This scholarly work is a valuable contribution to the overall history of monasticism in Ireland as it explores “the hidden years” of that tradition, following its much vaunted “golden age” when, as claimed, “the Irish saved civilisation”.
As the author puts it: “It’s as if monasticism in Ireland flourished during the sixth and seventh centuries and then in its pristine state returned to Britain and the Continent, leaving a static form of monasticism, diminished by increasing secularisation, to take root in the great monasteries of Ireland.”
Seeing Ireland’s monasticism “as somewhat exotic and not part of the normalised ‘reformed’ monasticism of elsewhere by the eleventh century” was “to underestimate the complexity of monasticism in western Christendom between 900 and 1250”, she writes.
Through nine chapters in this book she explores how this “hidden” element in the history of Irish monasticism came about, and sets about righting that.
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Interestingly, she observes how the view of early Irish monasticism as “a ‘Celtic’ deviation” arose from more recent, post-Reformation, scholarship which was influenced by the politics of historiography from the 17th century onwards. It became “entangled in the debates of confessional historians, Catholic and Protestant, who sought to appropriate the early Irish church for their own political and religious motivations”.
This continued “through the centuries, but especially with the rise of Catholic nationalism during the nineteenth” which “adopted many material elements of early Irish monasticism – the high cross and round tower being the most evident – as symbols of ancient roots”.
In more recent times, there had been “serious interrogation of this narrative”, she says, even as that too “tended to concentrate on the early monastic period and the twelfth century”.
In the author’s view, a reason why monasticism in Ireland “has been regarded as different” may be to do with sources. Some sources offered “much material that has hitherto gone unnoticed”, while more were in the vernacular and had “lain unedited and untranslated or infrequently used by many scholars”.
It was also the case, she says, that “those who have read them have not often used them as sources that might deepen our understanding of monasticism”.
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As controversially, she suggests, that, “in their enthusiasm to balance the gender narrative, scholars have overestimated the number of female religious houses in medieval Ireland, often due to mis-interpretation of the sources and their given content”.
For her own part and, “rather than dividing the narrative between female and male religious”, she has attempted “to include women in the greater narrative of medieval Irish monasticism in the circumstances of their own society”.
