Introduction to the project
Patrick of Ireland is a popular saint who is especially well-known for the celebrations around the day of his presumed death on March 17. What is less known is that St Patrick was a historical personage, a missionary and bishop in fifth century Ireland, and a writer of letters, two which survive until today. These are the two texts known as Confessio and Epistola (the latter is also known by the longer title Epistola ad milites Corotici). Patrick's two letters are generally categorised as epistles or open letters, meaning they are not intended to address one person alone, but a larger audience. The Epistola is a letter pronouncing excommunication against a certain Coroticus and his men, while the Confessio is a text with a strong autobiographical tendency in which St Patrick tries to justify his life's work and his mission, in that sense, an apologia pro vita sua. Patrick's epistles are very important historical texts. They are the only contemporary sources for the life of the historical Patrick and his Christian mission to Ireland, and they are two of the few surviving contemporary texts that inform our knowledge of fifth-century Irish and British history. Furthermore, his epistles also have much to reveal about mobility, of people and ideas, shedding light in particular on the importation of ideas from the Roman empire into Ireland.
The Royal Irish Academy's Saint Patrick's Confessio Hypertext Stack project launched in 2011 made a variety of resources related to the historical Patrick and both epistles freely available for research, including facsimile images of the manuscripts, text-critical editions and translations. Roman Bleier worked in 2011 on the Saint Patrick's Confessio Hypertext Stack project and found it would be useful for text-structural research to create electronic transcriptions of each manuscript witness. During his PhD at Trinity College Dublin he created such transcriptions under the supervision of Professor Seán Duffy using the encoding standard of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and following a documentary encoding approach.