You won’t get better: Healing and enclosure in Adomnán’s Vita Columbae

Abstract

Unlike many hagiographers who proclaim the healing miracles performed by their saint at his or her tomb in order to attract pilgrims, Adomnán in his Life of Columba very deliberately declines to do so. His saint does heal lay people, but never on Iona. By rejecting the hagiographical tradition which draws the sick to the saint’s grave, Adomnán seeks to defend the clausura—the enclosed monastic space—of his community, and to exclude people and practices which would disrupt the spiritual bond between the monks and their abbot.