Hagiographers might hope and believe that they are writing for the ages, crafting a text about their heroine or hero that will stand outside of time and space, certainly a story in which quotidian concerns of the political or economic play no significant role. But whatever their desires, these goals are generally unmet, and for medievalists of all stripes, the lives of the saints have offered endless insight into things both mundane and sublime. Of course, much depends on understanding not only the saint but the biographer as well, and to this end, Alexander O'Hara offers us an impressive book on both Columbanus (ca. 530–615), one of the great monastic saints of the early middle ages, and his challenging biographer, the Italian monk Jonas of Bobbio.

This book is one of three in which O'Hara has been involved over the last few years. In 2017 he, along with Ian Wood, published the first full English translation of the three biographies Jonas wrote in Life of Columbanus, Life of John of Réomé, and Life of Vedast (Liverpool University Press, 2017). A year later, he edited an excellent collection of studies on Columbanus and his world: Columbanus and the Peoples of Post-Roman Europe, (Oxford University Press, 2018). In the book under review here, Jonas of Bobbio and the Legacy of Columbanus, O'Hara shows us in seven chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue just how much we still can learn about both saint and hagiographer.

The introduction offers a glimpse of the book's major arguments and then orients the reader by summarizing the long historiographical tradition of “Columbanian” monasticism. The first two chapters tell the story of Columbanus: his self-imposed exile from his Irish home and his arrival in Francia in the 590s; his interactions with various Merovingian kings, queens, and elites; and his monasteries and monastic ideals. Most early medieval historians, if asked to sum up Columbanus, would perhaps describe him as cranky, and O'Hara would agree: the saint's vision of monasticism was “elite and punitive,” his rules “draconian, autocratic, and unwavering in their ascetic severity” (57). He was uncompromising in his encounters with others: when Burgundian bishops objected to his unwillingness to use the Frankish system for dating Easter, to his odd form of tonsure, and to his refusal to submit to their authority, Columbanus labeled them heretics, simoniacs, and adulterers; when a Merovingian king sought a blessing for his illegitimate children, Columbanus refused, was exiled, and eventually ended up in Italy. Even most of his monks—monks, it would seem, who voluntarily entered his various monasteries—found his monasticism too strict and “rebelled,” as Jonas has it.

Jonas himself was born in the northern Italian town of Susa, about 170 kilometers west of Milan. O'Hara wants to show that Susa was an outpost of romanitas and could offer the young Jonas a classical education, evidence for which he finds in Jonas's use of Livy, Caesar, Vergil, and other writers from antiquity. He convincingly argues that Jonas entered the monastery of Bobbio, established by the now-exiled Columbanus and his most committed followers, within a few months of Columbanus's death there. Jonas imbibed much of the Columbanian tradition, and O'Hara presents that tradition in a rather rigorous way, arguing that any deviation from Columbanus's two rules not only betrayed the Irish master but could lead to various kinds of divine punishment. Jonas eventually left Bobbio and joined Amandus's mission in northeastern Francia and at some point became abbot of Marchienne, where he wrote the Regula cuiusdam patris ad virgines for the nearby monastery of Hamages. Although O'Hara shows that Jonas was zealous in his belief that any modification of Columbanus's disciplinary regime could result in heavenly chastisement, his Regula cuiusdam draws both on the Rule of Saint Benedict and Columbanus's two rules, as well as his penitential.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 examine Jonas's hagiographic style. In chapter 4, O'Hara argues that Jonas self-consciously sought to shape and influence the social reality of his mid-seventh-century world, aiming his texts at the Columbanian monastic familia and a larger public audience. Chapter 5 discusses Jonas's use of scripture and concludes with a five-page appendix of the biblical citations in the Vita Columbani. Chapter 6 discusses the miracles in Jonas's texts, in the hopes of discovering a shift in the intellectual and cultural notions of sanctity over time. It is here, more than anywhere else, that this reviewer had some concerns. In his self-avowedly functionalist account, O'Hara divides the many miracles narrated in his texts first into two categories (healing and nonhealing), and then further subdivides these into smaller units. While this methodology does allow him to come to some interesting conclusions, I was not entirely convinced that his categories were as exhaustive as he argues. For instance, of the more than ninety nonhealing miracles in the Vita Columbani, nearly thirty O'Hara categorizes as emphasizing the “glorification of the saint” (203–204). One would imagine that in Jonas's mind, nearly all the miracles that he recounts add to Columbanus's grandeur, enhance his (and his true followers’) prestige, and highlight his orthodoxy.

The final chapter gathers together the various arguments O'Hara has made throughout the book. Jonas perceived Columbanus principally as a monastic founder; the second book of the vita, which focuses on some of the communities Columbanus had established, should not be understood as a tacked-on appendix, but is central to Jonas's focus on the importance of the holy community rather than on the holy individual; and these communities should remain holy by zealously following their founder's rules and practicing a strict separation that keeps the laity from polluting the monastic environment with their sinful worldliness. The book concludes with an epilogue that places at least some of Jonas's themes and concerns in the political and social reality of the mid-seventh-century Merovingian world.

Despite the concerns mentioned above, and some degree of repetition throughout the book, Jonas of Bobbio and the Legacy of Columbanus is a significant piece of scholarship which should be of interest not only to monastic and church historians but to almost all those concerned with the early middle ages. Armed with this excellent book, his translation of Jonas's vitae, and the recent translation of Columbanus's rules by Terence Kardong (Saint Columban: His Life, Rule, and Legacy, [Liturgical, 2017]), Columbanus is now accessible to undergraduates and graduate students who might blanch at the sometimes difficult Latin: I can think of no higher praise.