OMNIUM SANCTORUM HIBERNIAE

Tag: Book Reviews

  • Women Writers on the Irish Saints

    March 8 is International Women’s Day and so today I wish to acknowledge some of the women writers on the Irish saints whose work I have encountered during research for this blog. I read a good deal of the Victorian popular religious press and am struck by how many opportunities publications such as the Irish Monthly, the Irish Rosary, the Messenger of the Sacred Heart etc. provided for women writers to have their voices heard.  One, whose work I am delighted to reprint here at the blog, is “Magdalen Rock”, the pen name of County Tyrone schoolteacher Ellen Beck (1858-1924). Miss Beck lived in (and indeed rarely left) the village of The Rock, near Dungannon where she had been teaching in the local school since the age of sixteen. Her writings helped to transcend this rather insular existence as I have seen her work syndicated in American and Australian newspapers. I particularly enjoy the monthly feasts series she wrote for the Irish Rosary magazine and you can find her Saints of March article on the blog here.

    The research for my new blog on the Irish Martyrs has introduced me to another lady writer of this era, “Laura Grey”, which I suspect might also be a pseudonym. Unfortunately I have been unable to find out anything about this author but I have one of her papers at my other site here. A writer called Rosaleen O’Neil also wrote very competently about the Irish martyrs in 1905 and I was disappointed not to find any further papers by her or any other information on the woman herself. The two articles I have found can be accessed here.

    Helena Walsh Concannon (1878-1952) was a rather better-known Irish woman writer whose output went well beyond the popular periodical press. A native of Maghera, County Derry she published over twenty books, some (sorry, feminists!) under her married name of Mrs Thomas Concannon. Her husband, Tomás Bán Ó Conceanainn, was a distinguished member of the Gaelic League who shared his wife’s deep Catholic faith and her interests in nationalist politics and Irish history. Helena published a number of articles and books on the Irish saints including Saint Patrick: his Life and Mission in 1931, chapter XVI of which is entitled “Saint Patrick and the Women of Ireland”.  Here she looks at how Saint Patrick evangelized the women of Ireland and the part played by women in his wider missionary endeavours. A century ago she also produced the Women of ‘Ninety-Eight, a study of the female personalities associated with the 1798 Rebellion, long before women’s history was fashionable.  

    Moving on in time brings me to a woman whose work I have on my bookshelves but sadly have not made much use of here at the blog. The Saints of Ireland by Mary Ryan D’Arcy was first published by the Irish American Cultural Institute in 1974. When I read on the back cover that “over the 30-year period of research, her file cards, books and papers threatened to evict the family”,  I immediately recognized a woman after my own heart. Mrs D’Arcy’s book contains eight chapters beginning with Early Irish Saints and ending with Modern Irish Missionaries. Along the way she deals with the Irish saints in Britain and Europe as well as the Irish martyrs of the Reformation period. In the introduction she tells us that her interest started with a prayer book from the old country containing a Litany of the Irish Saints and a desire to know more about these strange and largely unknown names. I have a particular respect for the fact that in a pre-Internet age, she ‘delved into the record of Irish achievement, sorting through libraries in a dozen American cities and carrying on an immense correspondence with scholars and researchers throughout the U.S., in Ireland, England and on the Continent’. No wonder her book required three decades of research!

    Although today is a ‘feast’ on the secular calendar it is my hope that these women writers of the past are now enjoying the company of the Irish saints in heaven whom they honoured here on earth.

    Content Copyright © Omnium Sanctorum Hiberniae 2012-2021. All rights reserved.

  • The Quest for Celtic Christianity

    Below is a review of a valuable work by Professor Donald Meek,  a native Scots Gaelic speaker from the Island of Tiree, on the modern ‘Celtic Christianity’ movement.  His book exposes the differences between the popular view of the ‘Celtic Church’ as an anti-authoritarian, eco-friendly, woman-friendly, alternative Christianity and the view of modern scholarship which places it in a very different context. I also appreciated that as a Christian Meek is rightly concerned about some of the dubious undercurrents which flow into ‘Celtic Christianity’, his chapter on Alexander Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica was particularly eye-opening. Some have criticized the polemical tone of the book, but I found the writer’s irritation at having his culture appropriated by outsiders who have no understanding of it perfectly reasonable. Whilst they may have been responsible for creating many of the myths which the contemporary movement still embraces, nineteenth-century Celtic enthusiasts at least took the trouble to study the indigenous languages of these islands and were able to engage with the sources at first-hand.  The Quest for Celtic Christianity is now only one of a growing number of critiques on modern ‘Celtic Christianity’, but for me it is still the best.

    “The Quest for Celtic Christianity” by Donald Meek
    review by Dr Michael Newton
    One of the difficulties with being a minority culture is that it is hard to correct the misrepresentations which are created by the dominant culture, which has greater prestige, more authority and better means of communicating its ideas. As a result, minority cultures often find themselves the subject of inaccurate stereotypes. Sometimes the false image of the Other is created in order for a people to prove to themselves that they are superior to it, and other times it is an expression of a lost purity still retained by a more “primitive” people. Whatever the agenda that causes such manipulations of facts, it is no excuse for ignoring what can be learned from thorough and objective research.
    These are the issues which inform Professor Donald Meek’s excellent new book. Most branches of Christianity have seen congregation sizes shrink during the last century, and they are responding to this by making their church experience more appealing. Some of them are borrowing or adapting symbols, texts or rituals from other faiths or places. It is in this way that numerous groups are trying to invoke “Celtic Spirituality” or “Celtic Christianity” in their religious communities.
    Meek shows in detail, however, that the truth is usually lost in the Celtic mist. The book works on two chronological fronts, revealing the realities of the Christianity that the leaders of the church actually practised and exposing the creation of the mythical Celts, especially in the 19th century, which is the source of so many modern misconceptions.
    He points out a number of ways in which the false image of the Celts is created and sold to the credulous. By constant recourse to images and woolly concepts, the marketers can be highly imaginative in their definition of Celtic. By ignoring the history of the development of Christianity, they forget the bigger picture and ascribe undeserved virtues to the Celts. By selective and dubious use of English translations they avoid contact with primary texts in Celtic languages. Since most of these new sects flourish in far-away societies, they avoid direct contact with real Celts and Celtic communities.
    Actually, the earliest abuse of the myth of Celtic Christianity was during the Reformation, when churches wanted to find precedents for their break with the Catholic Church in Rome. This ancient predecessor, they wanted to claim, kept itself “pure” while Rome became corrupt and degenerate. Unfortunately for the myths, which still persist to the present day among many Protestants, early Christianity everywhere adapted to a degree to secular life. There was no united and independent Church in Celtic lands, nor did the Church in Celtic countries differ in crucial matters of doctrine from the rest.
    Just as many people are mistaking as “Celtic” many of the common features of pre- industrial Europe, so too are people attributing an unmerited uniqueness to the so-called Celtic Church and to Celtic saints. But these features of Celts and “Celtic Christianity”, such as visions and psychic phenomena, can be found in the stories of Saint’s Lives throughout Christendom as well as throughout the folk traditions of rural Europe. And just like the British Isles, Christianity as practised at the popular level all around Europe (and the world, for that matter) was a mixture of orthodoxy and pre-Christian practices.
    On the other hand, too few are willing to acknowledge aspects of saints or of the church which are not so appealing in modern times. The stories of saints’ lives emphasise their asceticism, their ability to destroy enemies through curses and violence, their preoccupation with sin and their uncompromising war against paganism.
    It is no surprise that Meek makes comparisons with Native America, whose spiritual traditions have been misrepresented, commercialised and sold by spiritual opportunists. Native communities seldom profit from this business, and instead see outsiders take control of their traditions and proclaim themselves to be more authentic than actual spiritual leaders. Unlike many Native Americans, however, too few qualified Celtic scholars have attempted to present the historical and cultural realities to the general public such as Meek does in this commendable work.

  • Feastdays of the saints: A history of Irish martyrologies

    Below is a book review  by Columban specialist Brian Lacey on a history of Irish Martyrologies by Pádraig Ó Riain. It was first posted in 2009 on my former blog and contains some useful background information on the historic Irish calendars of the saints:

    Pádraig Ó Riain FEASTDAYS OF THE SAINTS: A HISTORY OF IRISH MARTYROLOGIES Subsidia hagiographica 86, Société des Bollandists, Bruxelles, 2006. Pp. 416 + xxvii. Price 75 Euro. ISBN 978-2-87365-018-6.
    As Pádraig Ó Riain points out, in the early ninth century the monastery of Tallaght was known, along with that other well known Dublin place – Finglas, as one of ‘the two eyes of Ireland’. Tallaght is where we must start to look in any investigation in Ireland of the tradition of writings about saints called martyrologies. A martyrology, as Ó Riain tells us at the outset of this book, ‘is a list of names of saints, arranged according to the days of the year on which they died’. Usually these lists are ‘drawn from all over the Christian world’ and sometimes they have extra details such as the place where the saint is said to have died. These details can be of immense value for the understanding of both religious and political events in a local context.
    The earliest text of this kind known to us (the so-called Hieronymian martyrology drawn up either in southern France or northern Italy, but already with several Irish associations) dates to the late sixth or early seventh centuries, although it was clearly based on older lists and information. Having followed a slow and circuitous route, a shortened version of that text arrived in Tallaght around 828, as Ó Riain has newly worked out. However, by then it had accumulated – like a glacier that picks up traces of the landscapes over which it passes – influences from monasteries in Northumbria, Iona and Bangor (Co. Down). The copy that arrived in Tallaght had probably been deliberately requested as Ó Riain suggests, in response to a decision made at a church council in Aachen in 817 that every monastery should have a martyrology from which would be read out the daily list of saints. Once the copy arrived it immediately spawned two other texts, known to us now as the Martyrology of Tallaght and the metrical Maryrology of Óengus, which stand together at the head of the surviving Irish martyrological tradition. These were composed according to Ó Riain’s persuasive arguments in that order between 829 and 833, probably by the same author, Óengus a monk and bishop at Tallaght who is said in some sources to have been the son of Oengoba and the grandson of Oiblén.
    The Martyrology of Tallaght was, in origin, what we might call a working document (although it may have been venerated later as a relic, at Lorrha in Co. Tipperary) to which a number of local Irish ‘saints’ names were added, particularly those of figures linked with the contemporary church reform movement associated with the céile Dé. The Martyrology of Óengus was, however, a literary masterpiece: a sophisticated rendering into disciplined verse quatrains in Irish of the main elements of the earlier prose text. It was, as Ó Riain’s book points out, the first text of its kind anywhere in the Christian world. In an Armagh scriptorium in the late twelfth century, the already fairly lengthy text acquired a preface as well as extensive commentary and glosses. Before that, in the eleventh century, a copy of the original poem had been brought to the Irish Benedictine monastery in Regensburg (one of the so-called Schottenkloster) where it continued to influence other continental texts.
    Meanwhile, around the year 1000, a copy of a popular continental martyrology (the Martyrology of Ado, composed c. 855) had been made in a monastery in Metz, where, under the direction of its Irish abbot, the names of a number of Irish saints were added. A copy of that text was later made in Cologne (in a church also with strong Irish connections) from where it was brought to Dublin, most probably accompanied by a collection of relics for the foundation of Christchurch cathedral c.1030. It seems that this is ‘Dublin’s oldest known book’, as Prof. Ó Riain explained in a lecture to this Society in January 2004. Ó Riain teases out all the links and connections between these various texts and reconstructs their individual influences on the later Irish martyrologies: the Martyrology of Gorman, the Martyrology of Drummond, the Martyrology of Turin, the Martyrology of Cashel and, last in the series, the early seventeenth-century Martyrology of Donegal. He also places all these literary works in their appropriate ecclesiastical and cultural settings.
    This is a wonderful work of painstaking original and revisionary scholarship. The book, which is aimed in the first instance, of course, at a very specialist readership, nevertheless operates on several levels. It provides us with the first inter-connected history of the entire group of martyrologies from Ireland as well as those relevant places abroad that had strong Irish associations in medieval times. Indeed the book shows us that Irish influence on this genre of writing at a European level was quite extensive. The book also analyses the individual histories of each of the relevant texts. The evidence for Ó Riain’s new ideas and interpretations is presented in the very great detail necessary to explicate the thousand years of that tradition plus the several hundred years of subsequent study by modern ecclesiastical and secular scholars. The setting out of this detail might possibly deter the more general reader who is interested in these texts mainly for the light they throw on local studies, however that would be a great mistake. The excellent structure of the book – with each chapter divided into smaller sub-sections – means that such detailed passages can be passed over, if desired, without the reader having to lose the thread of the main narrative. In addition, throughout the book Ó Riain provides summaries and chapter conclusions, which can be read independently of the close arguments. His final epilogue, in which he summarizes the whole story again, is an epitome of clarity for such a complex subject over such a long period of history. In the appendices he also provides chronologies and diagrams that, once again, simplify and clarify the complex arguments involved in working out his overall thesis.
    Some of the chapters in this book are based on material previously published, both in Ireland and abroad. Those individual studies, however, have been revised and updated here. Together with the work being presented for the first time, this means that the book provides us with the first-ever comprehensive account of the whole subject. As Ó Riain points out, new editions are badly needed of several of the main martyrological texts that would take into account the results of modern scholarship. Until such editions appear this book also offers a guide as to how much we can rely on the existing versions.
    Pádraig Ó Riain has previously given us many valuable studies in the field of Irish hagiography and hagiology: his important edition of the Irish saints’ genealogies and his analysis of the dossier relating to Saint Finbarr being only two significant examples. The two pages in the bibliography of this book that list Ó Riain’s own relevant works are, again, only a sample of his industry. Paradoxically, for someone who has done so much to explain what the medieval writings about our saints actually mean, Ó Riain’s work can be characterised, in some respects at least, as iconoclastic, in that he frequently deconstructs the engineered medieval images in order to show us what really lies behind them.
    New books dealing mainly with the early medieval period in Irish history are relatively rare. In that sense it is, at least, a double pleasure to be able to welcome such a fascinating, readable and erudite account of this subject and to congratulate the Society of Bollandists, which since the seventeenth century has dedicated itself to the scientific study of saints’ Lives, for such an excellent publication.
    Brian Lacey

    Content Copyright © Omnium Sanctorum Hiberniae 2012-2015. All rights reserved.