> Today, 4 September, is the feast of ...
>
> * Ultan, bishop (657)
> - while feeding children with his right hand, he put Nordic
> invaders to flight with his left hand; an early Irish writer said of
> him: 'Had it been the right hand that noble Ultan raised against them,
> no foreigner would ever have come into the land of Erin'
>
The emphasis on Ultan's hands is reminiscent of a reference in De
Abbatibus mentioned by Janet Backhouse in her book on the Lindisfarne
Gospels to an Irish monk called Ultan whose hand, "once used to write
the Lord's word", performed a miraculous cure as his bones were being
raised from their original resting place. Same Ultan?
Jim Bugslag
PS Re a stone coffin for St Ida (d. 825), there are some splendid
stone sarcophagi in the crypt of the Church of St Paul at Jouarre,
dating from the late 7th-early 8th century. They include the
sarcophagi of Bishop Angilbert and, significantly, of Theodechildis,
the first abbess. From the same period, there is a stone
sarchophagus in the hypogeum of Dunes in Poitiers. It is difficult
to say how typical these were, however, since survivals from this
period are sparce and major stone sculpture in process of revival in
western Europe in this period (cf. the stone crosses of Ireland and
Britain). I would certainly think that a stone sarcophagus would
have been possible for a woman of the early 9th century, providing,
of course, she had the quite substantial means to have it made.
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