Medieval Irish saints

When History Is About Feelings In Frank Delaney’s Ireland, he takes the reader through the vivid tale of Irish history from a variety of perspectives. He applies emotion in his writing to criticize how history is taught today. Most scholars would agree with Ronan O’Mara’s professor, T. Barlett Ryle, when he argues, “History is not about feelings. History is about knowledge” (Delaney 342). However, it is taught from an objective point of view that causes it to be devalued, misunderstood, and seemingly inapplicable to the present. As a thinking and feeling species, we understand information best when we relate to it. Delaney shows how emotion acts as a vehicle to connect us to history by humanizing historical figures and/or tailoring the…

The spread of Christianity brought about considerable changes in the late antique world, with similar reactions to the ‘new’ monotheistic religion among the Anglo-Saxons and Irish as could be seen among the Gauls. Not only did the subsequent religious conversion effect the balance of authority in the region, but it also changed the society’ values regarding morality and ethics, as well as gender roles. Conversion itself meant different things to the different social classes. Additionally, the…

Martyrdom is a term that refers to the voluntary death of a person often for religious purposes or as the result of persecution. Martyrs often sacrificed their own lives for a particular cause rather than, in the case of Christians, betray their beliefs. In the Christian tradition, after their deaths many martyrs became saints. Saints are religious people who are recognized as being exceptionally holy by the Church. Yet saints and martyrs served other purposes other than just to honour the holy…

It is the aim of this essay to provide a close examination of an extract of Patricks Acknowledgement of God’s dealings with him or what is more traditionally known as St. Patrick’s Confessio ranging from chapters 1-21. The Confessio of St. Patrick is a first-hand contemporary account in which Patrick details his life, from his time as a slave to his present life as a committed Christian. This text is considered to be of great importance as it is often regarded as one of the earliest pieces of…

St. Patrick’s legend, to most people, St. Patrick is the man who brought a day of good times and green beer to pubs across the world. In reality, St. Patrick wasn’t made a saint until centuries after his death and he wasn’t even Irish. During his childhood, he was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Ireland. During his years in slavery he converted to Christianity and once freed he did spend the rest of his life teaching the Irish about the Christian religion, but he was soon forgotten after his…

Cathleen ni Houlihan is a mythological female figure who represents Irish nationalism in literature and art. In the play Cathleen ni Houlihan written by William Butler Yeats and Lady August Gregory, she is personified as an old, suffering woman, representing Ireland’s oppression by the English. Cathleen and the martyred Saint Joan of Arc, as represented in George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan, share strong similarities. Significantly, Maud Gonne, the original Irish actress chosen to portray…

Found in many early medieval Irish manuscripts, an Immram is the traditional Old Irish tale of a sea voyage in which a saint travels across various islands in search of the Otherworld of eternal bliss. One of the most well known depictions of the sea voyage is The Voyage of Saint Brendan, which follows Saint Brendan and his brothers as they embark on their journey in search of the Promised Land of the Saints. Throughout their legendary seven-year journey, Brendan and his followers encounter an…

work, “Performing Penance and Poetic Performance in the Medieval Welsh Court,” this was a very specific type of public penance, not common to other regions. More closely associated with the previously communal atonements of previous centuries, these poems were publicly performed and addressed to God. Not popular in other areas, McKenna argues that this penance served both the purpose of reparation for the individual, but also for the listening audience as well. While Welsh poetry displays a…

We see this occasionally with the depictions of the lives of the early holy saints. It is said that St Aidan's sumptuous liberality was such that on one event when King Oswin had given him an especially fine stallion for his own use, a poor man met him and requested offerings, whereupon he instantly got off, and requested the steed, with all his Royal trappings, to be given to the bum. Maybe it was just normal that the King was irritated at the brief path in which his blessing was discarded…

Having many widely used anthologies edited by him as the author of more than 20 volumes of poetry, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and taught at Harvard and Oxford University. Chapter One: Early Life On April 13, 1939 in Castledawson, County Derry, in Northern Ireland Seamus Heaney was born. He was born as the eldest child of the family to Patrick and Margaret Heaney. He had eight siblings’ six brothers and two sisters, but unfortunately one of his brothers called Christopher, to whom…