This is an account of the veneration of Insular saints as found in the kalendars of surviving Irish Sarum antiphonals and breviaries from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In accordance with a number of Dublin episcopal constitutions, these kalendars reflect the devotional practices of their users through the inclusion of Irish saints, ranging from those of national significance to a growing number of diocesan and more local figures. In addition, the presence of non-Sarum English saints reflects the regional practices of Anglo-Norman settlers from different parts of England, notably the West Country (Chester, Bristol), as well as connections with Canterbury, Winchester, London, and East Anglia. Comparison of these sources reveals how patterns of devotion could vary between English communities in Ireland and those that were more mixed or perhaps predominantly Irish, according to which saints were included in the kalendars, and how they were ranked.

Locus iste: This place. So begins the well-known sung text, or plainchant, forming part of the religious dedication of a building or altar. It can be found in hundreds of musical sources across Europe, from the earliest complete surviving antiphonary to include neumes (probably copied at the Swiss Benedictine monastery of Einsiedeln by Abbot Gregor the Englishman in the years around 960–70) to the printed liturgical books that circulated in the early sixteenth century, and up to the present day.1 The full gradual, Locus iste a Deo factum est inestimabile sacramentum irreprehensibilis est (‘This place was made inestimably sacred by God; it is beyond reproach’), emphasises the permanence and enduring holiness of ceremonial spaces within the Christian church. Its presence served as a performative connection between widely distributed churches and chapels and Rome, the spiritual centre of the Christian West. Religious buildings were all individually designed and decorated, and the unique liturgical books held within each one bear testament to the diverse services that were held there throughout the church year, from daily Mass to occasional rites such as baptism.2 Textual witnesses – manuscripts throughout the pre-Reformation period

Scholarship of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – not least that cultivated by members of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society and other scholarly groups – regularly sought to define the means through which liturgy moved between Continental Europe and Britain and Ireland. In the later twentieth century, a concept of cross-cultural exchange became more prominent: this model emphasised how people shared knowledge and ideas as they travelled between different religious centres. As the first set of case studies has shown, the presence of Sarum and York liturgy across the greater part of Britain and Ireland offered a certain consistency, but the reality was certainly much more subtle and complex, with no two textual witnesses supporting a picture of uniformity even between institutions connected by geography or other factors. Instead, the picture that emerges is more of a patchwork of regions and networks, within which there might be a striking diversity of related customs.

There is little that reminds us more of the limitations of thinking according to modern political and ecclesiastical boundaries than the study of the cults of regional saints, a field of research that has been gaining increasing momentum in recent years. This applies right across Europe: one need only think of the borderlands between France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg; the shifts in the definition of what is now the Federal Republic of Germany; the State of Bavaria, which once included parts of Austria (and thus the Diocese of Salzburg), or Hungary, which, until after World War I, formed part of the Hapsburg Empire of Austria–Hungary and included Serbia and Transylvania, which continues to have an ethnically mixed population of Hungarian- and German-speakers (as well as Romanian). So also for liturgy and the cults of saints, not least the traces of medieval devotion that are still preserved in liturgical manuscripts held in libraries across modern frontiers and thus belong to a shared history that needs to be included within our purview.

Of the three known offices or historiae for St Columba (Colum Cille), one is Irish and two are Scottish. The Irish office is found in three manuscripts spanning the fifteenth century. Proper processional material is found in a fourth. One full copy of the Scottish office is in the Aberdeen Breviary (1509); the second in the Inchcolm Antiphoner (c. 1400), which, although fragmentary, shares some material with the former. A unique hymn is found in a twelfth-century source now in Vienna. Although few in number, the sources reflect the wide Insular reach of the Columban familia, from Ireland, through Scotland, to Continental Europe, including modern-day France, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. Columba’s Continental cult waned with the withdrawal of the Irish communities but remains vibrant up to today in the Insular area, particularly in Ireland and Scotland where he is patron of numerous churches. His cult was also strong in Lindisfarne (originally an Iona foundation) and Durham, which held some relics even if no liturgical sources have survived.The texts of the offices highlight Columba’s image as a beloved patron, a learned and holy man, teacher, and physical and spiritual protector of his monks against the forces of nature (in particular the sea and the wind) and from warfare and human attack.

The written evidence considered in Music and Liturgy in Medieval Britain and Ireland has included sources of every type, from formal service books to informal additions, and from fragmentary manuscripts to early printed books. The picture that emerges is one of intersecting devotional cultures, both textual and practical: liturgy was constantly in development, open to adjustment, and affected by changes in international sacred customs as well as by local cultural interests and requirements. Furthermore, we have shown that though set apart geographically from the larger landmass of Continental Europe, Britain and Ireland were actively engaged in liturgical discourse through the constant travel of musicians, ecclesiastics, writers, books, relics, and via intellectual exchange, and rather than an agent of separation, the sea was in fact a connector of people.