Armagh and the Royal Centres in Early Medieval Ireland: Monuments, Cosmology, and the Past by N. B. Aitchison (review)

512 BOOK REVIEWS legislation that ,witnessed an increasing tendency to put the authority of the state behind the Church's position but at the same time reflected continued tension between the Church's legislation and existing custom. Mikat's study provides a sound picture solidly rooted in the sources and in modern scholarship of what the substance of the Church's law on incestuous relationships had become by the beginning of the seventh century and a persuasive assessment ofthe forces which gave shape to that body oflaw. His work will be especially useful to scholars interested in the evolution of canon law treating marriage practices. But it also has much to say about the creative utilization of tradition to reshape basic aspects of society during that alleged "dark age" marking the transition from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages in western Europe. Richard E. Sullivan Michigan State University (Emeritus) Armagh and the Royal Centres in Early Medieval Ireland:Monuments, Cosmology , and the Past. By N. B. Aitchison. (Rochester, New York: Boydell & Brewer for Cruithne Press. 1994. Pp. x, 356. $71.00.) In Armagh and the Royal Centres, N. B. Aitchison manages to blend an archaeologist 's understanding ofmaterial remains with a historian's critical use of the textual evidence for early medieval Ireland, and to come up with a synthesis that is both plausible and impressive. Aitchison's method is to explore the inconsistencies between readings of the material and textual evidence for the royal sites, and just generally to read the texts more critically. His argument is so complex and discursive that I cannot rehearse all of it here. His main aim, however , is to re-examine the connection between several complex archaeological sites, sometimes called "royal centers" by modern scholars, and the provincial capitals prominent in early medieval narratives and annals. While written sources agree that "royal" centers were sites oftrans- and intertribal political gatherings, battles, and fairs, the main evidence for royal residence at the sites comes from only one genre, "mythological" sources such as epics. On the other hand, archaeologists have turned up earthwork enclosures, ring barrows, megalithic tombs, linear earthworks, and roadways at the sites, but the one thing they have not found is evidence for residence in the late Iron Age or early Middle Ages. Why should the sagas lie? Because they were propaganda. The hills and barrows at Navan and the other sites were already ancient and still remembered as politically and spiritually important in the early Middle Ages. The literati portrayed them as both political foci and royal residences, drawing on the monuments ' power and status in the minds of the Irish, and using them to legitimate emerging early medieval over-kingships. The Ui Néill, the dynasty that created BOOK REVIEWS 513 the most successful over-kingship in early Ireland, the kingship ofTara, were especially adept at both political expansion and self-fashioning; and it was they who patronized the literati, their propagandists. In return, the literati created nothing less than an ideological basis for the high-kingship of Ireland. As a counter-point to this historical theorizing,Aitchison synthesizes the latest excavation reports for two of the sites,Tara and Navan Fort, focusing mostly on the latter. In sagas, Navan/Emain Macha was the traditional home of the pagan Ulster kings; but the site was also a close neighbor to Armagh (Ard Macha), the seat of St. Patrick and his ecclesiastical successors. (The last third of the book contains a detailed analysis of the site of Armagh and its early surroundings .) This was an irony not lost on early medieval monks, who not only knew but actually wrote the old epics of pagan heroes. In fact, Ireland's clerical literati were unique, Aitchison contends, in constructing a pre-Christian past with no reference to pagan Rome; instead, the literati relied on their own home-grown monuments to fill in the historical blanks. It was all part of a planned, premeditated attempt by ambitious churchmen and secular leaders to claim and justify political and/or sacral status. The book has a few flaws. Aitchison's reading ofparticular sites or texts is not always innovative, and his argument is occasionally tautological. Even...