “prouincias” of the text. 🢀

  2. i.e., coenobitarum 🢀

  3. “of Armagh” 🢀

  4. This sentence is corrupt and, apparently, defective. 🢀

  5. Gwynn: praeuilegio 🢀

  6. MS Nihil hominus 🢀

  7. Gwynn: ueneranda honoranda 🢀

  8. Perhaps we should read “innarrabilis.” 🢀

  9. Gwynn: contra 🢀

  10. i.e., Domnach 🢀

  11. i.e., cumala. 🢀

  12. i.e., αγίου 🢀

  13. in marg. du ferti martur “to (the) grave of (the) relics.” Sargifagum is, of course, for sarcophagum🢀

  14. Gwynn: xu 🢀

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