The Culture Shock of St Patrick

Abstract

Introduction St Patrick is an ancient saint while Culture Shock is a relatively modern phrase. ‘Cultural Shock’ was first recorded in 1929 (Gamio 1929) with ‘Culture Shock’ following in 1931 (Carpenter 1931). So it is unsurprising that in all of the numerous scholarly works on St Patrick (e.g. Thompson 1999, Hayes-Healy 2005, Freeman 2005, Kinane 2008,