117e The Irish and Celts Out Front and Early Adopters

Episode 117e The Irish and Celts Out Front and Early Adopters

Description: In today’s episode Dr. Carly McNamara of the University of Glasgow will lead us through the early conversion of the Irish to Christianity. We will talk about some of the sources we can look to for more information as well as how we should interpret those sources.

About Today’s Guest:
Dr. Carolyn McNamara
On Twitter: @MedievalCarly
Education Evolved: @EducationEvolvd www.educationevolvedltd.com/
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Begin Transcript:
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•In today’s episode Dr. Carly McNamara of the University of Glasgow will lead us through the early conversion of the Irish to Christianity. We will talk about some of the sources we can look to for more information as well as how we should interpret those sources.
•With that, here is the next piece of the mosaic of the history of the Popes of Rome and Christian Church.

Steve: [00:00:00] All right. Let's dive right back into the history of Christianity and the British Isles. We are joined again by Dr. Carlene McNamara of the university of glass gout to lead us through this fascinating period in history. We've discussed a great deal of information already in this series. So what will we be focusing in on today?
Dr. Carly McNamara: Yeah. So today, you know, we've talked about the ancient Coutts and we've talked about the coming of Christianity to. And in Northern Britain. So today I really wanted to focus on, you know, what does the church look like when it's getting settled into this new area? Know we're looking at areas that are kind of beyond the direct control of the Roman empire.
And so it's nice to see kind of what they do with Christianity. Once they kind of get their hands properly around it.
Steve: And so we are dealing with these areas outside of the Roman empire. So now we really should start [00:01:00] off talking about sources and what can we use to, uh, derive some ideas from this time period?
Dr. Carly McNamara: Yeah, that's a great point. So there's a number of different kinds of sources that we can look at for this period. Uh, we even see in. Juridical or legal documents that survived from the medieval period, you know, information about Christianity. That's really starting to become codified, but you know, there's, hagiographies which your readers are like, are you.
Listeners readers. Ha I'm funny. Uh, your listeners are likely familiar with hagiographies in that they are, you know, stories of the lives of saints, but we have to give a huge caveat to that in that it's not like a biography that we might read of, you know, former president Obama or some other well-known person today.
It's. It's not gonna be that kind of story. [00:02:00] Hagiographies have lots of miracles. There's usually lots of like telling the future that's going on and there's, we have to be really careful in how we approach and work with them. Uh, there's animals. And so animals, I liked two. Talk about as, you know, if someone's keeping their daily diary in a monastery of the big things of the monasteries interested in.
So they're recording the deaths of Kings they're recording, maybe eclipses in the sky earthquakes that might happen. Big battles are the deaths of important Abbots or bishops in their local area. So we're getting a lot of information from them, but it tends to be pretty sparse. It's like on this day, there was a battle at this place and this guy won and that's the whole entry.
So. We have to use them as a skeleton upon which we might be able to build some additional detail. And then we've got [00:03:00] liturgical books we've got in Tiffany's, which contained chance for use during mass or the canonical hours. And indeed one of the earliest and Tiffany Aries, that survives is from the.
Early eighth century, I believe it's the Tiffany of banger and banger monastery there in the north of Ireland or what we'd call today Northern Ireland, you know, and the fact that something like that exists from so early is just thrilling and fascinating. So you can get, if you're interested in kind of the liturgical side of, you know, what the church is doing rather than.
What I look at more as kind of the historical side, you know, those kinds of things are really useful. There's murder analogies, which are of course kind of lists of saints and their feast stays. Sometimes we might get a smidge of additional information with those, but they tend to be again, fairly bare bones.
We also have, uh, for [00:04:00] Scotland. Quite useful. They Aberdeen Breviary, although it wasn't compiled until 15, 10 in Edinburgh at the behest of king James, the fourth, it's kind of the first big document that we've got that lists all these saints that are considered important in Scotland. And it includes a lot of early Christian saints.
So that's really useful for us. We also have what are called histories. And I like to put this with a kind of quotations around the word histories, because it's not again what we might think of. And when you think of your textbook from your history class in high school or university, it's not going to be anything like.
So we can't approach them the same way that we might, those books in our present time. So we view histories today is kind of this non-partisan or objective account of events of the past. But in the, [00:05:00] in this deep pass, in the medieval period, they just didn't exist the same way. So. Yeah, we have to think about what's the purpose of these authors writing.
And remember that writing in and of itself was an expensive activity for the most part. And so it's not like you're going to have every male ruin and DeArment and, and such writing. So. It takes something or it means something for them to be putting this material down and some excellent examples of these histories that survive and amazingly.
So are Gail this who was a sixth century Ramano Britain he wrote, or he's best known for writing day XCD over Tanya or on the destruction of Britain? Uh, he's pretty well-known for hating almost everyone. Except sometimes the Romans and then we've got beads who is a late, you know, seventh or eighth century [00:06:00] Northumbrian monk from where most ERO in England, he took a number of pages from Gilda's book.
So you see. Similar kind of, it's usually hating on the Britains or the Welsh, but then he added some of his own information to it. A bead also wrote his own life of Saint Cuthbert at the request of the community of St. Cuthbert. So we want to keep an eye on both of these are religious men and religious orders.
And so what is the purpose they have of writing these things? Trying to express or what's their goal, you know, who's their audience. When, when we think about working with these sources now a
Steve: word from our sponsors,
when you're working with these sources, what kind of, um, methodology do you use in maybe inside of individual sources? [00:07:00] And is there a way that you combine sources to kind of cross check that.