Lay morality, clerical immorality, and pilgrimage in tenth-century Ireland: Cethrur macclérech and Epscop do Gáedelaib1

Abstract

The subject of the present study is a pair of medieval Irish ecclesiastical anecdotes, namely Cethrur macclérech (‘Four Junior Clerics’) and Epscop do Gáedelaib (‘A Bishop of the Gaels’). Insofar as they have received any scholarly attention, these brief narratives, and others which possess a similar form, have been characterised as Christian exempla.2 However, identifying their moral or didactic purpose is by no means straightforward: they are rich and complex narratives, bristling with puns, double meanings and moral ambiguity. In their incidental details, they shed light on various aspects of the ecclesiastical culture of early medieval Ireland. The purpose of this essay is to present editions, translations and close readings of both Cethrur macclérech and Epscop do Gáedelaib, to put forward possible interpretations of both texts, and to suggest a wider intellectual and historical framework within which this type of text might have functioned. Both texts are preserved in Lebor na Nuachongbála (TCD MS H 2. 18 (1339), now commonly known as the Book of Leinster, henceforth LL), a twelfth-century Irish manuscript which contains a multiplicity of vernacular historical, ecclesiastical and literary sources; both texts are written in the hand