Tomás Ó Carragáin is spearheading a generational leap forward in the archaeology of early medieval Christianity. His previous monograph surveying the physical evidence for churches in early medieval Ireland (Ó Carragáin Reference Ó Carragáin2010) showed what could be done with a rigorous, interdisciplinary approach to standing buildings. In this substantial follow-up, those buildings can now be placed into their enviably well-documented archaeological context. Both volumes show how much can be deduced about the social context of the early Church, even with relatively few well-excavated church sites to draw upon.
Few European countries can boast the richness of evidence for the early medieval period as Ireland—as many as 7600 churches by Ó Carragáin's estimation, and few scholars can as easily navigate the various disciplines needed to access these data in full. Having covered the architectural evidence in his previous monograph, here, ecclesiastical landscapes are established using the latest data from excavations and aerial and geophysical survey, alongside critical readings of the legal, genealogical and hagiographic texts and toponymy. The book is another output of the Making Christian Landscapes project (University College Cork), which began with funding from the Irish Heritage Council in 2008 and has led to various important publications, including an edited volume that places Irish case studies in their European context (Ó Carragáin & Turner Reference Ó Carragáin and Turner2016). This book therefore benefits from the results of a number of PhDs and other published studies, and includes an appendix by Paul MacCotter on the methodology for reconstructing territorial divisions.
Landscape-based approaches to archaeology have proliferated in recent decades, and so it is surprising that a volume like this has never been attempted in Ireland. Even here, as the author stresses, this can be only a preliminary study. The data are drawn from four case study areas in east, central, south and south-west Ireland. Each region presents its own advantages, from a wealth of large-scale, well-dated, developer-led excavations of settlements and burials in the eastern lowlands, to decades of targeted fieldwork on upstanding early Christian monuments in the Dingle and Iveragh peninsulas. Diversity and regionality, rather than the search for universal laws and predictive patterns, is the overarching result. Yet the focus on ecclesiastical estates, rather than more regionally contingent site morphology, reveals the ways in which Christianity became pervasive to early medieval Irish life, by integrating them with other evidence for settlement and economics.
The argumentation is framed chronologically, beginning with a critical new reading of the conversion to Christianity, in which the institution is said to have developed ‘in situ’. In a field still shaped by romantic notions of an Age of Saints, where the new faith was implanted by wandering Celtic missionaries, the focus of the first two chapters on well-dated cemeteries and settlements shows how the documented early church foundations were incorporated into the kin-based social structure and a diffuse rural population. This explains the insinuation of aspects of the antecedent sacred landscape and rituals, including seasonal festivals, into the lived experience of early Christianity in Ireland. Preliminary findings suggest that there was a divide maintained between royal centres and the earliest churches, but also that the earliest foundations cluster on royal lands in the east and north-east.
Covering the period AD 550–800, Chapters 3 and 4 are the data-heavy core of the book, in which the evidence for ecclesiastical estates proliferates across disciplines and can be more readily placed alongside the increasingly visible and abundant settlement evidence in the form of ringforts and cashels (stone forts). The study begins with core ecclesiastical landholdings, which were carved from royal lands, but which continued to be set apart from royal centres to avoid impinging on their estates. This is followed by a study of ‘lesser churches’—a catch-all term for a wide variety of foundations other than those of the ruling kin-group—ranging from small family chapels and proprietary churches to monasteries and including several ‘classic’ sites such as Caherlehillan and Reask (both Co. Kerry).
The key to this project is the establishment of territorial boundaries and mapping of sites in relation to these. The author is frank about the limitations of this evidence, which is back-projected from later medieval sources. The data for one south-west case study area, Corcu Duibne, are presented here as a useful gazetteer of all church sites, alongside an appendix on reconstructing medieval land division in this region. Despite the full presentation of this region's dataset, the boundaries so exhaustively mapped throughout the book remain theoretical, and those of us less well informed on the nuances of later medieval parish and townland formation in Ireland will always have a nagging doubt as to whether these ‘royal’ and ‘ecclesiastical’ estates can truly be taken back as far as they have been here. Still, the argument is that when these hypothetical boundaries are proposed, they can help arrange the data and pose new questions on the relationship between the Church and wider society as they took shape in these formative centuries. Useful statistical analyses on church density and its relationship to contemporaneous farmsteads are presented, which will be important benchmarks against which to test future work.
Two relatively short chapters follow, in which we see a reduction in the evidence for new church foundations in the period AD 800–1100. Rather than blaming this on the Vikings, one could see it as a normalisation—a trimming away of smaller churches as kin-groups were suppressed through the growth of stronger kings. Importantly, the Irish evidence forms a counterpoint to the contemporaneous English minster church model in that there is little evidence either for secularisation of church estates, or for the reduction of the power of monasteries. High crosses, round towers and mortared stone churches are all innovations of this period, showing that more wealth was redirected to fewer churches at this time. Unlike in England and France, there is surprisingly little evidence for parochialisation and centralisation of burial in this period, just as there is little evidence for castellation and nucleation of settlement. Ó Carragáin makes a strong case that this situation is not unique to Ireland, and it is the much-debated teleological model of ‘feudalisation’ (or manorialisation) that needs revision: “the evidence should prompt us to alter our models, or develop new ones, and in doing so, an important imaginative challenge will be to question long-held assumptions about cultural evolution and progress” (p. 223).
These are only some of the insights from this complex and rich volume, which will reward repeated visits. Credit must also go to Cork University Press for strong editorial control in light of a proliferation of images and cross-references, alongside the sharp colour photography and clearly legible line drawings throughout. The book is very clearly aimed at an archaeological readership, but its insights on this critical period should reverberate more widely.
