Who Was Saint Patrick?

by Edward Arthur Thompson

Book Overview

The classic study of the saint's life, presented with new introduction and bibliography.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312870841
• ISBN13: 9780312870843
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 190 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Discover Saint Patrick!

For the 'man in the street', like myself unable to confront the Latin texts, this is a magical account, written with understated authority and un-academic fluency - but, to my mind, with convincing authority, not to mention mercurial wit. I've read it twice.

Saint Patrick was not Irish

It is doubtless that Irish medieval Christianity differs from the rest of the Christian world not only because of the difference in the date of Easter or the tonsure's shape. All the historians agree that that was an exceptional type of religiousness. To understand this difference one has to look back to the very beginnings of Irish Christianity and to its founder - St. Patrick. This is a figure about little certain is known. All the knowledge we have we derive from two of his writings Confessio and Epistola ad Coroticum. Thompson in his book discusses line by line these writings speculating about their explicit and implicit meaning. This resembles a deductive work of a detective and requires a broad knowledge not only of history itself, but also geography, theology and mentality as well as of course - medieval Latin and paleography. He also discusses a controversial figure of Palladius in a relation to St. Patrick as well as Coroticus and his conflict with the Saint. This book is addressed to people truly interested in the matter and is a serious, scientific work, one of the most discussed among the historians, yet it is written in a simple, comprehensible way, making reading it a real pleasure for history adepts as well as history students. It discusses all the controversies among the historians about certain details of St. Patrick's life, from the date and place of his birth to his death, so that a reader may not only get to know the author's point of view, but also of other historians, and try to judge him/herself. Thompson, however, is very convincing in his way of writing and gathering evidence justifying his opinions. He also treats the opinions of his opponents - historians with a witty, yet mischievous sense of humor. The author leaves us not only with a broad and detailed knowledge about the Saint but also with some open questions left for further future investigation.