Ebook: Adamnan's "De Locis Sanctis"

Saint Adamnán, also spelled Adomnán, also called Eunan, (born c. 625, County Donegal, Ire. — died 704; feast day September 23), abbot and scholar, particularly noted as the biographer of St. Columba.

Though comparatively little known and little studied, the 'De Locis Sanctis' of Adamnan is a document of considerable historical interest. Of primary importance for the light it throws on conditions in Palestine and the near east in the early years after the Moslem conquest, this narrative of Arculf’s journey has the unusual interest too of simultaneously bringing into focus the widely separated Celtic, Byzantine, and Moslem worlds at the very dawn of the Middle Ages. Arculf appears to have been a Merovingian Gaul. His travels covered Moslem and Byzantine territories, and his experiences were recorded by an Irishman in the Celtic monastery of Iona.