Kissane, Noel. Saint Brigid of
Kildare: Life, Legend and Cult (2017).
Noel Kissane’s book on Saint Brigit is unlike any I have previously
read. Readable, immense in scope, it places her within the context of medieval
Irish and Continental Christianity while also examining the minutiae of her
cult.
Kissane traces the early development of Christianity in Ireland, such as
the process of conversion, and sets Saint Brigit in the context of bishops like
Palladius and Patrick. Important texts about or mentioning her are discussed, their
dates estimated and implications considered. Various older images of Saint
Brigit which we encounter on the internet are identified with their original
sources. The lives and intentions of authors of early poems and Lives dedicated
to her are delved into. Artistic depictions are listed. Her folklore, the
history of Brigidine nuns, cultural movements that drew inspiration from her
are examined—and so on and on.
If you were to attempt a pilgrimage through Europe dedicated to Saint
Brigit, this would be an essential reference book. Irish placenames linked to her,
monastic communities and churches connected to Kildare (ca. 1000 C.E.), and
current dedications from churches to Gaelic Athletic Associations are listed
and their history briefly recounted. The origin and movement of her various
relics (including more heads than most people can boast) is investigated, and he
details her cult across Europe, distinguishing between churches named for St.
Brigitta of Sweden versus those named for St. Brigit of Kildare, where to the
untrained eye these wouldn’t be easily teased apart.
I especially enjoyed reading Kissane’s depiction of life in Ireland
during her era—setting her tales against that essential background is not done
enough.[1]
He goes deeply into the role her supposed tribe, the Fothairt, played in that
society (working as mercenaries for other tribes) and what this implies for
her, and compares the claims of different locales for her birth, growing up, or
veiling ceremony. (I am now convinced it was Mac Caille, not Mél, who gave her
the veil, but you may come to a different conclusion.) Amply sourced and
footnoted, with an index that includes a breakdown by Irish county and town, it
has a bibliography to bring joy to the researcher’s heart. Such are the
delights of this book for Brigit scholars.
It is delightful, as well, to have so many oddities of the lore explained.
For instance, why do we sometimes encounter the suggestion that Cogitosus (author
of her earliest Life) was Brigit’s nephew? (Because of a misreading of a
garbled manuscript.) Could Patrick actually have converted Brigit? (Nope.) Why
did the Scottish claim her as their own? Was she ever in Glastonbury? Etc. Some of these are explained elsewhere,
of course, but no other text tackles so many of these questions as this one.
Little space is set aside for the goddess, naturally, as she is not the
subject of this book. However, I am disappointed that Kissane accepts without
really questioning, and offers as a statement of high probability if not fact,
the hypothesis, generally discounted by modern scholars (for utter lack of
evidence), that Kildare was a pagan community dedicated to the goddess Brigit.[2]
He even adds to the usual story his own details, such as that the saint may
have converted separately from the community (pg. 90), and that she probably
inherited a “countrywide network of established holy sites” (pg. 118). I fear
that his elaboration of these and related ideas will just add to the rampant confusion
around this. I am not opposed to him speculating. I simply wished he had made
it clearer that this scenario was unweighted by evidence, and had offered the contradictory
view as well. He has such a richness of factual matter here, and many of his
speculations throughout the book seem more carefully reasoned. In this area he
seems to lose sight of the boundary between conjecture and supportable theory. He
goes so far as to say, “It is almost certain that to some degree the early
Irish converts to Christianity conflated the saint with the goddess and
regarded the saint as retaining and manifesting certain of the qualities and functions
of the goddess” (pg. 93). But it is not
almost certain. Now, if he had said that it was almost certain that they saw
elements of a goddess in the saint, I
would be much happier. But to presume the existence of this Brigit goddess sanctuary
is venturing too far into conjecture to be certain of anything.
Another instance of unsupported speculation, much less worrying, is when
he states that the story of Brigit’s mother’s status is much more likely to be
correct in Vita Prima (slave) than in
Cogitosus’s Life (noble woman) because there would be no reason to invent her
illegitimacy. I can think of one good reason: Christ was born to a woman who
was unmarried at the time of his conception. As in other saints’ Lives, many of
the elements of Saint Brigit’s hagiography are meant to reflect moments in
Jesus’s life as a way of showing her holiness. They reflect but do not exactly
copy them. Could this be an instance of the same? I give this example only to
say that speculation is just that, and we should never take it, when
unsupported by excellent evidence, as any more likely than any other
explanation to be true.
There is another good reason for making her illegitimate. Cogitosus was apparently
a monk at Brigit’s monastery at Kildare (though a good while after her death);
the author of Vita Prima was loyal to Armagh, St. Patrick’s
seat of power. Kildare and Armagh were in the throes of a struggle
for ecclesiastical supremacy. As Lisa Bitel writes in Landscape with Two Saints, unlike in Cogitosus’s Life, in Vita Prima and other later Lives Brigit “submitted to male religious
officials, never competing directly for territory or space” (pg. 176).
In this way she is subtly shown to be Patrick’s inferior, making Armagh the
legitimate religious centre of Ireland. Would it not benefit such an agenda to
have her the daughter of a slave, where Patrick was the son of nobles?
But such matters hardly mar my pleasure in the book as a whole. There is
a goldmine of information here, including facts that, for all my scrutiny, I
have never come across before, and which put into a much clearer order the
normally shifting sea of matters Brigidine.
Highly recommended.
[1] See Christina
Harrington’s Women in a Celtic Church
and Lisa Bitel’s Landscape with Two
Saints for very fine exceptions to this rule, as well as Alice Curtayne’s
much earlier St. Brigid of Ireland
for a less academic and slightly more fanciful but nevertheless excellent
example.
[2] See Christina
Harrington’s Women in a Celtic Church
for a detailed explanation of how this hypothesis came about and the changes in
scholarship that have led to its general rejection today.
