reference to many original sources and the contemporary anecdotal accounts are valuable and bring the texts to life. Specialist articles on sister physicians including their medical training curricula (Barbra Mann Wall), together with new perspectives on religious in Ireland through the lens of translations from French by Catholic women religious in nineteenth century Ireland (Michèle Milan), will be of interest to scholars of these topics. An historical article on the Presentation Sisters (Catherine Nowlan-Roebuck) deals with what will be familiar to many concerning the founding and early days of the congregation but also informs us of the involvement of the bishops in regulating affairs, sometimes with a heavy hand. For the non-expert, like this reviewer, the overseas involvement in religious education in countries which today are rich first-world countries, makes the book particularly interesting. One gets an historical insight from contemporary sources of how new countries were dealing with their problems of integration and education and which factors eased or contributed to the difficulties encountered. Áilín Doyle has practised as a solicitor and lectured in moral theology at the Milltown Institute in Dublin. Saint Brigid of Kildare: Life, Legend and Cult, Noel Kissane (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017), 357 pages. This is a comprehensive account of St Brigid, the Mary of the Gael. It is the fruit of a life time of research. The author became academically involved with St Brigid when he completed a doctoral dissertation under the supervision of the distinguished Austrian medieval scholar Ludwig Bieler. Subsequently, in 1977, he edited and published the Metrical Life of St Brigid, which had been written in Latin by an Irish bishop in Italy in the ninth century. Since then he has been pursuing the elusive St Brigid. At the outset Kissane describes the Ireland of St Brigid’s time, its culture and its identity. Then he surveys the extensive literature on the saint. He begins with seven extant early lives, dating from the seventh to the twelfth century.The first of these, by Cogitosus, is the most important, because it is the closest to Brigid’s life-span. Kissane urges caution in assessing it, however. He highlights the fact that Cogitosus, a cleric resident at Kildare, was keen by his account to enhance Brigid’s reputation as a means of promoting the status Studies • volume 107 • number 426 248 Summer 2018: Book Reviews of Kildare, at a time when it was in competition with Armagh for precedence in the Irish church. All the extant lives represented an oral tradition and were primarily concerned with Brigid’s way of life rather than her life as such, and focused on her saintliness and the alleged miracles that testified to this. Kissane points out that for some scholars, including Pádraig Ó Riain, the foremost authority on the early Irish saints, St Brigid was not a real person. He rehearses the arguments for and against her historicity. In the end he states that, ‘while here is no conclusive evidence that Brigid actually existed, taking everything into account, the balance of probability suggests that Brigid was a real person, albeit of uncertain origins and manifesting many of the attributes of her namesake, the pagan goddess Brigit’. Acknowledging that hagiography is not history and is generally not given much credence in historical studies, Kissane claims that the contemporary or near-contemporary lives of early Irish saints contain a stratum of biographical information, some of which may be generally accurate. On that basis he sets out his putative biography of St Brigid. He fixes her life cycle at c. 450–530. Her father was Dubthach, a member of the Fothairt, a tribe who acted as mercenaries for the Uí Fhailge dynasty. He resided close to Croghan Hill in present-day County Offaly, hence this would seem to have been Brigid’s birthplace. She was born of an illicit union of Dubthach and his slave Broicsech. She grew up in her father’s household and was engaged in caring for farm animals. A Christian from an early age, she was later a leading figure in the Irish church and was involved in the establishment of convents, churches and monasteries while being mainly associated...
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Oct 1, 2020
Geethanjali Ramachandra + 2
Open Access