In this eagerly written book, David Jenkins proposes a theology of religious settlement in early medieval Ireland. Jenkins' thesis is quite simple: Irish Christians modeled their holy places after the biblical Temple of the Israelites, as described in the history of Solomon. The author's tone is exegetical; Jenkins spends many unnecessary pages laying out the many possible meanings of a particular bit of evidence before dismissing all but the correct meaning. His argument and instincts are sound, but the book is at times over-argued and, at other times, poorly supported by mere inference. Jenkins' thesis is neither as innovative nor as broadly pertinent as he suggests. Still, it is a sturdy little book suitable for some classrooms.
Jenkins' most useful chapter is his first, in which he thoroughly and critically reviews classic and recent works on churches and monasticism in pre-Norman Ireland. He ably traces developments in the historiography, beginning with the works of 19th- and 20th-century pioneers who struggled to explain the seeming uniqueness of Irish church organization and the diversity of its idiosyncratic architecture. Jenkins discusses the rise and fall of the "monastic hegemony" thesis promoted by mid-20th-century scholars such as D. A. Binchy and Kathleen Hughes. Hughes et al. argued that bishops and dioceses of Ireland's conversion period quickly gave way to a rural Christian landscape dominated by monasteries and ruled by abbots and abbesses, along with an occasional bishop. Jenkins rehearses several enduring debates in the field of early Irish history, finishing the chapter with a list of "revisionist" scholars who have rejected the old model of ecclesiastical development. Richard Sharpe and Colmán Etchingham, among others, have drawn upon both material and textual evidence to reveal the fluid dynamic of religious organization and settlements in Ireland as well as the many similarities of Irish, British, and Continental monasticism.
Jenkins admits that other academics, such as Charles Doherty and Aidan MacDonald, have already proposed the bases of his own argument. They and others have argued that most Irish religious settlements had common architectural features (enclosing walls, internal subdivisions, a saint's tomb or oratory at the center, peripheral spaces for mundane activities and guests), and adhered to the same basic layout. However, according to Jenkins, his predecessors never pursued the spiritual implications of their discoveries or proposed, as he does, that the Irish maintained a "canon of planning" for their Christian places based on scriptural models.
The rest of the book aims to substantiate this canon and identify its origins in a particular chapter of the eighth-century Collectio Canonum Hibernensis, a collection of decrees from Irish ecclesiastical councils supported by biblical and theological passages. Canon 44 of the Hibernensis prescribes divinely mandated measures and boundaries for a sacred place and the ordering of its internal spaces, as exemplified in the ancient Temple of Solomon (which the Irish, Jenkins argued, mixed up with the Tabernacle of Exodus). For Jenkins, this single chapter of the Hibernensis proves that Irish church builders were thinking of their Bibles when they built religious settlements. Jenkins examines the archaeological record of four sites as case studies to prove his proposition, but argues that the best archaeological and textual evidence for the canon of planning can be found in the Irish monastery of Iona built by St. Columcille off the coast of Scotland in the sixth century.
It is hard to argue that Irish Christians did not think about theology as they built their churches, but almost as hard to prove that they did. Some scholars have already noticed a pattern to Irish religious sites and have made the link to the Hibernensis and biblical exemplars. The author freely admits that local conditions also influenced church building and that pre-Christian enclosures may have looked a lot like later religious sites. He does not make a very good case for general awareness of Hibernensis chapter 44 or the canon's transmission to the women and men who planned and built settlements.
Jenkins does, however, prove lots of stuff that doesn't require proving. A footnote would be sufficient evidence that the Hibernensis is Irish in origin. Readers could do without the long disquisition on the history and importance of the biblical Temple and Tabernacle (references to Mishnah are quite unnecessary for an argument about Irish ecclesiastical settlements). Jenkins might have saved himself some labor, too, by cutting the brief history of Egyptian monasticism. He consistently chooses the lex difficilior of obvious evidence while so thoroughly qualifying his more interesting suggestions that they seem tenuous, at best.
Ultimately, Jenkins fails to persuade me that any articulated master plan drove Irish builders or that Irish spatial organization influenced the architects of monasticism elsewhere--not because his interpretation of Irish sites is necessarily wrong, but because he undermines his own arguments with his tangents and irrelevant proofs. Jenkins also insists on a traditional definition of monasticism and is far too vulnerable to claims of Benedictine dominance. He is quite wrong to say that we have no evidence for Merovingian layouts and religious landscapes in the early centuries of European monasticism; hagiography, letters, conciliar decrees, and histories offer plenty of information, as does archaeological literature. In fact, Jenkins could probably use a refresher course in the diverse micro- Christianities of the late antique and early medieval periods, especially via the works of Mayke de Jong, Albrecht Diem, Bonnie Effros, Kate Cooper, Felice Lifshitz, Alison Beach, and many other historians of Christian monasticism beyond Ireland. These scholars and others have begun to dismantle the tidy historiographical biases that previously relegated Irish religious settlements, as well as Anglo-Saxon minsters, to the fringes of Christendom. Meanwhile, economic historians, such as Michael McCormick, and assorted archaeologists have traced the routes by which Christian ideas, goods, and people traveled back and forth across Europe throughout what Jenkins still calls the "dark" ages. Jenkins might have made a much stronger case for Irish connections to monasticism elsewhere had he consulted these works.
Jenkins' book has plenty of unrealized potential and wasted pages. Too often, its obviously learned author undermines his more interesting points by over-qualifying them and over-arguing the obvious. It may well be true, as he suggests, that Adomnán saw his monastery at Iona as a new Temple in a new Jerusalem and sold this canon of planning to his ecclesiastical colleagues in Ireland. But must one support this hypothesis by drawing a parallel between Columcille's faithful horse, which cried over the dying saint, and the biblical Mary who anointed Jesus with perfume? Adomnán may have been thinking of Mary when he envisioned the weeping horse, but the analogy hardly supports Jenkins' more important contentions. "As one stands today within the material remains of early Irish religious settlement one is not," Jenkins writes, "struck immediately by a Temple analogy" (154). On that succinctly expressed point, he is absolutely right.