St. Paticks Day - Irish History
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Available At 101 little known truths and tales of Irelend. Covers myths and legends. Paperback: 150 pages, Publisher: Hippocrene Books Published October 2001.
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For a few hours each year, millions of Irish and non-Irish commemorate the life of a 1500-year-old saint in a boisterous display of parading and revelry, festooned in the shamrock and emerald green. The Wearing of the Green captures the dramatic story of how March 17 was transformed from a stuffy dinner for Ireland's religious elite to the world's most public ethnic festival.
Long celebrated with more fanfare in New York than in Dublin, the holiday has been criticized for its loss of religious meaning, commercialism, and embarrassing rituals of drunkenness. But it has also served to unite Irish emigrants from America to Australia to Argentina. More recently it has become a flash point for political divides within the Irish community.
The Wearing of the Green is the first book to chronicle the full history of St. Patrick's Day-from its medieval origins to plastic leprechauns and green beer-exploring the shared heritage of the Irish through the evolution of this amazing holiday.
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The Order of Saint Patrick was instituted in 1783. This is the difinitive history of the Order, setting it in context as a political, social, cultural and ceremonial constituent of viceregal Ireland. Alsoincluded: a survey of the146 knights of the order appointed between 1783 and 1936, and complete lists of the Grand Masters, Knights and Officers.
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This engaging book traces the history, archaeology, and legends of ancient Ireland from 9000 B.C., when nomadic hunter-gatherers appeared in Ireland at the end of the last Ice Age-to 1167 A.D., when an Anglo-Norman invasion brought the country under control of the English crown for the first time. So much of what people today accept as ancient Irish history-Celtic invaders from Europe turning Ireland into a Celtic nation; St. Patrick driving the snakes from Ireland and converting its people to Christianity-is myth and legend with little basis in reality.
The truth is more interesting. The Irish, as the authors show, are not even Celtic in an archaeological sense. And there were plenty of bishops in Ireland before a British missionary called Patrick arrived. But In Search of Ancient Ireland is not simply the story of events from long ago. Across Ireland today are ancient sites and folk customs that provide tangible links to events thousands of years past. The authors visit and describe many of these places, talking to a wide variety of historians, archeologists and language scholars, in the very settings where history happened. Thus the book is also a journey on the ground to uncover ten thousand years of Irish identity. It is all here, from the Celtic culture to the rise of the uniquely Irish Christian spirituality to the final chapter which deals with the complex events that lead to the English invasion of the island.
In Search of Ancient Ireland is the official companion to the PBS series of the same name.
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Much Irish history is written as a matter of heroes and leaders, of great personalities and sweeping events. T. W. Moody and F. X. Martin's collection of essays by leading historians offers all those things, but it takes the land itself as its starting point. Ireland, they write, has always been poor because of its ungiving soil; always isolated because of its ring of imposing mountains and steep hills--but always open to invasion from the east across the calm, narrow Irish Sea, because of which, they write, "our present-day laws and institutions have their origins in England." While taking a long view of events, they manage to compress thousands of years of history into this fact-filled, highly readable book
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In this delightful and illuminating look into a crucial but little-known "hinge" of history, Thomas Cahill takes us to the "island of saints and scholars," the Ireland of St. Patrick and the Book of Kells. Here, far from the barbarian despoliation of the continent, monks and scribes laboriously, lovingly, even playfully preserved the West's written treasury. When stability returned in Europe, these Irish scholars were instrumental in spreading learning, becoming not only the conservators of civilization, but also the shapers of the medieval mind, putting their unique stamp on Western culture.
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