In the ‘Age of the Saints’ between the fifth and seventh centuries, early Christian leaders in Wales assimilated the currents of existing faith and indigenous Celtic devotion into the intellectual traditions of the greater European church. The humanist teaching of such figures as ‘papa’ Dubricius (Dyfrig) in Erging, and of his successor Iltut (Illtud) in Llantwit Major, were followed by the sixth-century saints who turned increasingly to an ascetic monasticism influenced by ideas originating in the eastern Mediterranean. Although the idea of a Celtic Church encompassing the Celtic nations has now been superseded in our understanding of the period, the lives of the saints are squarely set against the backdrop of the lands of their mission.
The lives represent medieval Latin scripts in eulogy to the religious leaders of earlier centuries, though rarely achieving great literary invention around only kernels of truth that relate to the individual saints, and should correctly be viewed as embodying a literary form in their own right.
This is a newly available edition of G. H Doble’s Lives of the Welsh Saints, which was edited by Professor D. Simon Evans in 1984. This volume contains his work on five Welsh Saints – Dubricius, Iltut, Paulinus, Teilo and Oudoceus.
