There are many admirable aspects to this book, which is a pleasure to read; it is, for example, admirably compendious, setting out to address all aspects of St Brigid from the textual evidence, to the history, to the cult down to the present day.
The introduction justifies study of Brigid on the basis that her cult was extremely successful; in this sense Brigid was genuinely a phenomenon, widely-venerated both in Ireland and beyond. That a woman should attract such attention in early medieval Ireland calls for explanation, and this is the raison d’être of the book. By the end of the book the success of Brigid's cult has been largely explained, so the purpose of the book has been achieved.
Chapter ii outlines the historical context. Having discussed the essential unknowability of Brigid's dates the author settles on c. 452–517 ad. This chapter addresses all the areas of life that are relevant to the saint's career. This is not, however, intended to be an academic book; the author gives some footnotes but they do not provide the full references to supporting evidence appropriate to scholarly research. As a result, for scholars of Irish history this chapter on ‘Saint Brigid's Ireland’ is problematic in that it makes a number of generalised statements not supported in scholarship; for example, in suggesting that Brigid probably never learnt to read or write, the author comments: ‘Nor, apparently, did any of the other holy women of the period’, a statement for which there are available counter-examples, such as female saints of late antiquity like Melania the Younger and Demetrias (albeit distant geographically and probably in social status). More important, the author does not deal with the difficulties involved in taking surviving Irish legal texts at face value, given the problems with dating this material and understanding its relation to the reality of social organisation in early medieval Ireland. A few more signals of uncertainty and the problems surrounding interpretation of the laws would have been welcome. Overall, the author is slightly naïve also in his use of hagiography; for example, moving from the statement that some of the Lives of St Brigid emphasise that her father was a nobleman to saying ‘So he may well have been a royal lord’, when stress on the noble birth of a saint was a hagiographical topos, and the evidential value of a twelfth-century Life on this point is effectively nil. The section on the arrival of Christianity is unsurprisingly problematic; the author acknowledges but then by-passes major scholarly debates to suggest, for example, that Brigid probably took the veil ‘in Patrick's later lifetime and after his active mission’. It is, however, true that if the author had adhered strictly to what is known for certain about the historical context in which Brigid lived (if she did exist), the chapter on the historical background would have had very little to say, and the author adduces a broad range of the available evidence, usefully including archaeological evidence.
Chapter iii addresses historiography, and covers all writings about Brigid from the earliest hagiography through to the present day, in a clear and comprehensive manner. This survey of writing about Brigid will be useful for both scholars and non-academic readers.
Chapter iv begins with an explanation of the genre of hagiography, its purpose and methodology. The author notes a ‘theological undercurrent’ in Cogitosus’ Life but gives no further discussion of this. This chapter contains a useful survey of the important information contained in the Lives (for example, the description of the church at Kildare in Cogitosus’ Life) and a comparison of the accounts that the various Lives give of Brigid.
Chapter v deals with the biography and legend of the saint. The author discusses the possibility that Brigid was a pagan goddess transformed into a saint, and reviews scholarship that has proposed that the Christian saint never existed, rejecting this hypothesis to conclude that there was probably an original pagan cult site at Kildare that was subsequently converted to Christian use; he thinks it likely that the Christian saint herself did exist and arrived at Kildare later in life, having started her career in the area of the present counties of Longford, Westmeath and Meath. The author outlines the main characteristics of the saint and discusses how these might derive from those of the goddess, whose attributes became attached to the saint; the wide geographical cult of the saint he suggests may have been a result of the earlier cult of the goddess.
Chapter vi presents a detailed review of the evidence for the cult of St Brigid in Ireland, listing the different indicators of her cult, such as place names, wells, church dedications etc., and giving useful gazeteers of evidence for each category across Ireland. Chapter vii similarly reviews evidence for the cult of Brigid outside Ireland, and chapter viii discusses the order of the Brigidines. Chapter ix helpfully gathers together all the hymns and poems relating to Brigid. Chapter x reviews the folklore relating to her. The author also provides two helpful appendices, the first of which provides a translation of Cogitosus’ Life of Brigid, while the second reviews notices of Brigid in the liturgy.
The value of this book is that it is a compendious repository of much useful information, gathered in one place. Although not written primarily for a scholarly readership, much research has gone into this book, and it is written from a critical perspective, summarising scholarship on the issues considered; it will do much to bring scholarship on Brigid to a wider audience. For those interested in the history of medieval Ireland it will be a useful addition to their book collection.
