Did Brigit Love Animals Like a Good Celt Should?: An Inquiry into Cogitosus’s Life of Saint Brigit

Projecting onto the past modern challenges and values concerning the environment leads to broad claims concerning a universal Celtic “love” of nature and animals and an inventorying approach to source analysis. For example, that Cogitosus’s Life of Saint Brigit is brimming with animals does not prove that a sentimental relationship existed between saint and animal. Taking into account the spiritual, economical, and political nature of hagiographical works reveals that in a seventh-century rural environment such as Kildare, animals (including pets) were important for human survival. Thus, the more powerful and far-reaching a saint’s influence over the barnyard economy and over the uncontrollable natural forces that threaten to disrupt the precarious balance of that economy, the greater the political and spiritual influence of the monastery associated with that saint. In other words, under Cogitosus’s penmanship, animals are pawns that serve to demonstrate Brigit’s spiritual power and the Kildarian monastery’s political authority.