The homiletic purpose of these documents is most clearly shown in the Irish Life.  This was written to be preached as a sermon on the saint’s festival ["this day to-day,” Sec. 1], at Clonmacnois ["he came to this town,” Sec. 34:  “a fragment of the cask remained here till recently,” Sec. 36:  “here are the relics of Ciaran,” Sec. 41.  Similarly the First Latin Life, Sec. 35, calls the saint “Our most holy patron"].  The actual date of the Irish sermon is less easy to fix; the language has been modernised step by step in the process of transmission from manuscript to manuscript, but originally it may have been written about the eleventh century, though incorporating fragments of earlier material.  The passage just quoted, saying that a certain relic had remained till recently, may possibly indicate that the homily had been delivered shortly after one of the many burnings and plunderings which the monastery suffered; in such a calamity the relic might have perished.  The prophecy put into Ciaran’s mouth, that “there would be great persecution of his city from evil men in the end of the world” [Irish Life, Sec. 38] seems to relate to such an event:  it is very suggestive that exactly the same exprestion “great persecution from evil men” (ingrem mor o droch-daoinibh) is used in the Chronicon Scotorum of certain raids on the monastery which took place in the year A.D. 1091; and that on the strength of an old prophecy there was a belief in Ireland that the world was destined to come to an end in the year 1096, as we learn from the Annals of the Four Masters under that date.[4] It must, however, be remembered that a date determined for a single incident does not necessarily date the whole compilation containing it.

The text of the First Latin Life (here called for convenience of reference LA) is found in an early fifteenth-century MS. in Marsh’s Library, Dublin.  It has been edited, without translation, by the Rev. C. Plummer in his most valuable Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (Oxford, 1910) vol. i, pp. 200-216.  The translation given in this volume has been made from Plummer’s edition, which I have collated with the original MS.[5]

The text of the Second Latin Life (LB) is contained in two MSS. in the Bodleian Library (Rawl.  B 485 and Rawl.  B 505, here called R1 and R2).  Of these R2 is a direct copy of R1, as has been proved by Plummer, in his description of these manuscripts.[6] As to their date, there is no agreement; the estimate for R1 ranges from the first half of the thirteenth to the fourteenth century, R2 being necessarily somewhat later.  The Life of Ciaran contained in these MSS. has been used by Plummer in editing LA, and extracts from it are printed in his footnotes.  It has not, however, been previously printed in its entirety, and a transcript made by myself is therefore added here, in an Appendix.