Céli Dé in Ireland: Monastic Writing and Identity in the Early Middle Ages (review)

The last major study of the Céli Dé was that of Peter O'Dwyer in 1977, which he revised with additions in 1981. This has been the standard work on the subject ever since, and many subsequent writers have adopted O'Dwyer's views unchallenged. Academic scholarship has waited thirty years for a reappraisal, and subsequently two major reassessments of this so-called "reform movement" in early medieval Ireland have appeared, including Westley Follett's work.

O'Dwyer's work has had its critics, and writers such as Nora Chadwick and more recently, Colmán Etchingham, have questioned the categorization of the Céli Dé as a "reform," but their objections have been peripheral to the main thrust of their respective studies. Follett's work concentrates fully on reassessing the Céli Dé and is original in that it centers on the manuscript history of the various texts that have traditionally been associated with the Céli Dé monks. With painstaking thoroughness, Follett shows that the writings hitherto ascribed to the movement (if, as he says, it can be deemed a movement) are actually much fewer in number than O'Dwyer and other earlier commentators believed. Although this investigation of manuscript history forms the major part of the book, Follett also, in his long and detailed second chapter, explores Irish asceticism before the Céli Dé to put these monks in context. His carefully detailed study goes a long way to providing an up-to-date and much needed successor to John Ryan's now extremely dated Irish Monasticism.

Etchingham argues that Irish monastic asceticism showed no sign of declining in the mid- to late-eighth century, and Brian Lambkin views Céli Dé as members of God's personal retinue who saw themselves accordingly as a kind of "religious elite." In his conclusions, Follett substantiates these premises of Etchingham and Lambkin, and it is, perhaps, the only disappointing element in his work that he takes these conclusions no further. However, it is in his methodology that he shows his originality. Whereas Lambkin based his suggestion mainly on the evidence provided by the poems of Blathmac and the Félire Óengusso, Follett examines and critiques all the texts that have been associated with the movement. He draws the conclusion that "céli Dé, at least in their eighth- and ninth-century manifestation, were more of a local phenomenon than a regional or general one, as has often been supposed" (218).

This is an important book both for the study of insular monasticism and for research into the history of early Irish texts. In the meticulousness of its scholarship it provides a model for the latter. It enters the current debate regarding the exact identity of the Céli Dé when this question is coming to the forefront of academic research and develops that debate in new and original ways by its examination of the manuscript history of crucial texts, showing how a more precise assessment of the authorship of these texts can assist in understanding Céli Dé identity. Although not everyone will agree with Follett's conclusions, by refining and narrowing the early medieval "database" of texts connected with the Céli Dé, he provides an important service to current and future scholarship.