The first page of the Vita Sancti Columbae, written around the year 700.
The first page of the Vita Sancti Columbae, written around the year 700. Schaffhausen Municipal Library

Of Monks and Monsters: The Schaffhausen Vita Sancti Columbae

The Schaffhausen Municipal Library is home to a manuscript of great significance: The Hiberno-Scottish saint’s life of Columba of Iona provides insight into a period of history about which little is known. It also contains the oldest account of a monster in Loch Ness.

Chris Findlay

Chris Findlay

Chris Findlay studied History and English at the universities of Freiburg i.Br. and Cambridge and works as a freelance journalist. He is a bibliophile and passionate about manuscripts and paleography.

The shelf mark “Generalia 1” is an unmistakable clue that the Vita Sancti Columbae is the oldest book in the Municipal Library of Schaffhausen. The inconspicuous codex has no opulent binding or elaborately painted miniatures, although it was written in the scriptorium of the island monastery of Iona off the west coast of Scotland, where the Book of Kells, arguably the pinnacle of insular book illumination, is believed to have been created about 100 years later.
The monastery of Iona on the island of the same name, founded by Saint Columba.
The monastery of Iona on the island of the same name, founded by Saint Columba. Wikimedia / Holger Uwe Schmitt
Nevertheless, the "Life of St. Columba" is a manuscript about which there is much to say and which has much to tell us. Written around the year 700 by Abbot Adomnán, the codex is an invaluable source for historians and philologists and indispensable for our understanding of the history of the British Isles in the 6th and 7th centuries – a period from which hardly any written evidence has survived for this region. The Vita is also the oldest book to contain a single biography in Latin. And finally, the Schaffhausen manuscript is of great interest to cryptozoologists, about which later more. First, a few observations on its external properties: With a format of 29 x 22.5 cm, the codex is approximately A4 size, and it was written on 71 sheets of parchment produced from calfskin (vellum). The book was last rebound in 1941. The copyist, who names himself as Dorbbéne in the colophon, uses the Irish half-uncial, a roundish script developed at the beginning of the 7th century. At the same time, there are also recognizable emergent elements of the later insular minuscule, namely the ligatures between individual letters and, above all, the use of scribal abbreviations, with words or parts of words being replaced by space-saving contractions or symbols in a feature characteristic of Irish manuscripts. Another innovation is the use of word spacing, first introduced around this time for better readability by the Irish scribes, for whom Latin was a foreign language. Thus, the Vita is an important datable milestone in the development that would later produce the Carolingian scripts.
A writing sample from the Vita Sancti Columbae. The spaces between individual words and the ligatures between letters are clearly visible.
A writing sample from the Vita Sancti Columbae. The spaces between individual words and the ligatures between letters are clearly visible. Schaffhausen Municipal Library
But who was Columba, also called Colm Cille, who today is one of the patron saints of both Ireland and Scotland? The protagonist of the Vita was born in Ireland about 1500 years ago – according to tradition, on 7 December 521 – and died in 597. As a young nobleman, he was educated in the monastery of St. Finnian of Clonard. Around the year 560, he is supposed to have caused the first documented case of copyright infringement: He had copied a psalter from the monastery of Movilla and wanted to keep his copy, whereas the abbot believed that it belonged to the monastery library. Unfortunately, unlike modern arguments over intellectual property, this dispute could not be ended by a cease-and-desist letter, but resulted in the battle of Cúl Dreimhne, which caused 3000 dead and wounded casualties – an episode that is not mentioned in the Vita Sancti Columbae (and the veracity of which is questioned by modern scholars). The psalter allegedly written by Columba at the time, the Cathach or “Battler”, is now kept in the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin.
Stained glass window showing Saint Columba, Pittsburgh, USA, ca. 1956. In Latin, “columba” means “dove”.
Stained glass window showing Saint Columba, Pittsburgh, USA, ca. 1956. In Latin, “columba” means “dove”. Wikimedia
Soon thereafter, in 563, the saint and his companions set out on a peregrinatio (self-exile as an expression of monastic vocation) to Scotland, where Bridei, the king of the Picts, assigned him the small island of Iona to found a monastery. His new home in western Scotland, part of the kingdom of Dál Riata, had close cultural links to Ireland. However, while Ireland had been Christianized about 100 years earlier and was quickly growing into a center of Latin scholarship, the Scots and Picts had not yet converted to Christianity. The Vita describes how Columba devoted himself to this task. His status as a high-born member of the clan of Cenél Conaill and a descendant of the legendary High King Niall Noígíallach was helpful: Even as a simple abbot, he could meet with King Bridei on an equal footing. Thus, the British Isles were converted from two directions – in the north by Columba’s Hiberno-Scottish mission, and in the south by Augustine of Canterbury, who had been dispatched from Rome.
Artwork from the Book of Kells, likely also produced at Iona in the 8th or 9th century and considered the pinnacle of Irish book illumination.
Artwork from the Book of Kells, likely also produced at Iona in the 8th or 9th century and considered the pinnacle of Irish book illumination. Trinity College Dublin
Let us now return to the manuscript at the Schaffhausen Municipal Library. In formal terms, the hagiography written by Adomnán emulates well-known saints’ lives such as those of St Anthony and St Martin of Tours. It is not a historical account, but is designed to cast the founder of Iona’s monastic community as being on par with the Biblical prophets and apostles. Rather than a chronology, it offers a threefold demonstration of his saintliness by describing his prophetic activity, his miraculous activity, and appearances of angels. Columba is able to predict storms and knows whether travelers will arrive safely – a useful gift in the Hebridean island world of the North Atlantic, where the weather changes quickly and the monks' small leather-covered curragh boats could easily be engulfed by a whirlpool. In a beautiful episode, he prophesies the arrival of an exhausted and famished guest: A heron has been blown off course over the Irish Sea by a gale. The bird is nursed back to health by the monks for three days before returning to “that lovely part of Ireland” that is also Columba’s home.
Columba converting the Picts. Mural by William Hole, ca. 1899.
Columba converting the Picts. Mural by William Hole, ca. 1899. Wikimedia / Scottish National Portrait Gallery
As befits a true saint, he heals the sick, raises the dead, and turns water into communion wine. A butcher's knife that the saint has absentmindedly blessed can no longer injure any man or animal, whereupon the monks melt it down and apply the metal as a safety coating to their other tools and implements. Columba stops a young monk's chronic nosebleed and exorcises a demon from a milk pail. In these accounts, several generations’ worth of traditions passed on within the monastic community are admixed with folk tales, especially when the protagonist meets wild animals and monsters. His encounter with a water beast (“aquatilis bestia”) is particularly noteworthy: As the saint and his companions pass by the banks of the River Ness, they come upon the funeral of a man who has just fallen victim to the attack of the monster. The beast – “whose appetite had not been appeased, but only whetted” ­– resurfaces and wants to devour Columba. He, however, makes the sign of the cross and orders the beast to back off, which it does, to the astonishment of the Picts present. Thus, the Schaffhausen manuscript contains the first written mention of a monster being sighted at Loch Ness. It is still unclear how the book came from the Inner Hebrides to Schaffhausen. When Iona was raided by Vikings in 795 and then repeatedly attacked again over the following decades, many monks moved to the continent and brought their books, as well as their skills in manuscript illumination and Latin scholarship, to the region of Lake Constance, where the Irish monks Gallus and Columbanus (not to be confused with Columba) had already been active 200 years earlier. Presumably, the Vita Sancti Columbae had arrived in this region by the second half of the 9th century.
Artist’s impression of a Viking attack on the monastery of Iona.
Artist’s impression of a Viking attack on the monastery of Iona. Pinterest
The ownership inscription “Liber Augie maioris” on the first page of the codex in a 13th-century hand shows that it was then held at the monastery of Reichenau, about 40 kilometers upstream along the Rhine from Schaffhausen. It is possible that the manuscript had been taken there for safety along with other treasures of the Abbey of St. Gall during the Magyar invasions. It is not clear how it ended up in the Bürgerbibliothek of Schaffhausen, today the Municipal Library, which was amalgamated from the holdings of the city’s medieval Benedictine and Franciscan monasteries and of the parish church of St. Johann. It was here that the Vita was rediscovered in 1772.
Visit e-codices.unifr.ch to explore the digital version of the Schaffhausen Vita Sancti Columbae.

Published on: 22.08.2023

URL: https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2023/08/of-monks-and-monsters-the-schaffhausen-vita-sancti-columbae/

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