About
I am an Irish language teacher and historian of late antiquity and the early middle ages. I am interested in the intellectual history of the Insular world (and more broadly the Latin west) from c.350 to c.850, with a focus on sexuality and the body, the cult of saints, the miraculous, and medieval concepts of God, nature and the universe.
My monograph,
Bede and the Cosmos: Theology and Nature in the Eighth Century (Routledge, 2020), is available now in
paperback. Download a preview
here.
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 also 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.
Email:
eoghan.ahern@liverpool.ac.uk.
Publications
Monograph
Bede and the Cosmos: Theology and Nature in the Eighth Century (Routledge, 2020).
https://www.routledge.com/Ahern/p/book/9781138365438
Reference Entries / Online Resources
‘Anglo-Saxons, Gaels and Scandinavians: the peopling of Scotland’, for
Our Migration Story: The Making of Britain (Runnymede Trust, 2017):
https://www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk/oms/scandinavians-in-scotland
‘Bede: De Natura Rerum’,
The Literary Encyclopedia: Anglo Saxon England, 500–1066, ed. R. Dance and H. Magennis (2016):
https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=9640
Book Reviews
Review of
The Gregorian Mission to Kent in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History: Methodology and Sources, by Richard Shaw, in
Peritia (forthcoming).
Review of
Angels in Early Medieval England, by Richard Sowerby, in
Early Medieval Europe Vol. 26, No. 4 (2018), 565–567.
Review of
Bede’s Temple: An Image and Its Interpretation, by Conor O’Brien, in
The Journal of Theological Studies Vol. 68, No. 2 (2017), 836–8.
Review of
Bede and the End of Time, by Peter Darby, in
The Journal of Theological Studies Vol. 64, No. 2 (2013), 769–70.
