PASCHAL CONTROVERSYDuffy, Seán. Ireland in the Middle Ages. Dublin: MacMillan,
1997.
Ellis, Stephen. Ireland in the Age of the Tudors 1447–1603.
London: Longman, 1998.
Frame, Robin. Colonial Ireland, 1169–1369. Dublin: Helicon,
1981.
Lydon, James. Ireland in the Later Middle Ages. Dublin: Gill
and MacMillan, 2003.
Lydon, James, ed. Law and Disorder in Thirteenth-century
Ireland: The Dublin Parliament of 1297. Dublin: Four Courts
Press, 1997.
Richardson, H.G. and Sayles, G.O. The Irish Parliament in the
Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1952.
Otway-Ruthven, A.J. A History of Medieval Ireland. 3d ed. New
York: Barnes and Noble, 1993.
See alsoCentral Government; Chief Governors
PASCHAL CONTROVERSY
The earliest Christians, being converted Jews, fol-
lowed the Jewish practice of observing the day on
which the Paschal lamb was slaughtered at Passover,
which was the 14th day of the Jewish lunar First
Month, Nisan. By the second century Christians of
Asia Minor kept Nisan 14, irrespective of what day
of the week it fell on, thereby acquiring the name of
“Quartodecimans,” later to become a term of anath-
ema. The paradox of a Jewish-Christian practice,
traced by its adherents back to the Apostle John and
acknowledged even by its opponents to be the older
practice in the Church, subsequently being declared
a heresy was not lost on the later Irish and English
churches, in which controversialists (including the
7th–c. Roman curia) professed to detect residual
traces of the practice.
By the time Christianity reached Ireland in 431–432,
Christians everywhere had agreed that Easter should
be kept on a Sunday, following the 14th day of the
First Month (luna XIV), after the spring equinox. These
early Christians, following the practices of Greek-
speaking gentiles, also supposed that paschaderived
frompaschein“to suffer,” and therefore concluded that
Easter denoted the Passion, rather than the Resurrec-
tion. The combination of these uncertainties with the
fact that churches in Rome and Alexandria (and else-
where too) differed in their methods of calculating luna
XIVand the First Month, as well as the correct date
of the equinox, led to the situation in which churches
in different parts of the Christian world celebrated
Easter Sunday on different dates.
Stark divergences in 444 and again in 455 between
the Roman and Alexandrian cycles led Pope Leo to
ask his archdeacon, Hilarus, to commission a new
table, which was drawn up by the Aquitanian mathe-
matician Victorius and published in 457. Victorius’s
incompetence made an awkward situation impossible,
and the result was chaos. Two advantages of his table,
however, enabled it to secure widespread adherence:
it was a perpetual cycle of 532 years (running from
C.E. 28 to C.E. 559), and it followed familiar Roman
practice by starting the year on January 1. Although
Pope John I commissioned another study in 529 with
a view to solving the persisting problems, Victorius’s
faulty tables were declared the official tables for the
Gallican church in 541 (significantly enough, 84 years
after their first appearance). While Pope John’s
attempted reform resulted in the publication in 525 of
the 19-year tables of Dionysius Exiguus (which ran
for 95 years from 532–626) based on (the correct)
Alexandrian principles, Victorius’s tables continued to
be used for several centuries afterward.
It is not certain which Easter cycles were introduced
into the fifth-century Irish church, but it may be
assumed that Palladius introduced whatever cycle was
prevalent in Gaul in the 430s (either an 84-year cycle
or an early version of the Alexandrian 19-year
“Metonic” cycle championed in the 390s by Ambrose
of Milan), while St. Patrick (supposedly active in Ireland
at around the same time as Palladius, or perhaps a
generation or so later), would, in all likelihood, have
introduced a form of the 84-year Easter cycle then in
use by the British church. Victorius’s tables were cer-
tainly known in Ireland by the sixth century, and when
Columbanus of Bangor traveled from Ireland to Gaul
circa 590 his realization that they were the standard
tables there, apparently sanctioned by Rome (because
archdeacon Hilarus had since succeeded Leo as Pope),
occasioned his famous first letter addressed to Pope
Gregory I—“a letter equally remarkable for baroque
Latinity and studied insolence”—in which he damned
the Aquitainian’s tables by declaring that they had been
dismissed by Irish computists and scholars as being
“more worthy of ridicule and pity than of authority.”
Columbanus told Gregory that his fellow countrymen
used an 84-year Easter table and a related tract De
ratione paschali attributed to Anatolius, Bishop of
Laodicea, in modern Syria († c.282). The table was
apparently used by all churches in Ireland by that time,
and it remained in use by the community of Iona (off
the western coast of Scotland) until 716, after which
it disappeared without trace. Anatolius, for his part,
was cited by controversialists throughout the sixth and
seventh centuries (though some suspected the text was
a forgery). The rediscovery and publication of the
long-lost “Irish 84” in 1985 has for the first time
allowed a correct reconstruction of the historical Irish
Easter dates, and thereby cleared up many misconcep-
tions about the controversy.
Papal suspicions of Irish Easter practices came to a
head in 628–629, when Pope Honorius I addressed a
letter to the Irish clergy, admonishing them for their