Writing Medieval Irish Religious History in the Nineteenth Century
This chapter argues that the complexity of the early medieval Irish church allowed nineteenth-century historians to find evidence that supported the interpretation of medieval Irish ecclesiastical history which best accorded with their own worldview. Many
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Writing Medieval Irish Religious History in the Nineteenth Century Elizabeth Boyle Since the 1980s, there has been a transformation in the understanding of the nature and structures of the early medieval Irish church. Linguistic, textual and archaeological advances have clarified the nature of conversion, of religious practice, of doctrine and liturgy, and of church hierarchies and organisation in pre-Norman Ireland.1 However, this somewhat clearer picture of the early Irish church has not been adequately conveyed to audiences outside the specialist academic discipline of early Irish history. The gulf between academic and popular understanding of the early Irish church is wide. Some misconceptions have proved especially stubborn: in particular, the myth of a ‘Celtic church’, existing in opposition to an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and/or a ‘Roman’ church, remains important to popular conceptions of the Irish past, despite having been long since discarded by historians of medieval Ireland.2 The blame for this must lie in part with those of us who work in the field: we have failed to convey this transformation in understanding to those in related disciplines or outside academia. That there is no accessible introductory guide to the early medieval Irish church which accurately summarises recent scholarly developments helps explain this ever-widening chasm between specialist and popular conceptions.3
E. Boyle () National University of Ireland Maynooth, Maynooth, Ireland © The Author(s) 2017 J. Hill, M.A. Lyons (eds.), Representing Irish Religious Histories, Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700–2000, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41531-4_5
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These advances in the understanding of the early Irish church are complemented by developments elsewhere in the study of the early medieval church in western Europe more broadly.4 One shift in the way historians view early medieval European culture has been the realisation that ‘culture’ is not synonymous with ‘ethnicity’ or ‘language’. Cultural practices frequently do not observe national or linguistic borders, and the interactions between ‘language’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘culture’ are fluid and complex. There is now a more subtle characterisation of the early medieval western church as an institution which both unified western Europe, in the sense, for example, of certain shared beliefs, a common worldview, and the use of Latin as a shared ecclesiastical language; but also as an institution that was, at least before the reforming papacies of the late eleventh century, subject to great regional variation in terms, for example, of saints’ cults, some liturgical practices, and some points of doctrine. However, these regional variations were not coterminous with linguistic or ethnic boundaries. It is not possible to speak of a ‘Celtic church’, because there were no distinctive aspects to the Christianity practised in early medieval Ireland, Wales and Scotland; that is, no distinctive aspects that were shared by those societies and not found elsewhere: Christianity in the Celtic-speaking
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