Alice Curtayne and Saint Brigid

As we approach the feast of Saint Brigid, 2026, I have been re-reading the work of Irish Catholic writer Alice Curtayne, born in County Kerry on November 6, the Feast of All the Saints of Ireland, 1901. She died on August 9, 1981, in Saint Brigid's own county of Kildare. Over the course of her eighty years Alice Curtayne produced a number of books on the Irish saints, including individual titles on all three of our Irish patrons plus two volumes on Irish saints for children. I intend over the coming days to share extracts from three of her writings on Saint Brigid, all published in the 1930s:

 (1) Saint Brigid of Ireland - a 1934 book on Saint Brigid's life and cultus 

(2) The Rediscovery of Saint Brigid - a 1935 article published in The Irish Monthly 

 (3) Saint Brigid- The Mary of Ireland - a 1936 pamphlet published by the Australian Catholic Truth Society. 

 Ninety years on I find her work charming, still fresh and often thought-provoking. As Ireland in 2026 appears to find the unattested claims of a fictional flame-haired feminist goddess more compelling than the documented cultus of our national patroness, I am cheering on Alice Curtayne as she writes: 

It is easy to point to the affinity between certain of the heathen legends and episodes in the life of Brigid, but that affinity does not alone suffice to destroy Brigid’s historical truth. As a matter of fact the vitality of the Christian saint annihilates the dim concept of the pagan divinity. The abstraction fades before the brightness of the concrete. The warm humanity of Brigid that shines through the gossiping legends, that flaming humanity, alternately vehement, angry, tolerant, benign, completes before the eye of the mind a living personality that is the direct antithesis of the druids’ cold and unconsoling myth.

Alice Curtayne, St Brigid of Ireland (revised edition, Dublin, 1955), 104. 

I am sure she would have been heartened to know that the current generation of scholars have comprehensively undermined the foundations on which the claims of Brigid the goddess rest, even if popular enthusiasm for the pagan divinity remains unaffected. I look forward to sharing some more of Alice Curtayne's reflections on Brigid the saint each day until the octave of her feast. 

 

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