Dr Eoghan Ahern

My current research is focused on the earliest hagiographic writings in Ireland and across the Insular world (Ireland, Britain and Brittany). I am interested in Insular representations of continental saints such as Germanus of Auxerre, Lupus of Troyes and Gregory the Great. I am working, along with Sumner Braund, Meredith Cutrer and Roy Flechner, on a new commentary and translation of the O’Donohue group of Irish Saints’ Lives.

My monograph, Bede and the Cosmos: Theology and Nature in the Eighth Century, which was based on my PhD thesis, explored the cosmological ideas of the Venerable Bede. The central argument of the book is that Bede’s conception of the natural world played a crucial—and hitherto under-appreciated—role in shaping his wider thought and worldview. For this reason, Bede and the Cosmos is dedicated to a corpus-wide analysis of Bede’s cosmological beliefs—the first study to take such an approach. The book’s chapters thus cover a wide range of topics, from questions about angelic bodies and the destruction of the world at judgement day, to more subtle arguments about free will and the meaning of history

This research thread has also yielded a research article exploring Bede's understanding of the miraculous, published in Early Medieval Europe, and a forthcoming book chapter which will explore what types of evidence he deemed permissible in the study of nature.

Two connected studies have developed from my work on ideas about moral and civic decline in late antique Christian writings. The first, published in The Journal of Early Christian Studies, explored the use of the classical historiographical topos of decline by Christian historians of the fourth through sixth centuries, particularly Orosius, Gildas and Salvian of Marseilles. The second, in The Journal of the History of Sexuality, examined the process by which the biblical narrative of the decline and punishment of Sodom became linked in the Christian imagination with homosexual sin. The study draws attention to a number of overlooked fourth- and fifth-century texts that, I argue, served as the catalyst for later Christian traditions.