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From 550 to 750 monastic culture became more firmly entrenched in Western Europe. The role of monasteries and their relationship to the social world around them was transformed during this period as monastic institutions became more integrated in social and political power networks. These collected essays focus on one of the central figures in this process, the Irish ascetic exile and monastic founder Columbanus (c. 550–615), his travels on the Continent, and the monastic network he and his Frankish disciples established in Merovingian Gaul and Lombard Italy. The post-Roman kingdoms through which Columbanus traveled and in which he established his monastic foundations were made up of many different peoples. As an outsider and immigrant, how did Columbanus and his communities interact with these peoples? How did they negotiate differences, and what emerged from these encounters? This volume aims to explore further the strands of this vibrant contact.

Jonas of Bobbio, writing in the mid-seventh century, was not only a major Latin monastic author but also a historic figure in his own right. Born in the ancient Roman town of Susa in the foothills of the Italian Alps, he became a monk of Bobbio, the monastery founded by the Irish abbot Columbanus, soon after the saint’s death. He became archivist and personal assistant to successive Bobbio abbots, traveled to Rome to obtain the first papal privilege of immunity, and served as a missionary on the northern borderlands of the Frankish kingdom, where he wrote his Vita Columbani, one of the most influential works of early medieval hagiography. As abbot of a community in the far north of the Frankish kingdom, Jonas was part of an extensive monastic network that stretched from the English Channel to the Italian Apennines. By the time of Jonas’s death toward the end of the seventh century, the monastic landscape of this region had been transformed. This was the result of a socioreligious revolution, initiated by Columbanus (d. 615) and continued by his Frankish disciples in the decades after his death. Columbanus established a cluster of monasteries in the Vosges forests of Burgundy in the last decade of the sixth century, chief among them Luxeuil. During the seventh century, Luxeuil, its abbots, and the Merovingian royal court in Paris spearheaded an unprecedented monastic movement in Merovingian Gaul that would transform the interrelationship between religious and secular authorities in the Early Middle Ages.