This collection gathers fifteen papers presented at “Meeting the Gentes—Crossing Boundaries: Columbanus and the Peoples of Post-Roman Europe,” a 2013 conference in Vienna. The fourteen hundredth anniversary of Columbanus’ death (d. 615) inspired several conferences on the saint. If all the volumes arising from these conferences are as excellent as this one, the scholarly world will be blessed.

The fifteen essays examine Columbanus's whole career, from his upbringing in Ireland to his monastic foundations and political maneuvering in Francia to his flight to Lombard Italy. Essays overlap but never bore. Three, for instance, consider the famous story of Columbanus disrupting a beer ritual to the god Woden. These papers forthrightly disagree on the meaning and historicity of the event—an in-person argument from the original conference captured on paper.

Many of the strongest papers concentrate on the earliest and latest periods of Columbanus's career. The essays on Ireland reveal how deeply Columbanus drew on Insular traditions: especially on the writings and stories surrounding the elusive sixth-century British abbot Gildas, whom Columbanus venerated. Columbanus's legacy among his immediate followers is also a focus. In my favorite piece, Albrecht Diem demonstrates that the anonymous author of the Regula cuiusdam patris (a forgotten monastic rule) was one of the schismatic monks who left Columbanus's monasteries in the first decade after the saint's death—probably the notorious Agrestius himself.

Finally, what is absent is as noticeable as what is present. The unnecessarily heated debate between the “Vienna School” and “Toronto School” split early medieval historians in recent decades. Yet, although the conference occurred at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, featured “Vienna School” authors, and examined “the peoples of Post-Roman Europe,” there is no reference to “ethnogenesis” and almost none to “ethnic identity.” That debate may be over.