Noel Kissane's Saint Brigid of Kildare: Life, Legend and Cult traces devotion to Saint Brigid from the obscure beginnings of her cult in early medieval Ireland to the present day. The book is not structured, however, as a chronological survey of the cult but rather as a systematic study of the different kinds of evidence we can use to tell the story of that cult. The author analyzes the obvious material, such as lives of the saint, but also examines appearances of the saint in the liturgy, in church dedications, and in holy wells, which are catalogued geographically by county within Ireland and by country in Britain and Europe. As a result, the book has an almost antiquarian feel to it, as these geographical treatments repeatedly take over the main text and threaten to overwhelm the argument. However, the thesis shines through nonetheless, and it is a very important one. Kissane maintains that “St. Brigid was by far the most popular Irish saint outside Ireland” (297), in some cases even surpassing St. Patrick, and the mass of evidence Kissane musters leaves the reader in little doubt of the truth of this claim.

St. Brigid was supposedly born in what is now County Offaly, at some point in the late fifth or early sixth century—though these details, like much else regarding the saint, are disputed, as is the even more fundamental question of whether she lived at all. Scholars have debated whether Brigid existed as a real person, or whether she represents instead a euhemerized goddess of the same name, whose cult was simply absorbed into the Christian faith of the newly converted Irish in syncretic fashion. Well-known Celticists, such as Proinsias MacCana, have traditionally been sympathetic to the goddess theory. They point out that there is little contemporary evidence for the cult of the saint, since the first written sources to mention Brigid date from the seventh century, about two hundred years after her supposed lifetime, and they note that many aspects of devotion to Brigid, such as the cult of perpetual fire at her monastery of Kildare and her association with the ancient Irish agricultural festival of Imbolc, which coincides wither her feast on February 1, have a pagan cast to them. However, the preeminent scholar of early Irish hagiography Lisa Bitel has pointed out the converse, namely that there is little direct evidence for the cult of the goddess from which St. Brigid was supposedly conjured. Bitel believes instead that Brigid's later biographers attributed to her a variety of pagan attributes in an effort to make her cult more acceptable to an Irish public only lately won over to Christianity. Thus, Bitel's hypothesis is syncretism in the opposite direction: rather than a real goddess who produced an imaginary saint, she argues for, if not an imagined goddess, at least a somewhat shadowy one who gave a desirable pagan sheen to a real Christian saint.

Kissane splits the difference between these scholarly positions. He takes a more generous view of the surviving evidence for the cult of a fertility goddess named Brigid, but he also believes that a real person named Brigid lies at the heart of the later cult. The controversy over Brigid's status as a goddess is a theme that runs throughout the book, since many of the holy wells and other folkloric customs associated with Brigid would seem to derive from devotion to the earlier cult of the goddess, though it must be said that the reasoning here can verge on the circular, since much of the evidence for devotion to the goddess is derived from the cult of the saint. Still, the presence of elements in the saint's cult that cannot otherwise be explained, such as the prohibition against turning wheels on St. Brigid's feast, would seem to suggest a now-lost pagan origin. Given these murky aspects of devotion to the saint, one of Dr. Kissane's most striking findings is that St. Brigid underwent a comparatively recent resurgence in popularity in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in connection with the work of the Gaelic Revival, when interest in both the goddess and the saint was piqued among those who sought an “authentic” Irish identity in the remote Celtic past.

The bulk of Kissane's study is devoted to cataloguing every instance in which St. Brigid was venerated both in Ireland and abroad. In addition to providing a comprehensive chronological listing of every biography of the saint from the seventh century to the present, he has tracked down every church dedicated to St. Brigid, every mention of St. Brigid in a liturgical text, and seemingly every manifestation of St. Brigid in popular culture. The mass of detail is both impressive and, at times, overwhelming; yet lurking within the catalogue of liturgical office and church dedications, there is an important argument about the cult of Brigid: She was by far the most important female Irish saint not just in Ireland but throughout Europe, and, somewhat surprisingly, there are instances in which she outranks St. Patrick in importance. For example, several English monasteries, including Westminster, celebrated the feast of St. Brigid but not that of St. Patrick. Brigid is also attested throughout western Europe, from Scandinavia to Spain and Italy. In the specific case of the so-called Schottenklöster (Irish-founded monasteries) of Germany and Switzerland, Kissane argues that the widespread devotion to Brigid, who was primarily associated with the church of Kildare in Leinster, probably indicates something about the origins of many of the Irish religious who brought her cult with them to the continent.

Kissane has produced a fascinating compendium of evidence about Brigid that will serve the needs of scholars of medieval hagiography and liturgy and of modern popular religious devotion alike, and its many fascinating details will delight the less academic reader as well. Who knew, for example, that Oliver Cromwell, notorious in Ireland for his vigorous efforts to suppress an Irish rebellion, named his eldest daughter, born decades before he set foot in Ireland, Brigid? Alas, we have no record of whether, when she arrived in Ireland in 1651 as the wife of Cromwell's hardly less notorious general, Henry Ireton, her name caused any comment among the local inhabitants.