Episode 117g Having a Think About Celtic Christianity

Description: In today’s episode Dr. Carly McNamara of the University of Glasgow will dive in the intellectual tradition of early Irish Christianity. We will talk about who some of the important Irish Christian intellectuals were, how they operated and how they spread their version of Christian scholarship not only in the Ireland and Britain, but throughout Continental Europe as well.

About Today’s Guest:
Dr. Carolyn McNamara
On Twitter: @MedievalCarly
Education Evolved: @EducationEvolvd www.educationevolvedltd.com/
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Music Provided by:
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"Virtutes Instrumenti" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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"String Impromptu Number 1" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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Agnus Dei X - Bitter Suite Kevin MacLeaod (incomptech.com)
"Folk Round" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Celtic Impulse" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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Begin Transcript:
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•In today’s episode Dr. Carly McNamara of the University of Glasgow will dive in the intellectual tradition of early Irish Christianity. We will talk about who some of the important Irish Christian intellectuals were, how they operated and how they spread their version of Christian scholarship not only in the Ireland and Britain, but throughout Continental Europe as well.
•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] If we move on to what were some of the big cities that were starting to, as we get into the later middle ages and we're, you know, we're getting some new things. We have the Vikings coming in. How does that continue to develop?
Dr. Carly McNamara: Yeah. So I think that's a great point. So if we're looking at kind of pre Viking age Ireland, there aren't really any cities that we would think of today. They tend to be your smaller settlements. And again, that's going to be a little bit different to what we expect to see. You know, from places that were part of the Roman empire, where Rome, you know, founded these, you know, London kind of places, but then when the Vikings come in, they start to found what becomes cities and some of the big ones that I can think of just off the top of my head are, you know, Dublin is a big one.
We've got Waterford Wexford, cork, lemme. You know, these are all places that are [00:01:00] going to have a, a close Viking age, Scandinavian connection, because that's where they decided to settle. When they decided that reading, wasn't just going to cut it anymore. They want to just start spending the winter over in Ireland and then settling permanently.
Steve: How did those cities develop a Christian and an ecclesiastical, uh, support and a system?
Dr. Carly McNamara: Yeah. So we see the Vikings kind of getting pulled into Irish politics fairly quickly. You know, being able to talk a bit more in depth about that would be, I think really interesting, but just to give a little blurb about it, if you like, you know, they're finding themselves in a context in which, you know, we're looking more and more at society itself being.
Christian. And [00:02:00] so if they want to trade with people, it's likely they're trading with Christians. If they want to take wives from the local population, they're likely to be Christians. If they're wanting to know. Agreements with local Kings to serve as mercenaries in their wars against other Irish Kings.
It's likely that those Kings are going to be Christian. So they're going to get a lot of exposure and as they start to get that, you know, we're gonna get. The the Ecclesiastics coming in, or maybe there's a monastery nearby anyway, you know, near cork, there's a Lismore and a number of other monasteries.
So they're just, they're going to be around. And I think that's probably, I almost want to say by attrition kind of how they start to. Pulled into Christianity. You're talking about the Christianization of Scandinavians, I think is really fascinating stuff.
Steve: [00:03:00] Yeah, because they, they come in and in different ways, different places where the Scandinavians, when some times they had their families with them. But if they're going into a place that's heavily acculturated in one area and you want to become a part of that culture, it's really a lot easier to just become a part of that culture then to really impose your culture.
On top of that, it's just. Not how that would generally work. If you're a handful of Vikings going into England or, uh, Ireland, you're not going to NESA and you want to get married and you want to settle down, you're still probably going to care. You're still going to carry on some of your aspects of your culture just naturally, but it's sure a lot easier to learn their language, get into their religion so that you can get married, settle down, do that whole thing.
Dr. Carly McNamara: Yeah. And we start to see, you know, once we've got the. kingdom of Dublin getting fairly large. We start [00:04:00] to see Vikings who themselves have Gaelic names. And so it's very obvious. So there's been intermarriages going on between Scandinavian and native Irish or Gaelic speaking peoples. And we might have a think about the degree to which a certain amount of inter religious.
You know, experiences within a marriage word, going to be fairly normal, even though we are moving increasingly towards a very Christian society.
Steve: Yeah, I think of like I'm in a. It seems so real to me that it plays out like you maybe have a Viking comes in, who's into, uh, Odin or whatever. He's marrying a Christian and, you know, maybe he adopts Christian Christianity in every way, but he's still going to, you know, just naturally carry on what some of the things that he had always celebrated.
And it's going to get [00:05:00] folded in a little bit, at least into his Christianity. Or a lot of bed, probably depending on case by case.
Dr. Carly McNamara: Yeah. One of my favorite stories that talks to the conversion of Scandinavians is, you know, more in the Santiam and they would do these big baptism events. And this one guy comes in and he gets his baptism and they give him a new piece of clothing and they're giving new clothing to all of the people getting baptized.
And he, he we're told that he turns to the people who are doing the baptizing. He says, well, this shirt isn't as nice as the one I got last time. And so that's kind of evidence for us. You know, how sincere are some of these Vikings actually being when they go through some of these mass baptisms, you're there going, you know, I'm going to get maybe a nice [00:06:00] meal.
Uh, I got to wash myself anyway. Maybe it's logger job. Maybe it's washing day. They're going to give me some stuff afterwards, you know, in their own religion. They're not beholden to just a single deity or they can, you know, Revere any deity they want basically. And so they're like, right. I'll share, I'll worship your guy too.
And you're going to give me some nice stuff so we can throw that into the mix. And I think that goes back to when we talked last time about. The conversion of Ireland and what the thought process of some of these Kings or even just your, your everyday person might my bring to the process of conversion in, or the sincerity of their conversion.
Steve: And it's so interesting. We're really looking at, in any cultural change. What's. Really zoomed out view, but all of these changes were really made granularly. [00:07:00] They're changed at, you know, the individual pixels come together to make the pig the big picture.
Dr. Carly McNamara: Yeah.