ST/EW/84

Brendan

Gender

Male

Floruit (period)

None

Floruit date range

? - 577

Description

1. Brendan the Navigator or Brendan of Clonfert, the outstanding saint of Connacht. His fesat day is 16 May. He is associated with Clonfert in Galway and Ardfert in Kerry. Brendan was celebrated in a series of Lives as well as in the Navigatio sancti Brendani. Commemorated in the Aberdeen Breviary. See T.M.Charles-Edwards, 'Connacht, Saints of', ODNB for further references. 2. Brendan of Birr or Brendan mac Nemainn (d. 565/73), whose feast day is 29 November. His church was at Birr, near Kinnitty in Meath. No life survives, though apparently a fragmentary text still existed in the seventeenth century. Brendan of Birr came to be reckoned in the post-viking period as one of ‘the twelve apostles of Ireland’. Much earlier, in Adomnán's life of St Columba, Brendan was the only person to rise up as Columba approached a synod at Tailtiu that was all set to condemn him; Adomnán also devoted a chapter to Columba's miraculous perception of the angelic welcome given to Brendan's soul: ‘in this past night I have seen the sky suddenly opened, and companies of angels coming down to meet the soul of the holy Brendan’ (VIta S. Columbae, 3.11). Not commemorated in the Aberdeen Breviary. See N. Stalmans and T.M. Charles-Edwards, 'Meath, Saints of', ODNB for further references.