Customer Reviews

Celtic Saints

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This lovely little book gives you not only the famous saints like Columcille and Patrick, but the little saints of local fame. The descriptions are accurate and compelling and make these ancient saints live in our hearts and minds today. This would be a lovely gift for a friend interested in the history of Ireland, Wales, or Scotland.

CELTIC SAINTS contains biographies of twenty-one men and women including Patrick, Brigid of Kildare and Brendan The Navigator. The stories of the various saints are a mixture of fact and legend. In some ways the book reads like a popular history of Ireland and the nearby Celtic areas of Scotland and Wales during the Middle Ages.

The illustrations by Ann MacDuff are magnificent. If you have any love for Ireland and Celtic culture, you will probably appreciate this little book.

For those interested in the history of mysticism and spirituality, the early Celtic saints with their rigorous fasting and love of nature have long been a subject of interest for me, and ever since I first read about the subject in the middle 1990s I have spent a lot of time with this short book.

What is particularly impressive about "Celtic Saints" is not so much the stories told - which are done much more deeply in numerous other books that are by no means hard to find - but the beautiful pictures of the saints which seem, which I look at them, to be even superior to the images I have actually seen in the stained glass of real churches. I will note in particular here that the picture of Ita which is the page of the book I will confess to have read most frequently of all (partly because of her extreme fasting that Joan Carroll Cruz has called the first case of inedia) is especially beautiful: depicted barefoot in bright colours Ita is particularly impressive. The male saints in their brown monk's habits might be closer to the real life, but with such beautiful pictures of animals like deer and hares one obtains a quite truthful (I hope and do have some belief) image of how the Celtic saints were very close to and revered nature. Dymphna's purple robe and Bridget's green habit are also well-done, whilst Ciarán and Finnian are painted especially well, and the angels in the picture of Fursey are remarkably accurately drawn. The gardening spade in the picture of Fiacre is another wonderful step that is an effective illustration of how - as described in the text on David of Wales (the only saint in the book formally recognised by the Vatican) - Irish monks would work the land manually, an ideal that has great appeal in these days of ecological devastation caused by large-scale farming.

All in all, one can easily obtain better information about the lives of the people discussed elsewhere, but as a general book on early Celtic saints this is probably the one to go for with its beautiful illustrations.