Saint Columba

For anyone looking for a comprehensive account of the life of St Columba, this must be it, disentangling as it does fact from legend insofar as this is possible. The author's doctorate was on the heritage of St Columba (Colum Cille), who is also one of the three patron saints of Ireland. He describes his early life, the founding of the monastery on Iona and gives an interesting description of everyday life. He then moves on to the history of the Abbey, the first lives of the saint and the spread of other Columba and monasteries as well as the cult of St Columba in Europe and the Monastery of the Kells. It is a scholarly but readable work that also corrects the date of his death from 597 to 593, a finding by Dr Daniel McCarthy that he tactfully refrained from publishing until after the centenary celebrations in 1997.