Abbán

Abbán of Corbmaic (, ; d. 520?), also Eibbán or Moabba, was a saint and abbot. He is associated, first and foremost, with the Mag Arnaide (Moyarney or Adamstown, County Wexford, near New Ross). His order was, however, also connected to other churches elsewhere in Ireland, notably that of his alleged sister Gobnait.

==Sources== Three recensions of Abbán's Life survive, two in Latin and one in Irish. The Latin versions are found in the Codex Dublinensis and the Codex Salmanticensis, while the Irish version is preserved incomplete in two manuscripts: the Mícheál Ó Cléirigh's manuscript Brussels, Royal Library MS 2324–40, fos. 145b-150b and also the RIA, Stowe MS A 4, pp. 205–21. These Lives probably go back to a Latin exemplar written in ca. 1218 by the bishop of Ferns, Albin O'Molloy, who died in 1223. His interest in Abbán partly stemmed from the fact that Mag Arnaide lay within the diocese of Ferns, but as this was only a minor church in his time, more must have been involved. An episode which shows something of O'Molloy's personal attachment to Abbán's order is that where Abbán arrives in the area between Éile and Fir Chell, i.e. on the marches between Munster and Leinster: Abbán converts a man of royal rank from the area and baptises his son. O'Molloy is known to have been a native of this area, but his own commentary as apparently preserved in the Dublin Life identifies the connection more nearly: "I who gathered together and wrote the Life am a descendant [nepos] of that son" However, the immediate circumstances which prompted the composition of the Life are likely to have been political, relating to the Norman presence in the diocese of Ferns. To support his case, O'Molloy made much of Abbán's wider connections to other churches and saints, making him travel all across the country and in the case of the anecdote about Abingdon (see below), even inventing tradition.