ADAMNAN or ADOMNAN (c. 624-704), Irish saint and historian, was born at Raphoe, Donegal, Ireland. In 679 he was elected abbot of Hy or Iona, being ninth in succession from the founder, St. Columba. In 686, while on a visit to King Aldfrith of Northumbria he was led to adopt the Roman rules on the date of Easter and on the tonsure, but failed to enforce the change upon his monks.
We owe to Adamnan two valuable works, the anecdotic Life of St. Columba, preserving the authentic traits of the saint, and the De locis sanctis, an account of Arculf's travels in the Holy Land, which, in the longer version of Bede, was a kind of guide-book to the holy places in Palestine throughout the middle ages.
Adamnan is sometimes credited with Adamnan's Vision, the Irish version of which is in a i2th century MS. in Dublin.
MSS. of the original Arculf-Adamnan Bibliography.-Thirteen MSS. of the original Arculf-Adamnan narrative exist, and fully ioo of Bede's abridgment of the former ; the most important, containing all the plans, are (I) Berne, Canton Library, 582, of 9th century ; (2) Paris, National Library, Lat. 13,048, of 9th century ; a third ms., London, Brit. Mus., Cotton, Tib. D.V., of 8th-9th centuries, though damaged by fire and lacking the illustra tions, is of value for the text, being the oldest of all. The best edition is that of Tobler in Itinera et Descriptiones Terrae Sanctae (1877) ; we may also mention that of 187o, by Delpit, in his Essai sur les anciens pelerinages h Jerusalem. See further Delpit's remarks upon Arculf in the same work, 260-304 ; Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geog raphy, i. 131-41 (1897), and J. L. Macpherson, Arculfus' Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1899). The Life of St. Columba was edited by J. T. Fowler (1894).
