Over the last week we have seen how Alice Curtayne's book on Saint Brigid has examined our national patroness as a uniquely important figure in early Irish history. But we are going to turn now to the last of the author's three works, a pamphlet called Saint Brigid - The Mary of Ireland. The Australian Catholic Truth Society's edition was published in 1936, and reissued in 1960. The text is available to read online here. I have a copy of my own published in Dublin in 1933. The main text is the same but there are some charmingly naive illustrations in the Anthonian Press edition and some extra prayers appended. I will share some of those tomorrow, but today I want to turn to Alice Curtayne's treatment of Saint Brigid as the supreme saint of agricultural life. The author has presented Saint Brigid as a unique personality in early Irish history with unbounded energy, organizational genius and leadership qualities. But her hagiography is also filled with episodes relating to the provision of food. Popular culture, where her feast day was a significant date on the agricultural calendar, has always included a strong acknowledgment of the saint's patronage of agriculture, reflected in traditional iconography which depicts a cow at her feet. Alice Curtayne has little difficulty in reconciling all of the various aspects of Saint Brigid's life from the nun to the farmer. The provision of hospitality was a duty laid upon those in the monastic life and a common trope in hagiography:
Everyone who came to her doors was entertained. In this lavish dispensing she was frequently disturbed by misgivings of an insufficient supply. Would the butter last out? Or would the beer go round? were the anxieties known to Brigid the hostess. But all earthy feasts come to an end. This great-souled woman always thought the backs of departing guests a sad sight. Did they have enough? And would they be fed tomorrow? were her recurrent troubles. There is an Irish poem ascribed to her in which she is supposed to envisage heaven as a stupendous feast, shared by countless guests and going on forever, replenished from inexhaustible supplies; even a 'lake of ale is mentioned. Though the authenticity of the poem is dubious, the idea is just. It is strictly true of Brigid that her heaven would be a state in which she could have all the pleasures of hospitality without its solicitudes.
Although modern scholars have confirmed that this poem was written some centuries after the time of Saint Brigid, Curtayne goes on to say:
Her visions were as characteristic of her as that notion of heaven. Professor Gardner, extending a thought of Shelley, has remarked somewhere that "the mystic's representation, the language that he uses, must all be coloured by his previous education and mental equipment". It is, indeed, highly interesting to observe that when the saints attempt to describe their visions they invariably end by describing some daily scene, but to which they attach an allegorical meaning...How characteristic in this respect were the visions of Brigid. In that one described in the Lebar Brecc, she "saw" ploughmen and sowers, clear shining streams, oats springing up, a furrowed field, all farm animals: sheep, swine, dogs. These are the things on which Brigid's eyes rested every day.
For Saint Brigid is supremely the saint of pastoral life. She is the genius of our Irish homesteads, and every farm is in a sense her shrine. She is the tutelar spirit of our meadows and gardens. But within the iron gates of industrial cities, she is a stranger. All her legends are about farm life, milking cows, making firkins of butter, calling home the sheep in the rain. She was at home in a dairy. The legends evoke discomfitures that are very familiar: the dairymaid's confusion when a superior worker sneers at her butter, as insufficient in quantity or indifferent in quality. Brigid was a notable butter and cheese maker, and her home-brewed ale was famous throughout the land. After her profession, even when she was Mother Abbess of thirteen thousand nuns, she still spent part of each day at those rural occupations. We read of her coming in from shepherding, her garments saturated with rain; or supervising the reapers from dawn to sunset in the harvest fields about her convent settlement; or contentedly busy over her stores of honey and wholesome brews...
Alice Curtayne, St. Brigid - The Mary of Ireland, (Dublin 1933), 18-19.
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