The Life of St. Patrick and His Place in History [Unabridged] [Paperback]

John B. Bury (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 8, 2011

This classic biography first appeared in 1905 and still offers a valuable resource to scholars, theologians, and others interested in Irish history. The well-documented study depicts St. Patrick’s early life in 4th-century Britain during the Roman occupation, his abduction by Irish raiders, his conversion to Christianity, and his lifelong efforts to convert pagans and found churches.

Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Dover Publications; Unabridged edition (December 8, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0486400379
• ISBN-13: 978-0486400372
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,187,108 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Readable and interesting, full of stories and humor., October 15, 1998

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[e-mail] (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Life of St. Patrick and His Place in History (Paperback)

One of the finest scholars of the late Roman world, John Bury died in 1927 leaving a distinguished record of research and writing. Bury's LIFE OF ST. PATRICK was one of the earliest scholarly attempts to separate fact from fiction in Patrick studies. Very quickly following the death of the saint a great body of stories and traditions arose around him. Some of these stories were plainly fabricated; others contained more than a grain of truth. As a scholar of the late Roman world Bury knew the territory very well and tells a compelling and plausible story of the earliest days of the Irish church. While scholarly, the book is readable and interesting, full of wonderful stories and wry humor. In his introduction to the reprint of Bury's classic, one of the greatest contemporary Patrick scholars, Liam de Paor, calls the book "a monument of enlightened scholarship and . . . of permanent value."

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars dated critical study: good, but not for generalists, October 4, 2001

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I. Gimlet "i_gimlet" (Honolulu, HI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Life of St. Patrick and His Place in History (Paperback)

John Bury published his life of St. Patrick in 1905, and the Dover edition is an unabridged republication of that work. It includes an introduction written by Liam de Paor in 1998. It is regarded as a classic in the study of St. Patrick and provided the generally accepted interpretation of his life up until the publication in 1942 of a lecture by T.F. O'Rahilly entitled "The Two Patricks." There have been significant and substantial changes in the academic understanding of St. Patrick since the publication of John Bury's work. As Liam de Paor notes, "The perspective provided by the research of the present century mainly is based on a more rigorous criticism of the Irish sources. We can no longer, for example, take Irish fifth-century annals as contemporary, or even near contemporary, with the events they record. They are reconstructions, embodying much guesswork, made by scholars and disputants of the seventh and eighth centuries, who sought to cast their interpretation of earlier times in annalistic form. Nor can we take at face value the work of seventh-century hagiographers such as Muirchu and Tirechan, both of whom produced accounts of Patrick in the service of the claims of Armagh. Bury, of course, by his training and background, well understood the importance of the criticism of sources. However, he did not have available the results of the work on early Irish texts that has been done by numerous scholars over the past ninety years, and he was led into undue reliance on secondary and tertiary sources for want of better ones. Our picture of fifth-century Ireland is very different now from what it was at the start of the twentieth century." (pp. xix - xx)

The book is 404 pages long excluding the introduction and preface and consists of four main sections. The first section is 224 pages long: Bury's account and discussion of St. Patrick's life, its significance and context. The print is large and considered by itself this section could serve as a quick introduction to the basic narrative of St. Patrick's life and times. However, as de Paor notes, the scholarship on this subject has progressed significantly since 1905 and there were several instances where I had wished that the author had explored his subject further. For example, it appears that St. Patrick had designated funds for the manumission of Christian slaves in Ireland and had established rules for the use thereof. Pope Gregory apparently OK'd this procedure for use in Britain as well. Was this standard procedure for proselytizing missions in the 5th Century AD or was it confined to the far reaches of the occident? Were there any Papal rulings on the institution of slavery or was this just a tactic used in the far West, perhaps one that originated with St. Patrick given that much of his youth was spent as a captive sold into slavery? In any case, at least for me, there were several instances where I supposed the author presumed his audience was familiar with more of the context of those times than I think most general readers could be reasonably expected to know.

Pages 295 to 391 are Appendices A - C: notes on the sources, notes on the text, and extended discussions on particularly vexing questions, respectively. The print for these is quite small, and there are a number of difficulties for the general reader. To begin with, readers without Latin will find it difficult to tease out useful information from these as much of the critical evidence is presented in Latin which is not translated. (The main narrative also contains Latin, but I think the context makes it comprehensible.) There is also some -- though not much -- ancient Greek. Also, the text itself infrequently indicates when you should refer to the endnotes and sometimes refers you to endnotes that do not exist. The maps included do not highlight those places in Ireland that St. Patrick visited, there is no map for Britain or Gaul (which are important elements of the story), no line indicating the suggested paths St. Patrick took and no chronology. Moreover, since much of the endnotes are concerned with scholarly disputes that were current in 1905, which may or may not have much relevance to the current discussion, I imagine that they are of much more moment to those interested in the historiography of the study of St. Patrick in the early 20th century than they are to generalists like myself.

To sum up, I think that the general reader will profit from Bury's basic account of St. Patrick's life, but should be aware that much of the scholarship is outdated and that much of the supporting notes will be dated and unintelligible to him if he does not know Latin. Paor, in the introduction, mentions two studies "which should be consulted by the serious inquirer into these matters" (p. xix), R.P.C. Hanson's "St. Patrick--His Origins and Career" and E.A. Thompson's "Who Was St. Patrick?", but I cannot vouch for their accessibility to the general reader because I have not read them. Bury's index is good and comprehensive.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars History!, January 6, 2000

By 

Richard T. Rossiter "Richard T. Rossiter" (National Park, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Life of St. Patrick and His Place in History (Paperback)

Bury's presentation and analysis of the facts are history at its best. This is the way history should be done. Although I have not seen Evidence One of rebuttal to Bury, most modern historians all follow lock step the axiom that Patrick started an autonomous Celtic church separate from the universal church. The extensive notes are worth the price of the book!