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Churches in the Irish Landscape AD 400–1100. By Tomás Ó Carragáin. Cork: Cork University Press, 2021. 520pp. €49/£45 hardback.
For much of the second half of the twentieth century, the dominant understanding of church organization in early medieval Ireland—most notably shaped by the influential historian Kathleen Hughes—was that it was a largely monastic system. The Irish Church was thought to be led and administered by powerful monasteries and their daughter houses, in the absence of established diocesan and parish systems. Some historians queried the extent of pastoral care that was provided to lay communities beyond the borders of monastic estates, while others emphasized the importance of the airchinnech (best translated as “ecclesiastical land manager”) in the Irish ecclesiastical hierarchy and saw it as evidence of the “oddity” or exceptionalism of ecclesiastical organization in Ireland, compared to other territories where bishops dominated. This paradigm was thoroughly refuted by Richard Sharpe in a series of important studies, including his “Some Problems Concerning the Organisation of the Church in Early Medieval Ireland,” Peritia 3 (1984), 230–270, and his “Churches and Communities in Early Medieval Ireland: Towards a Pastoral Model,” in the 1992 volume, Pastoral Care Before the Parish, ed. John Blair and Richard Sharpe (Leicester University Press). Sharpe's argument was refined in more recent decades, most notably in numerous publications by Colmán Etchingham, although Etchingham too cast doubt on the extent to which pastoral care reached the laity in more...