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This article highlights some of the historiographical trends over the past one hundred years in how the Irish diaspora in early medieval Europe has been studied. The role of the peregrini, the Irish monastic exiles who left Ireland for Britain and continental Europe from the sixth century onwards, has to some extent been marginal and tangential to the historiography of this island. Forms of modern ‘Irophobia’ in some scholarship have also led to an obfuscation of the early medieval religious and ethnic landscape by seeking to minimise Irish cultural influence. The article argues that by contextualising the phenomenon of Irish clerical exile in Europe within broader theological and comparative frameworks, further research in this field has the potential to clarify the influence of the Irish and to show how the experience of exile contributed to the formation of both Irish and European identities in the middle ages.

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In the seventh century Christians in the Latin West turned with a novel concern to the issues of death and the afterlife. This is a period that has been characterized as marking the ‘rise of the other world’, a development that was rooted in a belief in the imminence of Doomsday and an increasing preoccupation with sinfulness. This shift to a more metaphysical mentality can be noticed in a number of areas ranging from changes in burial and liturgical practices to literary works and the rise in power of the monasteries as intercessory places of prayer.