Legend relates that Christ showed Patrick himself the site of what was to become a pilgrimage destination: Saint Patrick's Purgatory, a well or cave on Station Island, in Lough Derg in Donegal, Ireland. The first record of the site's existence is, however, the Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii, written between 1179 and 1185 by H. of Saltrey, an English Cistercian, who describes the visit to the Purgatory by an Irish knight, Owein, and the visions of purgatory and paradise he experienced there. The Tractatus was a popular text, surviving in Latin in many manuscripts, and in multiple vernacular translations and adaptations, such as Marie de France's Espurgatoire seint Patriz. For the rest of the Middle Ages, the Purgatory was a well-documented pilgrimage site, attested in numerous accounts and noted in literary works. With the contemporary Visio Tnugdali, the Tractatus and related works on Saint Patrick's Purgatory were influential in shaping and representing medieval ideals of the afterlife.

The present volume begins with an extensive introduction, essentially a monograph, by Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, on the Tractatus and the history of the pilgrimage, and including an extensive analysis of the Tractatus’s complex composition. The volume's second part is a collection of sources, beginning with the text of the Tractatus and continuing with accounts and testimonies related to the site from the twelfth through the sixteenth century. These include excerpts from the historians Gerald of Wales, Peter of Cornwall, Jacques de Vitry, Roger of Wendover, Matthew Paris, and Ranulf Higden; references in Cistercian, Dominican, and Franciscan miracle collections and saints’ lives; an extensive series of accounts by pilgrims and observers from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in Latin, Catalan, French, Italian, and English; and materials on the transformation of the site in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries into a penitential destination. Vernacular adaptations and translations of the Tractatus, such as that by Marie de France, are not included, as they are usually well represented in other forms. In several instances, the editions are reproduced from editions already published by Maggioni. The rest are printed from other existing editions. The Tractatus itself, which does not exist yet in a critical edition based on the entire manuscript tradition, is reprinted from the 1991 edition by Robert Easting. Each text has a thorough introduction by Maggioni, and, in the case of the closure and transformation of the site, by Paolo Taviani. All the sources are provided with Italian translations prepared by Maggioni and Roberto Tinti, except, again, for the section on the closure, which was done by Taviani, who also provided an epilogue.

Given the importance of the site and how well known it was at the time, the present collection of texts will be useful for scholars interested in the cultural history of purgatory, pilgrimage, and the pilgrimage to the Purgatory of Saint Patrick. Perhaps the most valuable are the pilgrimage accounts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, since several are extended accounts, and they appear in a range of original languages, accompanied in the volume by useful Italian translations. Although specialists already have access to the editions, given that most are reprints, the introductory section by Maggioni on the Tractatus and pilgrimage, and the section by Taviani on the closure of the site are stand-alone studies, significant additions to the literature. The other use to which such collections often lend themselves—namely, for teaching and for introductory research for those who do not read Latin or medieval vernaculars—is limited in this case to those who read Italian. There are also limits for more advanced research, as is often the case with collections of excerpts, because of the difficulty in placing each excerpt within the context of its original source. The introductions help greatly in this regard, but the part that the excerpt plays within a work is secondary to the collection of excerpts, and the collection may not reflect how an individual author knew a topic or understood its tradition.