Perceptions of St Patrick in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

In Perceptions of St. Patrick in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, Bridget McCormack surveys a comprehensive collection of materials to make a compelling case for the significance of the saint in a variety of cultural arenas. Patrick emerges from this study not only as the patron saint famous for founding Christianity in Ireland and for serving as a secularized focus for national celebration, but also as a controversial figure in the competing images of Ireland that were produced in the complex political climate of the eighteenth century. McCormack divides her study into five chapters, each dealing with a different segment of Irish society, and so draws attention to the ways in which social diversity as well as conditions unique to the eighteenth century underpin these variations in representation.

The first two chapters deal with specifically religious representations of Patrick. In "Two Patricks," McCormack reviews the official position of the saint in the Church of Ireland and the Catholic Church. In writings by members of the Church of Ireland, Patrick is a figure of social order, his famous banishing of the snakes becoming a metaphor for the banishing of "wrath, strife and intestine division" (27). Catholic writers were in conflict, some stressing Patrick's traditional relationship to Rome and others appeasing Protestant anxieties with a Patrick "devoid of the shackles of Roman absolutism" who "preached a rational Catholic gospel" (33). The next chapter, "Popular Perceptions," draws on contemporary travelogues and literary texts to argue that, despite growing church resistance, "An essentially medieval cult of St. Patrick continued to exist in the eighteenth century" (53). This "popular cult" included members of all classes and denominations. Moreover, it was founded upon a fairly uniform body of tales about Patrick (as banisher of evil, as protector of Ireland, and as the spouse of "Sheelagh"), and devotions performed at stones, wells, and other sites across Ireland.

In Chapter Three, "Patrick and the Protestant Nation," McCormack provides an important context for the emergence of "Paddy" as an Irish everyman figure. She traces the secularization, and politicization, of Patrick through his various avatars as "knight protector," "a landed gentleman cast in the role of father figure," "the house of commons," and finally, by the 1780s, as "Paddy." McCormack argues that the introduction of the demotic variant of the saint's name "suggests a more inclusive idea of 'nation': one which included an actual political role for the middling as well as the landed class of all denominations" (63). While one might wish that McCormack had addressed the extensive use of "Paddy" in the 1790s literature of the United Irishmen, rather than ending her discussion with the Volunteer movement of the 1780s, she does provide a useful context for further consideration of such materials.

This inclusive "Paddy" also provides a tacit explanatory foundation for the next chapter, "St. Patrick's Day," which draws on the available evidence to reconstruct celebrations of March seventeenth by all classes of Irish society. Protestant members of the upper classes formed societies and held stately parades and parties, extensively using symbols that tied together England and Ireland. According to the texts gathered by McCormack, employers gave servants some money and the day off to drink, despite secular legislation discouraging the practice and Catholic clerics' condemnations of such carnivalesque celebrations of the saint's life. McCormack suggests that "the absence of any reports of lower class Protestant celebrations does not necessarily imply that they did not celebrate that day" (75). But McCormack does not ask, for instance, why some lower-class Catholics made pilgrimages on St. Patrick's Day while others drank and participated in "riots or crimes," or whether reports of Catholic excesses and silence on secular Protestant celebrations might be related to emergent stereotypes or the politics of the Irish press.

In the final chapter, "A Flawed Saint," McCormack considers the different roles that Patrick played in the politically invested histories written by various religious and secular scholars in the eighteenth century as well as in the Fianna lays published in translation during this period. Religious writers generally represented Patrick's conversion of the Irish to Christianity as an originary moment in the history of Irish civilization. Catholic writers characterized Patrick's mission as an unmitigated success, inaugurating a golden age of literacy and Christianity in Ireland "while Europe was in the dark ages" (86). Church of Ireland authors stressed Patrick's status as a missionary, "illustrat[ing] a shift in Church of Ireland thought towards a necessity for a revival of its evangelical and missionary origins" (88). They either argued for an Ireland that was Christian before Patrick's arrival or for a "tolerant pre-Christian society," suggesting that Patrick's mission was successful only because the Irish were already literate and civilized. In some texts, including the lays, authors went even further and characterized Patrick's mission not as the origin of order, but as a disruptive force which intervened in an already ordered and stable culture--a representation with suggestive echoes of contemporary debates about the missionary project in India.

McCormack has gathered together an impressively wide array of representations of St. Patrick, covering national celebrations, political pamphlets, religious writings, and reports of pilgrimages and popular belief. Her analyses of the visual evidence she presents in twelve illustrations are particularly helpful, dealing with these objects in a depth not often sustained in the overviews presented in her chapters. Despite the sometimes scant attention to the complications that arise across and within the religious and class divisions that inform the organization of McCormack's study, this volume nevertheless provides much information, and a usefully focused approach, for students of eighteenth-century Ireland.