Women in a Celtic Church: Ireland 450-1150 (review)

The attitudes of Irish clerics toward women have always been contradictory, at best. Father Jack Hackett, a character in the RTE television series Father Ted, would shriek "NUN!" and leap out the window whenever a sister entered the sitting room.

Have the attitudes of Irish clergymen toward nuns and other Catholic women changed much from the time of St. Patrick and St. Brigit? Christina Harrington argues in Women in a Celtic Church that Irish priests and monks were once far more receptive toward female colleagues. According to Harrington, the first generations of Irish Christians practiced a kind of gender symmetry unprecedented in medieval Europe. This is the core argument of her vehemently argued, somewhat naïvely nativist analysis of the history of religious women in early medieval Ireland.

Harrington organizes her book in three chronological sections: the initial period of Christianization (fifth-sixth centuries); the golden age of Irish nunneries (seventh-ninth centuries); and the period of reform and consequent decline in women's status (tenth-eleventh centuries). She makes two main points, both aimed at other interpreters of Irish history. First, she argues that feminist goddess-worshipers and other neo-pagans have misunderstood what they call Celtic Christianity, and that scholars are to blame. Harrington scolds historians and Celticists for not making their academic conclusions more widely accessible to the reading public. As she puts it, "The abyss between the Ivory Tower dweller and Waterstone's Bookshop browser has never been wider" (p. 9). Only an irritable academic would point out that Harrington's own book, published by Oxford University Press at £40, is hardly priced to leap off Waterstone's shelves. But any reader should question why academic and popular interpretations of Irish Christianity must be mutually exclusive. For instance, why should a convinced devotee of the goddess Brig be forced to believe that the deity had nohistorical connection with Saint Brigit just because someone with a Ph.D. says so?

Second, Harrington criticizes feminist interpreters of medieval history, in particular Suzanne Wemple (Women in Frankish Society, 1981), Jo Ann McNamara (although, curiously not her major book, Sisters in Arms, 1996), and me (an article that I wrote in 1986 while still in graduate school, although my books and more recent articles on St. Brigit seem to have escaped her notice). Harrington posits a uniquely kinder, gentler Christianity in Ireland, where women could choose to become professional virgins, penitents, or widows; where abbesses wielded extraordinary political and administrative powers; and where bishops, monks, and priests treated nuns as partners in the business of religion. Meanwhile, according to Harrington, the rest of Europe permitted vicious claustration of religious women and promoted sexist theology. In Harrington's vision, Irish clergy became suspicious about women only in the tenth century, when Continental influences and reforms complicated the indigenous gender system of Ireland, thus bringing the easy collegiality of nuns, monks, and priests to an end.

Harrington makes some excellent arguments in her explication of the primary sources. She insists rightly on the diversity of women's communities. She advocates a rigorous chronology of saints' lives and other texts, which helps her to find dynamic change where other historians have noticed only stasis. Her careful use of archaeological evidence, legal materials, and liturgical and theological texts balances her interpretation of the notoriously difficult hagiography. She also makes some lovely arguments about specific issues. For example, she sensibly weighs in on the supposed pagan origins of Kildare, the definition of caillech ("veiled woman"), and the functions of abbesses. Her explanations ofthe Tallaght reformers and of Irish ideas about Eve are thoughtful and persuasive.

Yet Harrington's insistence on the unique gender symmetry of Irish society, the unusual power of Irish religious women, and the evil influence of foreign misogyny, along with her textual naiveté, cause problems in her argument. First, if Irish religious women were so well received...