Original sources and modern studies of the life of the apostle of Ireland. Some books that include complete texts of original sources are included in both categories.
History of the Irish Primitive Church, together with the life of St. Patrick, and his Confession in Latin, with a parallel translation. By Daniel de Vinné. New-York: Francis Hart and Company, 1870.
The Life and Writings of St. Patrick. With appendices, etc. By the Most Rev. Dr. Healy, Archbishop of Tuam. Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son, 1905. —Includes the text of Patrick’s Confession and Epistle to Coroticus with parallel translation.
Libri Sancti Patricii: The Latin Writings of St. Patrick. Edited by Newport J. D. White. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1905.
The Confession of Saint Patrick, concerning his life and conduct. Translated from the original Latin by Archdeacon Hamilton. Dublin: John Charles O’Reilly, 1859.
A Translation of the Latin Writings of St. Patrick. By Newport J. D. White, D.D. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1918.
Libri Sancti Patricii:
The Latin writings of St. Patrick. A revised text, with a
selection of various readings, based on all the known
manuscripts. Edited by Newport J. D. White, D.D. London: Society
for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1918.
Another copy.
St. Patrick: His Writings and His Life. By Newport J. D. White, D.D. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1920. —Includes Muirchu’s Life, the earliest “biography” of Patrick.
A Life of St. Patrick (Colgan’s Tertia Vita). Edited by J. B. Bury. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1903. —Latin, with English introduction and notes.
The Most Ancient Lives of St. Patrick; including the life by Jocelin, hitherto unpublished in America, and his extant writings. Illustrated with the most ancient engravings of our great national saint; with a preface and chronological table. By Rev. James O’Leary, D.D. Seventh Edition. New York: P. J. Kenedy, 1904.
The Tripartite Life of Patrick, with other documents relating to that saint. Edited with translations and indexes by Whitley Stokes, D.C.L., LL.D. London: Printed for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office by Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1887.
A History of the Ancient Church in Ireland. By William G. Todd, A.B. London: James Burns, 1845. —A short book with a chapter on Patrick and some account of “the religion of the ancient Irish.”
St. Patrick, Apostle of Ireland; a memoir of his life and mission, with an introductory dissertation on some early usages of the church in Ireland, and its historical position from the establishment of the English colony to the present day. By James Henthorn Todd, D.D. Dublin: Hodges, Smith, & Co., 1864.
“It is a minor defect in Todd’s St. Patrick that he is not impartial. By this I mean that he wrote with an unmistakable ecclesiastical bias. It is not implied that he would have ever stooped to a misrepresentation of the evidence for the purpose of proving a particular thesis. No reader would accuse him of that. But it is clear that he was anxious to establish a particular thesis. He does not conceal that the conclusions to which the evidence, as he interpreted it, conducted him were conclusions which he wished to reach, In other words, he approached a historical problem, with a distinct preference for one solution rather than another; and this preference was due to an interest totally irrelevant to mere historical truth. The business of a historian is to ascertain facts. There is something essentially absurd in his wishing that any alleged fact should turn out to be true or should turn out to be false. So far as he entertains a wish of the kind, his attitude is not critical.” —J. B. Bury in the preface to his Life of St. Patrick (see below).
History of the Irish Primitive Church, together with the life of St. Patrick, and his Confession in Latin, with a parallel translation. By Daniel de Vinné. New-York: Francis Hart and Company, 1870.
The Life of St. Patrick and His Place in History. By J. B. Bury. London: Macmillan and Co., 1905.
“Perhaps the scope of this book will be best understood if I explain that the subject attracted my attention, not as an important crisis in the history of Ireland, but, in the first place, as an appendix to the history of the Roman Empire, illustrating the emanations of its influence beyond its own frontiers; and, in the second place, as a notable episode in the series of conversions which spread over northern Europe the religion which prevails to-day. Studying the work of the Slavonic apostles, Cyril and Methodius, I was led to compare them with other European missionaries, Wulfilas, for instance, and Augustine, Boniface, and Otto of Bamberg. When I came to Patrick, I found it impossible to gain any clear conception of the man and his work. The subject was wrapt in obscurity, and this obscurity was encircled by an atmosphere of controversy and conjecture. Doubts of the very existence of St. Patrick had been entertained, and other views almost amounted to the thesis that if he did exist, he was not himself, but a namesake. It was at once evident that the material had never been critically sifted, and that it would be necessary to begin at the beginning, almost as if nothing had been done, in a field where much had been written.…
“The justification of the present biography is that it rests upon a methodical examination of the sources, and that the conclusions, whether right or wrong, were reached without any prepossession. For one whose interest in the subject is purely intellectual, it was a matter of unmixed indifference what answer might be found to any one of the vexed questions. I will not anticipate my conclusions here, but I may say that they tend to show that the Roman Catholic conception of St. Patrick’s work is, generally, nearer to historical fact than the views of some anti-Papal divines.”
—This book itself became almost an orthodoxy for half a century; D. A. Binchley (1963) referred to is as “The gospel according to Bury.”
The Life and Writings of St. Patrick. With appendices, etc. By the Most Rev. Dr. Healy, Archbishop of Tuam. Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son, 1905.
“A student in quest of the ‘traditional’ Patrick…must have recourse to the book by a former Archbishop of Tuam, The Life and Writings of St. Patrick, by John Healy, D.D. In this substantial and well-written volume he will find the pure milk of tradition, undiluted by Bury”s ‘rationalism.’ ” —D. A. Binchy in “Patrick and His Biographers,”
, 1961.
St. Patrick: His Life and Teaching. By E. J. Newell, M.A. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, [1890].
St. Patrick and His Gallic Friends. By F. R. Mongomery Hitchcock, D.D. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1916.