Gripla - 20.12.2011, Page 104

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tices and literature, which soon after the fifth century spread everywhere
in Europe; but it is worth recalling that even in medieval Iceland such
practices were in use, and such literature was known, to the point of leav-
ing clear-cut traces in the sagas.105
If the Irish influence regarding the private penitential system in the
eighth century had became so widespread among the Anglo-Saxons and
on the Continent that it is often difficult to determine any direct Irish
dependance in the sources,106 there are some forms of monastic ascetic and
penitential discipline which can be counted as peculiar to the Irish culture
and milieu. It may occasionally be that such forms work the other way, i.e.,
are mostly derived from continental sources but are then developed by the
Irish in their own ‘typical’ way;107 and in this new, idiosyncratic shape they
may also happen to return overseas again. This may be the case with the
idea of a threefold martyrdom, that is, of three different kinds of suffering
qualifying someone as a martyr, to which a triad of colours is associated.
The locus classicus for this three-coloured classification of martyrdom
is the Cambrai Homily, an early Old Irish sermon fragment (interspersed
with Latin excerpts)108 dated to the second half of the seventh century,
and copied by a Carolingian scribe – probably from a piece of parchment
slipped in between the leaves of the model exemplar – in the Collectio
Canonum Hibernensis preserved in Cambrai, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS
679 (formerly 619), fols. 37v–38v.109 Due to the scribe’s ignorance of Irish,
105 Cf. Cucina, “Il pellegrinaggio nelle saghe”: 132–155. For an essential introduction to the
evolution of the discipline of penance in the Middle Ages, with a rich bibliographical
survey, see especially ibid., 132–136; for the relevance of the Irish forms and literature of
penance in the Scandinavian regions, and particularly in the Icelandic milieu, see especially
ibid., 136–138.
106 See the long, exhaustive survey, more general in scope than the title would suggest, offered
by Frantzen, The Literature of Penance, 61–150.
107 Cf. Clare Stancliffe, “Red, white and blue martyrdom,” Ireland in Early Medieval Europe.
Studies in memory of Kathleen Hughes, eds. Dorothy Whitelock, Rosamond McKitterick
and David Dumville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 21. Charles D.
Wright, The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993; repr. 2006), 19, rightly speaks of “an Irish learned tradition at once derivative
and idiosyncratic.”
108 Cambrai Homily’s bilingual nature is especially underlined in Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, Early
Medieval Ireland 400–1200 (Harlow, England: Longman, 1995), 193 and 203.
109 As the manuscript was made for Alberic, bishop of Cambrai and Arras, it is securely dated
to 763–790.