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.

Responses supplied by contributors from North East England recorded by BBC Radio Scotland, BBC Radio Newcastle and BBC Radio Cleveland

Responses supplied by contributors from North East England recorded by BBC Radio Scotland, BBC Radio Newcastle and BBC Radio Cleveland

This chapter traces the roots and development of the French-Canadian novel from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. A contested form in Europe, where commentators questioned its cultural value and usefulness to society, the novel’s status was additionally fraught in French Canada. Here, it was perceived as a product of the ‘Old World,’ shaped to meet the needs and to reflect the values of foreign readers. Throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, the French-Canadian novel remained a vehicle for variously negotiating or consolidating the emergent national character. Following the foundational development of ‘belles lettres’ in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the first novels appeared in Quebec in the 1830s and 1840s. While displaying obvious debts to metropolitan influences, these inaugural novels also set precedents in theme, setting, and characterization. In addition to meeting the challenges of writing representative fictions, French-Canadian novelists had also to negotiate pressures exerted by the censorial clerical elite. The clash between social liberals and conservatives dominated literary production at the turn of the twentieth century. The themes and forms of French-Canadian fiction bear witness to the unique historical and sociocultural circumstances under which the novel developed here.

This chapter examines the most apparently troubled episode in the history of Cuthbert’s community – its intermittent perambulations around northern England in the ninth and tenth centuries – through the lenses of its earliest historical record, the anonymous Historia de Sancto Cuthberto. Noting the irrelevance of Cuthbert’s asceticism to this narrative, it argues that his life and posthumous miracles are used as vehicles to authorize the land claims of the Lindisfarne/Chester-le-Street community during this period of prolonged insecurity. In the course of consolidating and adding to these landholdings, Cuthbert demonstrates a readiness to work flexibly with the Danish elite where necessary – respect for land trumps ethnic difference. Where crossed, however, he is mercilessly retributive, a far cry from Bede’s pastoral and ecological saint. In addition to these local negotiations, the chapter explores how the Historia ambitiously sets Cuthbert to work as a kingmaker on a national level, insinuating him into the West Saxon narrative of hereditary English monarchy, while the West Saxons manifest a devotional interest towards him in turn to help strengthen their foothold in the north.

This chapter looks at the written responses to the Viking Age in England. The initial response from Alcuin drew on the paradigm established by the 5th/6th-century British writer Gildas, who depicted the Anglo-Saxon invasions as punishment from God for the sinfulness of the Britons. It proceeds to contrast this with how the Viking Age was remembered in the north of England through an examination of the eleventh-century text Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, which (it is argued) shows how the Scandinavian past was integrated into northern English history as an essential, and very often positive, element. This is compared to the Skaldic poetry associated with the court of Cnut the Great, and it is suggested that the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto and other later English history-writing integrated elements of Scandinavian traditions (especially those associated with Cnut’s family) into their depictions of the English past.