The Brendan Legend: Texts and Versions deals with the vast textual tradition relating to the Irish Saint Brendan, known as 'The Navigator'. Stories about Brendan have been popular in the whole of Western Europe, from the seventh to the twentieth century. The themes of the book are the interrelated problems of the textual and literary embedding of Brendan texts. For the first time researchers in Celtic, German, Latin and Romance languages and literatures have co-operated on the Brendan tradition, and they have mapped the changes in textual traditions according to different circumstances and audiences. This book will be important to those studying the influence of Celtic literature on the European Continent, and, more generally, to those interested in the versatility of textual traditions in Western Europe.
Glyn S. Burgess, Docteur de l'Université de Paris (Sorbonne) (1968) is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Liverpool. He has published extensively on the legend of St Brendan, Wace and the
Lais of Marie de France. He is the joint author, with Clara Strijbosch, of
The Legend of St Brendan: A Critical Bibliography (Dublin, 2000).
Clara Strijbosch, Doctorate (summa cum laude) 1995 in Medieval Dutch Literature at Utrecht University, is an independent researcher and literary critic and has taught in Utrecht, Amsterdam, Antwerpen, Galway, Düsseldorf, Durban and Vienna. In 2000 she published
The Seafaring Saint (Dublin).
Searching for a Versatile Saint: Introduction
Clara Strijbosch
The Use of Animals in Benedeit’s Version of the Brendan Legend
Glyn S. Burgess
Brendan’s European Tour: The Middle Irish Poem Mochen, mochen, a Brenaind and the Changing Nature of Pilgrimage in the Eleventh Century
Thomas Owen Clancy
Oriental Eremitical Motifs in the Navigatio sancti Brendani
Anna Maria Fagnoni
The Little Man on a Leaf and the Two Concepts of the Dutch/German Reise
Walter Haug
The Island of the Birds in the Navigatio sancti Brendani
Peter Christian Jacobsen
The Irish Life of Saint Brendan: Textual History, Structure and Date
Séamus Mac Mathúna
Navigatio sancti Brendani. Some Possible Connections with Liturgical, Apocryphal and Irish Tradition
Martin McNamara
The Hispanic Version of the Navigatio sancti Brendani: Tradition or Form of Reception of a Text?
Aires A. Nascimento
Brendan and Moses
Giovanni Orlandi
The Abbot and the Monastic Community in the Gaelic Churches, 550 to 800
Hérold Pettiau
Between Angel and Beast: Brendan, Herzog Ernst and the World of the Twelfth Century
Clara Strijbosch
The Navigatio sancti Brendani and Two of its Twelfth-Century Palimpsests: The Brendan Poems by Benedeit and Walter of Châtillon
Carsten Wollin
Ein hübsch lieblich lesen von Sant Brandon: A Look at the German Prose Versions and Their Illustrations
Karl A. Zaenker
Philological Remarks on the so-called Navigatio s. Brendani
Michaela Zelzer
Bibliography
Index Compiled by Jude Mackley
All those interested in early medieval Ireland, saints, medieval literature, medieval seamanship and the discovery of America.