Dawson (D)’s original, stimulating, and important study treats the Patrician texts from Ireland before 1100 as a connected whole, beginning in the fifth century with Patrick’s own writings and continuing into the seventh and twelfth centuries. The texts, along with the oral traditions of local sites, created the cult of Patrick. D’s thesis is credible. The book offers a new understanding of the way devotion to Patrick developed in the early Middle Ages and opens new avenues for research.
D provides a holistic view of the development of the cult of Patrick through her reading of the sources, both familiar and less known. Patrick’s Confession and Epistola have been extensively studied as historical sources, and the Lives of Tírechán and Muirchú from the Book of Armagh in the seventh century have also received much attention. However, the later anonymous texts have scarcely been studied at all beyond Bieler’s critical edition (Four Latin Lives of St. Patrick, Dublin, 1971). D treats all the sources as responses to the institutional and devotional needs of their own times. Devotion to Patrick in 1100, for instance, was scarcely related to the primacy of Armagh as it had been in the seventh century. The later Lives are to be read in their own context. D considers other sources (hymns, legal literature, and the like), in Old Irish as well as Latin, and includes some references to Patrician sites in Ireland, but essentially the book deals with what it says it does: the Hiberno–Latin tradition.
The works of Patrick himself are the subject of D’s first chapter, along with comments on early material that established devotion to Saint Patrick. The Confessio remained the foundational text for all subsequent writing, but the later writers altered the Patrician material. D’s point is that the later writers of saints’ Lives have different aims from Patrick himself. Hagiographical writers, starting with Ultán’s lost Life, elide much of the detail Patrick includes and add much that is not found in the Confession, to show him as a saint worthy of devotion.
D devotes a chapter each to the seventh-century authors Tírechán and Muirchú, whose works appear in the Book of Armagh. Each chapter is grounded in the texts and deals with the author’s background, methodology, audience, and narrative structure and content. D includes several appendices that detail the literary and site-based sources for each of these writers. D’s treatment of Tírechán is especially enlightening. Tírechán’s work emerges as a sophisticated piece of historiography, “structured and purposeful” (33), reading Patrick through the lens of the ecclesiastical structure of seventh-century Ireland. Tírechán uses earlier literary sources and established oral traditions from Patrician sites, especially in Connaught. Thus, Tírechán contributes to the still-evolving Patrician cult. Muirchú is most concerned with showing Patrick as the patron of Armagh, and Armagh, consequently, as the head of the Irish church. Muirchú’s novel approach is to combine the format of continental hagiography, biblical modeling, and native Irish literary forms in a comprehensible narrative to establish Patrick’s position as the greatest Irish saint. Tírechán was interested in Patrick’s position in the ecclesiastical establishment, but Muirchú put his cult in the center of all Irish power structures.
The Patrician cult continued to develop after Tírechán and Muirchú. Chapter Four shows the development of the cult in Britain and the continent as well as in Ireland. The wider cult required that the sources change to meet the new situation. As part of the development of the cult, the Book of Armagh was assembled in the eighth century, including much new material. Here, as indeed throughout the book, D shows “(a)n appreciation of why certain elements of Patrick’s biography were prioritized by different communities at particular times…” (88). This is as good a summary of the book as any.
Chapter Five, the longest and most original chapter, is a long-overdue study of the texts in Bieler’s Four Latin Lives: the Vita Secunda and Quarta, and especially the Vita Tertia. D examines the Lives in the context of their original composition in the eighth century (putatively) and as they are extant in the MSS. These sources had the greatest influence over the later Patrician narrative and the Patrician cult before the rediscovery of the Book of Armagh in the nineteenth century. The texts were dynamically altered over time in response to the changing needs of the cult after the eighth century and are much more focused on Patrick’s miracles. In particular, the Vita Tertia (early ninth century) is a new Life for a new audience. The author portrays Patrick as the patron of all of Ireland and focuses especially on cultic centers outside of Armagh. Vita Secunda and Quarta, derived from a single source (“W”), are even less concerned with Patrick as the saint of Armagh. D shows how all the literary and cultic sources come together in the Irish language Vita Tripartita.
Dawson’s book is an important contribution to early Irish history and hagiographic literature. Previous scholarship has focused on Patrick’s writings and Muirchú and Tírechán. This book looks at the anonymous Lives in the context of the Hiberno–Latin literary tradition. They are not just appendages to the earlier writings but are part of the developing Patrician cult which appears as more complex and widespread than familiarity with Muirchú and Tírechán alone would suggest. These Lives are more nuanced and interesting than scholarship has allowed and are worthy of literary and historical study. Dawson’s book will stimulate further exciting research not only solely on the Patrician cult but also on other saints’ Lives from the Plummer and Heist collections.
There are some minor flaws. Brepols’s copy editing is not up to par. The bibliography (pp. 137–152) is not quite complete and can be confusing. However, there are no major difficulties for readers.
In summary, this is a work of significance in Patrician scholarship that will show its value for years to come.
