The monastic sites of early Christian Ireland have always been an attraction to visitors. Now issued in a new edition, this book is intended for use by those who wish to understand the religious and secular life of early Ireland. The authors have used the site remains and historical source material to reconstruct the life of Irish monks and laymen from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Here the reader will find treatments of the function of monasteries in early Ireland, the daily life of their inhabitants, and the significance of their art and sculpture. The appendices include a county-by-county guide to the most interesting early Christian sites.

The monastic sites of early Christian Ireland have always been an attraction to visitors. Now issued in a new edition, this book is intended for use by those who wish to understand the religious and secular life of early Ireland. The authors have used the site remains and historical source material to reconstruct the life of Irish monks and laymen from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Here the reader will find treatments of the function of monasteries in early Ireland, the daily life of their inhabitants, and the significance of their art and sculpture. The appendices include a county-by-county guide to the most interesting early Christian sites.

Ireland has long been regarded as a 'land of saints and scholars'. Yet the Irish experience of Christianity has never been simple or uncomplicated. The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland describes the emergence, long dominance, sudden division, and recent decline of Ireland's most important religion, as a way of telling the history of the island and its peoples. Throughout its long history, Christianity in Ireland has lurched from crisis to crisis. Surviving the hostility of earlier religious cultures and the depredations of Vikings, evolving in the face of Gregorian reformation in the 11th and 12th centuries and more radical protestant renewal from the 16th century, Christianity has shaped in foundational ways how the Irish have understood themselves and their place in the world. And the Irish have shaped Christianity, too. Their churches have staffed some of the religion's most important institutions and developed some of its most popular ideas. But the Irish church, like the island, is divided. After 1922, a border marked out two jurisdictions with competing religious politics. The southern state turned to the Catholic church to shape its social mores, until it emerged from an experience of sudden-onset secularization to become one of the most progressive nations in Europe. The northern state moved more slowly beyond the protestant culture of its principal institutions, but in a similar direction of travel. In 2021, fifteen hundred years on from the birth of Saint Columba, Christian Ireland appears to be vanishing. But its critics need not relax any more than believers ought to despair. After the failure of several varieties of religious nationalism, what looks like irredeemable failure might actually be a second chance. In the ruins of the church, new Columbas and Patricks shape the rise of another Christian Ireland.

In this first volume of the Royal Irish Academy's multi-volume A New History of Ireland a wide range of national and international scholars, in every field of study, have produced studies of the archaeology, art, culture, geography, geology, history, language, law, literature, music, and related topics that include surveys of all previous scholarship combined with the latest research findings, to offer readers the first truly comprehensive and authoritative account of Irish history from the dawn of time down to the coming of the Normans in 1169. Included in the volume is a comprehensive bibliography of all the themes discussed in the narrative, together with copious illustrations and maps, and a thorough index.

This is the first book devoted to churches in Ireland dating from the arrival of Christianity in the fifth century to the early stages of the Romanesque around 1100, including those built to house treasures of the golden age of Irish art, such as the Book of Kells and the Ardagh chalice. � Carrag�in's comprehensive survey of the surviving examples forms the basis for a far-reaching analysis of why these buildings looked as they did, and what they meant in the context of early Irish society. � Carrag�in also identifies a clear political and ideological context for the first Romanesque churches in Ireland and shows that, to a considerable extent, the Irish Romanesque represents the perpetuation of a long-established architectural tradition.

Down Cathedral is one of the two oldest ecclesiastical foundations in Ulster still in use. Although the present structure dates from the early 13th century it is known that there had been a monastery and place of workship on the Hill of Down for many centuries before then. This book describes and illustrates the history of the Hill of Down from those earliest times to the present day. The relationship of St Patrick with the Hill is narrated and takes careful account of the latest research, some of it controversial, on the association of the island's patron saint with the Hill on which he is thought to be buried. The intriguing early and middle history of the Cathedral, including the building of the Benedictine monastery, the bishops and priors who ruled over it and its destruction at the dissolution of the monasteries in the middle of the 16th century, is told in clear and absorbing detail. Its subsequent restoration to full glory from the 1790s, largely due to the influence of the Downshire family, marks the beginning of the modern period for this much loved building. The story is brought right up to date with the recent appointment of a New Bishop and a new Dean. Important new sources in the State Papers and in archiepiscopal registers that have only recently become accessible have been used in the telling of this fascinating study. Many of the images in this work are published for the first time and include photographs of irreplaceable artifacts uncovered during the significant archaelogical excavations of the last few years. The outcome is a comprehensive, pioneering and beautifully illustrated account of one of Ireland's most treasured historical locations, written with authority and affection by one of the country's most accomplished and respected ecclesiastical historians.

The fourth volume of The New Cambridge Medieval History covers the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which comprised perhaps the most dynamic period in the European middle ages. This is a history of Europe, but the continent is interpreted widely to include the Near East and North Africa. The volume is divided into two parts of which this, the second, deals with the course of events - ecclesiastical and secular - and major developments in an age marked by the transformation of the position of the papacy in a process fuelled by a radical reformation of the church, the decline of the western and eastern empires, the rise of western kingdoms and Italian elites, and the development of governmental structures, the beginnings of the recovery of Spain from the Moors and the establishment of western settlements in the eastern Mediterranean region in the wake of the crusades.

Embracing Solitude focuses on the interior turn of monasticism and scans the Christian tradition for women who have made this turn in various epochs and circumstances. New Monasticism is a movement assuming diverse forms in response to the turn to classical spiritual sources for guidance about living spiritual commitment with integrity and authenticity today. Genuine spiritual seeking requires the cultivation of an inner disposition to return to the room of the heart. The lessons explored in this book from women spiritual entrepreneurs across the centuries will benefit contemporay New Monastics--both women and men. The accounts will inspire, challenge, and guide those who follow in the footsteps of the renowned spiritual innovators profiled here.

The landscape of Ireland is rich with ancient carved stone crosses, tomb-shrines, Romanesque churches, round towers, sundials, beehive huts, Ogham stones and other monuments, many of them dating from before the 12th century. The purpose and function of these artifacts have often been the subject of much debate. Peter Harbison proposes in this book a radical hypothesis: that a great many of these relics can be explained in terms of ecclesiastical pilgrimage. He has constructed a fascination theory about the palace of pilgrimage in the early Christian period, placing it right at the center of communal life. The monuments themselves make much better sense if it looked at in this light—as having come into existence not through the practices of ascetic monks but because of the activities of pilgrims. He begins by searching the historical sources in detail for evidence of early pilgrimage sites. By examining their monuments he projects the findings to other locations where pilgrimage has not been documented. He goes on to describe monument-types of every kind and to identify pilgrims in sculpture surviving from before AD 1200. The Dingle Peninsula in Kerry proves to be a microcosm of pilgrimage monuments, enabling the author to reconstruct a tradition of maritime pilgrimage activity up and down the west coast of Ireland. Indeed, the famous medieval traveler's tale of the fabulous voyage of the St Brendan the Navigator can now be seen as the literary expression of a longstanding maritime pilgrimage along the Atlantic seaways of Ireland and Scotland, reaching Iceland, Greenland, and even North America.

In the first major work on the subject for over 30 years, Nancy Edwards provides a critical survey of the archaeological evidence in Ireland (c. 400-1200), introducing material from many recently discovered sites as well as reassessing the importance of earlier excavations. Beginning with an assessment of Roman influence, Dr Edwards then discusses the themse of settlement, food and farming, craft and technology, the church and art, concluding with an appraisal of the Viking impact. The archaeological evidence for the period is also particularly rich and wide-ranging and our knowledge is expanding repidly in the light of modern techniques of survey and excavation.