Brendan of Clonfert stands among the most celebrated of Irish saints, and the fame of his travels helped spread that veneration around the world. The Navigatio, or Sea Voyage, attributed to him has enjoyed great popularity since at least the tenth century and helped establish him as the patron saint of sailors. Reliable English translations have been available since the mid-twentieth century, yet this edition by Gordon Barthos provides the first full English translation of Brendan’s Life in the Codex Insulensis, also known as the Oxoniensis collection, since Oxford’s Bodleian Library now holds its two extant manuscript copies (MSS Rawlinson B 485 and B 505). The Navigatio accounts for over half of this Life, which Barthos translates from Charles Plummer’s invaluable Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (1910; 2 vols., Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997), with additional consideration of digitized copies of the Rawlinson manuscripts. The Oratio (Prayer) attributed to Brendan Barthos translates from Pierre Salmon’s Testimonia Orationis Christianae Antiquioris (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 47; Turnhout: Brepols, 1977). This copy of the Life dates to around 1300, and the prayer to the eleventh century.

Scholars specializing in medieval Ireland, sainthood, and heroic tales will especially welcome this fine translation, although the text itself is not particularly polished. Through no fault of the translator, its chronology often gets jumbled. Both Plummer and James Kenney, another early twentieth-century giant in Irish hagiographical studies, faulted the text’s crude conflation of its sources. Nevertheless, it provides a good overview of Brendan’s biography from his birth (c. 486) to his death (578), with his epic journey and evangelizing efforts in between. Barthos also adds the tale of Brendan’s compassionate encounter with Judas, who through Christ’s mercy is given periodic reprieves from “burn[ing] like a mass of molten lead in a cauldron” in hell, being allowed to sit on a rock in the ocean as he is repeatedly submerged beneath the waves, a water torture that nevertheless feels like “a paradise of delights” compared to his usual agony in hell (102). Barthos largely meets his goal of offering “a contemporary, readable interpretation” of the Latin, rather than an overly literal one (31), with a few missteps, like rendering nutrix as “nurse” instead of “foster-mother” (37, 76). Similarly, he repeatedly uses the verb “prophesy” as a noun instead of “prophecy,” which an editor should have corrected prior to publication.

The translation is the book’s most beneficial contribution. Barthos is a retired journalist rather than a medievalist, and his lack of sufficient scholarly grounding becomes particularly apparent in his introduction and notes to the text. For example, he seems unfamiliar with the wealth of scholarship on Ireland’s female saints, including Brigid and Íte, both of whom feature in Brendan’s Life, but Barthos offers only a cursory discussion of them. Íte, Brendan’s foster-mother, plays a particularly vital role in educating and caring for Brendan, which she is said to have done for so many that she is celebrated as the muimme sanctorum Hiberniae, the foster-mother of the saints of Ireland. She also provides key parallels to some of the content in Brendan’s Life, including her daily diet of food delivered by angels, an experience shared by the elder living alone for sixty years on the isolated Holy Island (74); elsewhere Barthos notes when such commonalities occur in other saints’ Lives, but they are almost invariably male saints’ Lives. The one exception is with a Life of Brigid (81), which Barthos knows not from the Life itself or from scholarship centering Brigid or other female saints, but because of a reference in Richard Sharpe’s Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

Relatedly, Barthos does not sufficiently deliver on his intention to demonstrate that Brendan was “an icon of the Gaelic west who was identified with its people, their struggles, and their aspirations over the long arc of Irish history” (1). Partly this results from his confusion about evolving medieval ethnic identity in Britain and Ireland, as in his discussion of Brendan’s

At no point does Barthos indicate awareness that in the Middle Ages “Briton” referred to people commonly called Welsh today, not the English. Barthos could perhaps still have made this argument, but only with significant additional context, not by simply conflating medieval Britons with the modern British or with the medieval Norman English, who invaded and then colonized Ireland starting in 1169. This apparent ignorance about such fundamental aspects would presumably not have arisen with a trained medievalist specializing in this history. Again, it is surprising that an editor did not catch this, especially one at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.

Nevertheless, by translating this fascinating material, Barthos has enriched all who work in the field, and while his bibliography has some gaps, he makes use of first-rate scholarship to better understand the world that produced and perpetuated these stories. This relatively affordable and accessible edition should help make Brendan a more familiar figure to future scholars and all invested in medieval Christian history.