John Colgan

John Colgan, O.F.M. (Irish Seán Mac Colgan; c. 1592 – 15 January 1658), was an Irish Franciscan friar noted as a hagiographer and historian.

Colgan was born c. 1592 at Priestown near Carndonagh. He joined the Franciscan Order and was sent to study in the Irish Franciscan College of St. Anthony of Padua in Leuven (Irish: Lúbhán, French and historically in English: Louvain) in present-day Belgium in 1612. He was ordained as a priest in 1618. Here he is said to have acted as professor of theology for some time, but he soon forsook the professorial chair to devote himself to the Irish studies for which that college was famous.

Father Hugh Ward (d. 1635) had projected a complete history of the Irish saints, and for this purpose had sent some of his brethren, notably Michael O'Clery, to Ireland to collect materials. Ward died before he could make any progress in his work, but the materials that had been gathered remained. Colgan, being a competent master of the Irish language, had thus ready at hand an excellent collection of manuscripts of Irish hagiology.

He undertook a great work, to be published in six volumes, dealing with the whole range of Irish ecclesiastical history and antiquities. In 1645 he published at Louvain the third volume of this series (Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae, etc.), containing the lives of the Irish saints whose feasts occur in the calendar for the months of January, February, and March. The lives of the saints whose feasts occur in the succeeding months were to have been published in the last three volumes of the series. Luke Wadding, in his Annales Minorum, informs us that the volume dealing with the saints for April, May, and June was in the press at Colgan's death; this seems incorrect, since, if the work had been so far advanced, it would have been published by some colleague.

The second volume of the series, entitled Trias Thaumaturga, etc., appeared at Louvain in 1647. It deals with the three great national saints of Ireland, Patrick, Brigid, and Columbcille. In it are contained seven of the ancient lives of St. Patrick, five of St. Columba, and six of St. Brigid. For a long time the Trias Thaumaturga was nearly the only source of information on St. Patrick, and even since the Whitley Stokes edition of the Vita Tripartita (Rolls Series), Colgan's work cannot be dispensed with. Colgan gives a Latin version of the Vita Tripartita which represents a different text from that edited by Stokes; Colgan's manuscript seems to have entirely disappeared.

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