One of my favourite books about Saint Brigit has come back into print after many years, Saint Brigid of Ireland by Alice Curtayne. Cluny Media of Rhode Island is a recent Catholic publisher focussed on reprinting books which are no longer available. In homage to SBI's reprinting, I will repost here my review of the book. (To read the original post with the other reviews included, click here.)
St. Brigid of Ireland, Alice Curtayne, 1954, Sheed and Ward, New York. 162 pp.
“Already in her girlhood the lines of an exceptionally strong character are emerging. Her freedom won, the first use she made of it was to succour her mother, whose health was poor, but who was still engaged in the heavy labours of quern and churn.”
pg 28
This passionate and beautifully written book took me by surprise. I read it over twenty-five years ago, at a time when I was interested in Brigit the saint only as a lens through which to glimpse the goddess, and the book had little to offer me then. It altered in my mind into a quaint and archaic piece of Catholic introspection, confused with Lady Gregory's “Brigit, the Mary of the Gael”1. I’m happy to have returned to it at a time when I can appreciate it.
Curtayne, a native of Brigit`s Kildare, writes from the perspective of a devoted Irish Catholic. Grounded in Church and Irish history and the stories of Celtic saints, she is aware of the significant role Brigit plays in Ireland: “She stands in the first shaft of light that illuminates our history, literature, topography, art and architecture ... Her contemporaries re-named the landmarks, recast the whole topography of the island, in order that she should be remembered (pg 4-5).”
She touches on the limits and privileges of free women, then settles into the dark burden of the bond slave2, ending with a dramatic ushering in of St Brigit: “She stood isolated, without prototype, without peer (pg 9).” This reads at first like faith-driven hyperbole, and certainly faith plays a large part in her view of Brigit, but as the book unfolds she argues her case from a variety of materials, and the picture she paints is intriguing, filled with nuance and unexpected detail.
Curtayne clearly and extensively locates Brigit on the historical stage of her time. She explores the political climate of turbulence tempered with unity that then existed, particularly in the region of Ireland where she lived, outlining the struggle for territorial dominance between Leinster and the southern Ui Neill, the contention over the position of High King, and the backlash against a punitive tax levied on Leinster. “In striving to evoke the atmosphere of the fifth century, the reader must hear the clash of arms as the perpetual undertone to all other sounds (pg 16).” Some of her details may be arguable in light of modern research; nevertheless, situating her so clearly in her environment makes this an excellent introduction to and contemplation of Brigit and the world she emerged from.
She offers a glimpse of the lives of early Irish nuns, and knits together Patrick’s picture of Irish religious women with Brigit’s Lives as well as historical and mythic texts. She discusses how Brigit’s community might have looked, how building might have proceeded, what her chariot would have been like and how it would be to travel in it. She examines the Lives to learn of the character of the woman they depict, and finds much that I miss when reading the tales—her physical strength, for instance, as one who works hard in the dairy. The image of robust health and physical power that Curtayne envisions, so different from the assumption of beauty as slim elegance, gives us a homespun Irishwoman with acuity of mind and the confidence of an aristocrat. There is of course a taste of the good Catholic girl so familiar from Saints’ tales. But she is so much more than that here.
When she tells a tale from the Lives, Curtayne couches it in the background of the age: in discussing the ale references tittered at by moderns, she describes the role of ale, made fresh and weak and used as a common daily beverage, not a special drink to make men wobbly. In telling of her refusal of marriage, she lets us know clearly the privileged life—to a poet, that nobleman of the Celtic world—that Brigit was passing up. She ties together disparate bits of information—Brigit born a slave, daughter of a tribal leader: in attempting to wed her to a poet, he has in fact offered her the highest possible social position, and throughout her life she behaves as a woman who retains the power and self-assurance of her father’s class.
In telling Brigit’s stories this way, introducing ideas from ancient Ireland, such as regarding class or attitudes toward lepers, contrasting them with attitudes current in Biblical or modern times (the 1950s), and then personalizing the story, she gives often told and sometimes stilted stories new life. She reconnects them to a world and time other than our own and then imagines a human within them—how Brigit might have felt and why she reacted as she did. Finally, she will hint at, or carefully unfold, the symbolism or spiritual lesson she perceives there.
In approaching the material as if Brigit was a real and historical figure, and in dramatizing to great effect, she expands our understanding not only of the story and symbol of Brigit, but her place in the story of Ireland. Unique in my reading about Brigit is the revelation of her here as a source of pride and unity for a country whose people had for centuries been oppressed and despised. This message, which comes scattered in various forms throughout the book, is an important reminder. Brigit may be internationally loved and venerated now, but this is a new version of her, added to and subtracted from without our necessarily noticing. Placing her back into this setting is important both for our understanding of Brigit and for our honouring of her origins and the people who introduced us to her.
Curtayne's belief in God doesn't lead her to swallow everything that “pious hagiographers (pg 19)” have written. She seeks rational understanding while at the same time turning over the spiritual lessons found in Brigit's Lives. But she does accept that miracles happen. “The stories (of her generosity) ring true, because for the most part they are at once extraordinary and trivial. If a later biographer were minded to invent miracles for Brigid, he would use rather more imagination and tell of something more impressive than a little food conveyed furtively to a dog (pg 21).”
At times she struggles to make peace between her rigorous intellect and her faith. She says Patrick, having lived earlier than St Brigit, could not have known her. But in the Book of Armagh it is claimed otherwise. She accomodates this by saying that because of Brigit’s friendship with intimates of Patrick, it “may be taken as essentially true (pg 45).”
A little stretch of the truth is permitted elsewhere, too. “Not the faintest breath of scandal ever touched the double monastery founded by Brigid and Conlaeth (pg 63).” Now, it states clearly in the Liber Hymnorum that “She blessed the pregnant nun, she was whole without poison, without illness”. Perhaps this was some neighbouring nun, not of Kildare ... 3 Or perhaps this was not a scandal in Brigit’s day—it certainly doesn’t read like one in the tale.
Curtayne grounds Brigit to some extent in the mythology of her people. In telling the tale where Brigit gives away her father’s sword, she refers to the heroic sword given by a fairy queen which grew so long it touched the heavens like the curve of a rainbow. And she links Brigit directly to those heroes of old. “This strange creature, in whose veins flowed the blood of Conn of the Hundred Battles ... (pg 26)” This Brigit, though unapologetically Christian, becomes more truly Celtic and Pagan than many versions of the modern, reimagined goddess.
But she stops short of linking St Brigit directly to the goddess whose name she shares. While not denying the connection, she brushes it aside, refering in passing to “fearfully dull books” that suggest St Brigit was not a real woman, but only a product of the goddess (pg 109).
In so many ways, the Brigit in Curtayne’s book takes on life and character, and in doing so, allows the reader to connect more fully with her meaning in his or her life. To Curtayne, Brigit is not merely a symbol. Her miracles, some though not all, are real. Her envisioning of Brigit’s life surpasses even Kondratiev’s4 imaginings, and is founded on a broad knowledge of the Lives, her times, the Celts, the Bible, and the history of the Church.
We are given Brigit’s presence in Ireland and her effect on it, the building of communities, the hosting of intellectual circles surpassing anything in England or on the Continent of that time. A careful comparison between Celtic Christianity and the Christianity of St Francis5, insight into St Brigit’s reaction to the violence around her, with its parallels to the Troubles yet to come in Ireland, her examination of difficult spiritual truths6—Curtayne approaches her topic from a dizzying multitude of angles. In a rare moment of she writes: “But not to incur a charge of bathos, it would be better, perhaps, not to mention in the same breath with the Brigidine circle Madame Récamier’s salon, or the “intellectual afternoons” of Hannah More and George Eliot (pg 69).”
A rich offering indeed.
Purchase here.
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