Our Venerable Mother Osmanna of Brittany, Hermitess near Saint-Brieuc
Life
Osmanna of Brittany was an Irish woman who, by tradition, was descended from a noble family and left her homeland for the continent to live a consecrated life in solitude. She is commemorated as an anchoress who settled in Lesser Brittany in north-western France and reposed near Saint-Brieuc about the year 650. Her commemoration falls on September 9.
The surviving accounts of her life are late and contain, as her hagiographers themselves acknowledged, a mixture of obscurities and legendary material; some scholars regard the narrative as largely unverifiable. What is consistently transmitted is that she was an Irish virgin who pursued an eremitic life in Brittany and was venerated there and at several centers in France.
Contributions & Legacy
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Life
According to the tradition preserved in the martyrologies and in Butler's Lives of the Saints, Osmanna was descended from an illustrious family in Ireland and retired to France to live in a state of virginity. She fixed her residence in Lesser Brittany, where she served God in solitude with great fervor as an anchoress.
Later accounts add narrative detail that the earliest notices lack: that she fled Ireland to avoid an arranged marriage, that she lived with a single female attendant in woodland, and that a local bishop instructed her in the Christian faith and baptized her. The same accounts attribute to her miracles of healing, including restoring sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and speech to the mute. Because these elements appear only in the fuller and later legend, they are transmitted as tradition rather than as documented fact.
Relics & Shrines
For several centuries a large part of her relics was kept in a shrine within the abbatial church of Saint-Denis near Paris, in a chapel dedicated under her patronage. Part of the relics was profaned and dispersed by Calvinists in 1567, and what remained at the abbey was removed during the French Revolution in 1793. Her veneration was observed at Paris, Saint-Brieuc, and Le Mans.
