The O'Donohue Lives of the Codex Salmanticensis: A Return to the Question of Dating

The O'Donohue collection of Saints' Lives, preserved in a fourteenth-century manuscript, was dated by Richard Sharpe to the eighth or ninth century, but his conclusions have not been universally accepted. This paper first reviews the evidence of the Irish names in the Lives, which show Old Irish linguistic and orthographic features. It then discusses a hitherto overlooked feature of the Irish names in the manuscript: the retention of the gentilic maccu . Together, this evidence points to a date for the O'Donohue collection in the first half of the ninth century.