Gablánach in Scélaigecht: Celtic Studies in Honour of Ann Dooley ed. by Sarah Sheehan et al. (review)

Published by Dublin’s Four Courts Press, a key producer of books on Irish Studies and edited collections focused on medieval Ireland in particular, Gablánach in Scélaigecht: Celtic Studies in Honour of Ann Dooley comprises sixteen studies written by Ann Dooley’s former students and colleagues at University of Toronto as well as by senior Celtic scholars from Irish and North American institutions. The volume takes its fitting title from a line in Acallam na Senórach (“Tales of the Elders of Ireland,” as Dooley herself renders it), medieval Ireland’s longest text at ca. eight-thousand lines, and one which Dooley’s extensive work and excellent translation, with Harry Roe (Oxford, 1999), has made available to a wide readership. In the Acallam, Saint Patrick states that “storytelling is an intricate,” “complicated,” or, most literally, “branching business,” and this proverb, much beloved by Professor Dooley herself, provides the logic behind this collection. As the editors write in their Introduction, Dooley’s “scholarly interests are themselves ‘branching,’ covering a broad range of topics from bardic poetry to manuscript studies, from the Táin to the Acallam, from constructions of heroic masculinity to the ‘invention of women’ in medieval Irish saga literature” (p. 1). The volume consequently represents several “branching” contributions to the study of Celtic literature and history that Dooley has pursued over her rich career—her publications from 1979 to the present are helpfully listed at the book’s opening.

The collection offers a rich diversity of studies and approaches to major and lesser-known texts and traditions. Fitting in a collection in honor of Ann Dooley, the Acallam, and related Patrician hagiographic material, is represented by multiple essays, as is medieval Ireland’s other major vernacular literary text, the Táin Bó Cúailnge (Cattle-Raid of Cooley) and associated Ulster Cycle narratives. Though they do not operate as linked clusters, as seems to be the aim with the Ulster Cycle contributions, multiple contributions on hagiography and early Irish religious writing, in Latin and the vernacular, are represented, as are poetry and poetic and storytelling discourses from both medieval Ireland and Wales. There is a transnational dimension, too, and a handful of essays consider movement of saints, people, and texts between Ireland, Britain, Wales, and Gaul. To extend the branching arboreal metaphor, this Festschrift is much like the hagiographic tree that simultaneously produces several species of fruit, acorns, apples, nuts, and sloes, miraculous boons attesting to the tending saint’s stewardship or blessing. There are, however, some boughs that have not flourished. While we perhaps cannot expect the editors to be stewards of fruit trees quite up to the standard of Sts. Brigid, Berach, or Coemgen, and their multifruited, wondrous trees, more stringent pruning of contributions would have allowed for a harvest of greater bounty.

Turning to specifics, the first four essays focus on Ireland’s religious literature. Michael Herren reassesses earlier, foundational scholarly approaches to the documents and sources related to St. Patrick and opens up some further possibilities for understanding Patrick’s time in Gaul and its influence on his monastic and missionary practices. Herren ends with an intriguing suggestion that in Gildas we might have a description of an unnamed Patrick and his work. As do Ó Riain, Follett, Sheehan, and Jankulak later in the volume, Herren reminds us of the need to reexamine scholarly methodologies and the often wobbly assumptions that can determine canonical views. As Sheehan discusses, Ann Dooley herself has argued for re-evaluating the “underpinnings of the history of our own discipline” (p. 171), and it is thus fitting that several scholars in the volume productively engage in reassessing foundational views within their essays. In two smart but brief notes, John Carey first expands on Peter Dronke’s comments that John Scotus Eriugena speaks...