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Medieval Women in a Celtic Church: Ireland 450-1150. By Christina Harrington. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2002. Pp. x, 329.£40.)
The attitudes of Irish clerics toward women have always been contradictory, at best. Father Jack Hackett, a character in the RTE television series Father Ted, would shriek "NUN!" and leap out the window whenever a sister entered the sitting room.
Have the attitudes of Irish clergymen toward nuns and other Catholic women changed much from the time of St. Patrick and St. Brigit? Christina Harrington argues in Women in a Celtic Church that Irish priests and monks were once far more receptive toward female colleagues. According to Harrington, the first generations of Irish Christians practiced a kind of gender symmetry unprecedented in medieval Europe. This is the core argument of her vehemently argued, somewhat naively nativist analysis of the history of religious women in early medieval Ireland.
Harrington organizes her book in three chronological sections: the initial period of Christianization (fifth-sixth centuries); the golden age of Irish nunneries (seventh-ninth centuries); and the period of reform and consequent decline in women's status (tenth-eleventh centuries). She makes two main points, both aimed at other interpreters of Irish history. First, she argues that feminist goddess-worshipers and other neo-pagans have misunderstood what they call Celtic Christianity, and that scholars are to blame. Harrington scolds historians and Celticists for not making their academic conclusions more widely accessible to the reading public. As she puts it, "The abyss between the Ivory Tower dweller and Waterstone's Bookshop browser has never been wider" (p. 9). Only an irritable academic would point out that Harrington's own book, published by Oxford University Press at £40, is hardly...