Throughout the Celtic world, in Britain, Ireland and France, the legacy of the Celtic saints remains visible. Churches, place-names, standing stones, healing springs and local lore stand as testament to those who helped establish the Christian Church in their native lands.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
Celtic saints can stake a legitimate claim to any number of unique events of history. Irish saints, for example, have been credited with saving Western civilization after the fall of Rome. From Round Towers such as Glasnevin or Clonfert, they spread throughout Europe, taking along the word of God and the culture of humanity. In this work, Rees, a Catholic nun, reveals just how much Christianity owes to the men and women of Dark Age Britain, Ireland, and Brittany. Throughout, she describes the people, their times, and the threads that connect the saints to each other. One criticism: The geographical arrangement is problematic. For example, to find out about St. Deiniol, one must know the patron saint of Bangor in North Wales and consult that section; though the volume is well indexed, it indexes only the Anglicized versions of names, and Deiniol is found under Daniel. Still, this is an interesting addition to the recent literature on Celtic saints, such as Nigel Pennick's The Celtic Saints (Sterling, 2000). With its focus on archaeology and literature, it deserves a space on the shelves of academic libraries.DJohn J. Doherty, Northern Arizona Univ., Flagstaff
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
Elizabeth Rees is a Roman Catholic nun. She gained a Master's Degree from Oxford University, before starting a career as a writer, lecturer, and pastoral worker. She is the author of Christian Symbols, Ancient Roots and teaches courses on the Celtic saints in Cornwall, Somerset, and North Wales.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Inadequate, though not as bad as it could be,
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This review is from: Celtic Saints: Passionate Wanderers (Hardcover)
The study of what is usually called Celtic Christianity is in a parlous state. Except for particular issues such as the life of Patrick - where Dumville?s recent collection of studies has managed to shed as much darkness as light - little of note has happened since E.C.Bowen's questionable but at least scholarly study of the connection between "Saints and seaways" in the sixties, and practically no translation has been published since A.W.Wade-Evans' erratic 1944 collection, which is written in abominable English and leaves the Welsh-language LIVES untranslated; and, before him, we have to go back to the still more erratic Llandovery translations of W.J.Rees, dated 1854, and containing not only mistranscriptions and mistranslations, but actual grammatical mistakes IN ENGLISH!Not, alas, that this means that the subject is left untouched. Where the real scholars don't bother going, the popular scribblers wander at will. A real cottage industry has sprung up about "Celtic spirituality", and this book, while not belonging to its lunatic fringe, is clearly a part of it. What scholarship there is in it, is dated and unperceptive; assertions, especially as to the periods in which various saints lived, go unsupported; and the whole is bathed in a sentimental air that shows its desire to flatter the reader rather than to lead to any understanding of the subject. Also, while it annexates the Curch of early Northumbria to the Celtic world because of the influence of missionaries such as St. Aidan, it altogether neglects Brittany; could it be because to investigate it would require reading texts in Latin and - heaven preserve us - in FRENCH? Altogether, I cannot recommend this book either as a general introduction to its subject or as a study. Those who can, would be well advised to read Sabine Baring-Gould and John Fisher's ancient (1904) four-volume account of the Celtic saints, which is sometimes mutton-headed but has at least the virtues of thoroughness and consistency.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Mixes fact and fiction,
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This review is from: Celtic Saints: Passionate Wanderers (Hardcover)
This is a very nice book by a very nice person. There's an excellent gazetteer showing how to get to some of the places she mentions and she is tremendously enthusiastic about her subject.
The main problem is that she mixes historical fact with legend. The very existence of many of these "saints" is doubtful. What would happen would be that a name got attached to a place and then many centuries later someone would make up a story to go with the name. Then the story would get embellished. In many cases the stories were made up as late as the nineteenth century, although these saints are supposed to have lived in the sub-Roman period, the time between the Romans leaving Britain and the Anglo-Saxons coming in. The Roman Empire had been Christian for a hundred years when they left. It's a very dark period without much in the way of historical documentation. To take one example; there was a church in a place called St David's that had been in existence for a long time by the tenth century, when the Annales Cambriae were written. The writer of the Annales Cambriae merely put in St David's name and gave a date for his birth some time in the fifth century. In the 11th century a monk at St David's wrote a "life" of the supposed St David, which is what Rees largely treats as authentic history. To be fair to her she usually, but not always, prefaces some such stories with "according to legend" or "it is said that" but she sneaks it in so that you may not notice it. St. Patrick, St Columba, St Aidan and St Ninian are fairly well authenticated from near contemporary writings, including St Patrick's own memoirs. Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England, written in the eighth century confirms some of the data. Rees keeps mysteriously referring to people as missionaries, when they were traveling in lands that were already Christian. She has Welsh missionaries going to Cornwall to convert the Cornish. I couldn't quite figure that out. She assumes a certain knowledge of Celtic languages, which is needed to explain some of the changes the names underwent. Lenition and mutation in these languages alters the beginning of words, so that the mutated forms are very different. Even allowing for that I couldn't grasp how Kentigern became Mungo. Almost all the references are to secondary sources in English. A very nice book by a very nice person, but niceness doesn't always mean accuracy.
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