The guide to St Brigid: What we know and (more importantly) what we do NOT know:
- We know NOTHING about St Brigid’s life or career.
- We DO know she was important enough to have been subject of at least three biographies within 200 years of her death, two in Latin and one in Irish.
- Three more may have been lost from that period. No other Irish saint, not Patrick nor anyone else, generated as much literary activity.
- The biographies are big on her character, her piety and generosity, but sparse on the type of details a modern biographer would include, names, dates, places.
- Her geography is uncertain. The biography by a monk called Cogitosus is a virtual travelogue for the monastery she established in Kildare, the other two do not mention Kildare at all.
- One life mentions she is from the people of Fothart, whom we know from other sources were associated with Croghan Hill.
- Her association with Faughart County Louth is a misinterpretation, added probably around 1400.
- The biographies mention 126 miracles, more than Patrick & Columcille put together.
- The miracle of the expanding cloak is not amongst them, it was first recorded in the 1850s.
- By 1300 she had a massive following throughout Europe and was our most important and influential saint.
- Saint Bridget of Sweden was named for her when she was born in 1303.
- Her international fame was overtaken by others, although there was revival of interest in her in the 1800s and 1900s as a model for Irish girlhood.
- The Goddess theory is an inversion, the first written reference to Brigid the Goddess came 600 years after the death of Brigid the saint, in a manuscript compiled in Castledermot and purporting to describe pre-Christian Ireland.
- There are NO written records form pre-Christian Ireland. So did the Goddess invent the saint or the saint invent the Goddess?
- Even the relics we paraded with in Kildare last Sunday are likely bogus. The chapel where they were installed in Lumiar was not built until the 1500s, and the three knights are supposed to have brought them there in 1283.
- But does it matter? The characteristics in the very first biographies, simplicity, piety, generosity and love of animals were kept alive by the ordinary people and offered inspiration to 45 generations since she died.
