The Flowering of Ireland: Saints, Scholars and Kings

In the early Middle Ages, when classical scholarship in Europe had been buried beneath centuries of barbarism, Ireland was the seat of one of the most extraordinary literary, artistic, and scholarly flowerings the Western world had ever seen. "The Flowering of Ireland" brings to life that radiant, singular era between the fifth and twelfth centuries when Ireland became the repository if not the savior of classical Western civilization. Katharine Scherman traces Ireland’s ascendancy back to the fifth-century meeting of two disparate cultures: the pagan Celts — a vigorous, paradoxical people who loved battle yet revered the arts, and who exalted warriors, priests, and poets to a status just below that of kings — and the handful of scholarly Christian missionaries, successors to hermits who had fled the corruption of Rome for the arduous purity of the Syrian desert. The proud but accepting Celts welcomed the missionaries and their Greco-Roman classical tradition, and the flame of Irish scholarship was ignited. Here are the lives, partly apocryphal yet deeply moving, of the early Irish saints — foremost among them Ireland’s patron saint, Patrick, who, according to legend, introduced Latin, writing, and the Christian creed to Ireland, as well as encouraging the recording of the great pagan myths. Among the most haunting tales are those of self-exiled monks who sailed uncharted seas in their light curraghs to seek grace on craggy islands and mist-shrouded mountaintops.