The Island of St. Patrick: Church and Ruling Dynasties in Fingal and Meath, 400-1148 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Island of St. Patrick: Church and ruling dynasties in Fingal and Meath, 400-1148 Lisa Bitel The Island of St. Patrick: Church and ruling dynasties in Fingal and Meath, 400-1148. Edited by Ailbhe MacShamhráin. (Dublin: Four Courts Press. Distributed in the United States by ISBS, Portland, Oregon. 2004. Pp. 192. $35.00.) This charming volume of essays was inspired by a parish priest in Skerries, a seaside town about thirty kilometers north of Dublin, to celebrate both the second millennium and the coming of Saint Patrick to Ireland. Church Island, off Skerries' coast, was traditionally Patrick's first missionary landfall. Father Quinlan, along with a number of well-known archaeologists and historians, and a local millennial committee, put on a celebratory conference and produced a book. The editor claims that Skerries' medieval territory of Brega offers a historical microcosm of events in Ireland. The essays thus cover topics between Patrick's fifth-century arrival and an 1148 synod on Church Island. Together, these modest articles hint at some enduring debates and current trends in the fields of Irish history and archaeology. Church Island (also called Inis Phádraig) is, according to the archaeologist Michael Ryan and colleagues, a fifteen-acre limestock rock rimmed with cliffs and beaches. An early medieval church may have stood there, replaced by a larger structure of local stone in the twelfth century. Later, farmers grazed animals among its ruins, occasionally discovering a grave and tossing its marker into the sea. Patrick's seventh-century biographer Tírechán was first to mention Church Island as Patrick's stopping place, thus assuring it a permanent role in ecclesiastical history. In one of the most interesting and thoughtful pieces of the volume, Catherine Swift uses Tírechán's reference as an excuse to map the other Brega churches that he mentioned. Several other articles also treat ecclesiastical topics. Charles Thomas, with the liberty of seniority, contributes one of his typically knowing comments on christianization and the quick spread of Latinity across the island. Howard Clarke and Martin Holland take the story of Patrick's cult and Church Island, respectively, into the central Middle Ages. Clarke maps saints' cults in medieval [End Page 105] Dublin to show that Patrick was but one of its many saintly patrons. Holland chronicles the battle over church reform in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. By the combined efforts of kings and Irish bishops, Clarke explains, the Canterbury-backed see of Dublin lost primacy and was brought into a new native hierarchy of churches commanded by Armagh. The synod at Church Island convened by St. Malachy in 1148—at a location symbolic of Patrick and his main church of Armagh—decided both the failure of Dublin and the success of the native reform movement. Other articles probe the politics of early medieval Brega. Edel Bhreathnach tracks the interactions of Brega's feuding dynastic groups between about 700 and 1100, in order to explain the dynamics of Irish kingship. Ailbhe MacShamhráin investigates the success of the Clann Chernaig, a line of Brega's kings who merged ecclesiastical leadership with royal office. One of their line, Máel-Finnia, died in 903 as conqueror of the Dublin Vikings and an abbot at the Church Island community, and thus ended up a saint. The origins of the volume are most obvious in two other contributions. One is an archaeological note offered on behalf of the "ever popular" archaeologist Leo Swan, who died between giving a conference paper and the book's publication. The second is Peter Harbison's catalogue of Patrician portraits, originally a slide show at the conference, but, alas, lacking in print its original color. One other minor detail signals the volume's local origins to those who missed the great millennial celebration in Skerries. There is no map to locate the exact place of Church Island in ecclesiastical history. Charles Thomas, ruminating on Patrick's mission, wonders in his essay whether scholars will soon suffer "a fresh outbreak of odium Patricianum," since he doesn't know "how many people have anything dramatically new to say" about the saint (p. 15). Although there is nothing too...