From Confessio to Calderón de la Barca: the Literary Evolution of St. Patrick’s Biography and the Question of his Legacy

In the following text, I will discuss the gradual erosion of historical accuracy in connection to a series of hagiographic texts concerning the biography of Saint Patrick, Ireland’s patron saint. I will outline each one against a wide historical and cultural backdrop and subsequently ascertain whether or not the changes that hagiographers introduced over the centuries have been detrimental to his legacy. The texts I have chosen to analyse can be separated into two major time periods: the first being the trio of works that construct the absolute basics of the Saint Patrick legend, all originating from the 5th to 7th centuries, which are the autobiographical Confessio, with its heavy focus on relaying a Christian moral about sin, and the historical sources Bishop Tírechán's Account of St. Patrick's Journey and Muirchú's Life of St. Patrick. With these early hagiographic texts serving as reference points, I will, however, primarily study two Spanish Patrician works from the 17th Century: Pérez de Montalbán’s 1627 work Vida y Purgatorio de San Patricio and Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s play El purgatorio de San Patricio, or The Purgatory of Saint Patrick in its English translation. Within my analysis I will determine whether or not the changes integrated into his story by Montalbán and Calderón in fact matter to the overall legacy of Saint Patrick in the modern-day and if they had any lasting impact to readers, bearing in mind that both texts, more or less, retain the essentials of his Christian message and promote him as an exemplary spiritual figure within history.

The Idols of the Pagan Irish in the Medieval Literary Imagination

Medieval Irish literary sources include a number of legends relating to idols purportedly worshipped by the pagan Irish prior to the coming of Christianity. Of these the most famous is Crom Cróich of Mag Slécht, identified as the ‘king-idol of Ireland’ in the pseudohistorical lore as well as in the hagiography of Saint Patrick. This article traces the development of the various traditions relating to Crom Cróich in the medieval literary milieu and re-examines some of the evidence presented by previous scholars in support of the view that these legends could refer to an actual cult of a pre-Christian deity.

Las dos traducciones de El purgatorio de San Patricio por Denis Florence MacCarthy (1853 y 1873) Primeras calas

The article analyses The Purgatory of Saint Patrick, a translation of Calderón’s El purgatorio de San Patricio which the Irish poet Denis Florence MacCarthy (1817-82) published in two versions, one in 1853 and one in 1873. The comparison of the two texts shows how MacCarthy, as a lucid importer of the Catholic and Baroque Calderón in a predominantly hostile Anglophone culture, progressively refined his poetics of translation, adopting in particular a completely imitative versification (including a bold assonant English verse) and showing a growing, if eclectic, fidelity to the Calderonian rhetorical universe.