The Ancients - Saint Brigid: Turning Bathwater into Beer

Episode Date: May 29, 2022

Saint Patrick is a household name, celebrated around the globe every March. But what do we know about another of Ireland’s patron saints, Brigid?In this episode, find out about Patrick’s pupil and successor, her miracles and the ways in which her sainthood differs from that of her male counterparts.Lisa Bitel is Dean's Professor of Religion and Professor of Religion and History at the University of Southern California. She previously came onto the podcast to talk about Saint Patrick. You can find this episode here: pod.link/1520403988If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store.

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they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. it's the ancients on history hit i'm tristan hughes your host and in today's podcast where we're talking once again about an irish saint you might remember a couple of months back we did an episode for saint patrick's day all all about St. Patrick, with Professor Lisa Battelle from USC Dornsife. Now, when we approached Lisa about St. Patrick and doing a podcast on that, Lisa was like, yes, absolutely. But you must also do one. We must also talk about St. Bridget. Because St Saint Bridget is another of the patron saints of Ireland,

one of her many miracles is that she turned bathwater into beer. Her story is really, really interesting, as is her legacy. So following our recording on St. Patrick, Lisa and I recorded a second episode all about Saint Bridget. This was a really fun chat with her on Saint Bridget. This is one of her main areas of interest, of focus when talking about Irish saints and you're going to see why in this episode. She is a really interesting figure. So without further ado, to talk all about Saint Brigid of Kildare, another of Ireland's patron saints, here's Lisa. Lisa, it's great to have you back on the podcast.

Oh, I'm happy to be back. We chatted about St. Patrick last time. This time we're talking about St. Brigid, because of the patron saints of Ireland, we normally seem to always focus on St. Patrick, but St. Brigid now, especially in 2022, she's making a comeback. Maybe you're referring to the fact that she just got a national holiday for the first time. Before the national holidays were Patrick, Jesus, and I've forgotten who the third one was. And now there's a woman with one as well, and that's nice. Okay, so let's delve into this now.

What sources do we have for Saints Bridget? Whether she was literate or not, unfortunately, she didn't write anything that she left to us. So we don't have anything from her perspective or from her period. What we have is the earliest existing saint's life hagiography from Ireland. So before any lives of St. Patrick, we have this life of St. Bridget written by an author whose name we know, Cogitosis, who apparently was a churchman at her main church in Kildare. But we don't know much about him either. We just have this life of her written supposedly about 200 years or less after she lived. And you mentioned last time how with the Saints' Lives of Patrick,

how these people writing centuries after Patrick's wars in Ireland, that they were using earlier sources in their own rights. Do we think Cogitosis was also using earlier sources in his account? Yeah, he suggests so. I mean, that's a hagiographical trope, really, to say, you know, I'm not making this stuff up, honest. I got it from people who know. He probably had a written source as well as people who said they'd heard stories about Bridget and would tell him those stories. But that's all we know. We don't know any specifics. And then therefore, as we delve into the life of St. Bridget using Cogitosis as our main source in this chat,

first of all, as a bit of context, what is Cogitosis' aim when he's framing, when he's portraying St. Bridget? What does he really want to convey across about St. Bridget and her life? That's an important question. You could ask that of any saint's life. And in Ireland, the scholarly answer has been for the last century that they wanted their saint, as I've mentioned, in their church to be regarded as the most important. Part of it had to do with politics and saying, we're one of the holiest places on this island. You know, you come to get Christianity here, you're getting the best brand. We're really politically important and our patrons are great kings. Part of that was recruitment. You wanted

your abbess or your abbot or your bishop to be from a really good family to keep up the prestige and the donations flowing to your church. But also it was advertisement to the public. Our church is really important because we have a really important saint here. Let me tell you about the saint. And then you come here on pilgrimage and we will pray for you. Maybe you'll get healed of something when you pray to our saint by her tomb and you'll give us donations in return some of it was genuinely religious too and spiritual like listen to the wonders of this very holy person imitate this person well let's therefore delve into the life itself now and let's start from cogitosa's account what does he say about Bridget's background? So one thing about Bridget compared to Patrick, besides being a woman, she was native Irish, right?

She wasn't a Brit who came over to Ireland. So she supposedly came from Leinster, which is Kildare down in the southeast, that province of Ireland. Her father was a king. She was supposedly the child of a slave and the king. It isn't necessarily a trope. The way you went to war in Ireland is you went to someone's territory and you took their cows and their women and maybe kids to be your slaves as well. So it wasn't unusual to bring home a woman of high status and have her end up as some sort of servant or slave in your household if you were a successful king. But at any rate, so this king and this slave captured woman have a child and it's Bridget, which is more than the king bargained for, I think.

The stories are of her growing up in the kitchen of the king's settlement and basically giving away stuff to anybody who came along and asked for it because she was so charitable from birth. She gave stuff to beggars and she gave bacon to a dog. And when the household got upset about her giving away the food, there it was, magically replenished. So she starts off life as a semi-low status person who's willing to give away what little she has or what little her father has to anyone who asks. She's charitable. That's her first obvious virtue. And you mentioned that her father was this chieftain, kingly figure, you said, lent to them? Yeah, they called them king back then. You know, he, which became a chieftain, was a king originally. Comes from Rex, the same

root as... Scholars estimate that maybe in the time this veto was written, maybe there were 150 kings in Ireland. They were all jostling to be top king or provincial king and bully the other kingdoms into sort of alliances. I mean, so is that something also to stress at the moment, you know, with St. Bridget's life when she's living?

It seems to be quite politically fractured, politically volatile landscape in Ireland, in Leinster and around that area. Oh, all of Ireland. Yeah. Violence was common in society in different ways than violence is in ours. I don't know if it was more or less, but different tribes were always raiding each other, which constituted war. In fact, if you got a bunch of different tribes together and went raiding. That was war. So there was constant, constant friction between population groups. And it was a trial to sort of bring peace about for any lasting amount of time. It's what actually the church tried to do constantly.

Well, I mean, how different, therefore, was Ireland at the time of Brigid compared to that time when Patrick was over in Ireland? Probably not much. Fair enough. Probably not much different. Patrick was over in Ireland? Probably not much. Fair enough. Probably not much different. So far as we know, I mean, it's unclear whether something, the institution of, say, provincial over kingship was stronger earlier in Patrick's time or later in the historical period. We really have no clue because Irish writings are so full of retrospective, they're always casting current politics back a few centuries to legitimize them. As in the lives of Patrick, the 7th century sources reveal 7th century politics, but set them in Patrick's time.

Same with Bridget's life. So we're never sure about how things really work politically. Fair enough. Well, let's delve back into Bridget's life then. So you mentioned that one of these key traits early on is this charitable nature of Bridget. And so what else do we know about Bridget when she's growing up, like this early stage in her life? Are there any other prominent stories that emerge in her vitae which are worth mentioning here? saint in the Middle Ages, there were certain predictable traits you would have. And they weren't traits like I can make a druid fly in the air and bash his brains out, like a male saint could have, right? A male saint like Patrick could be macho and aggressive and proselytizing. But Bridget nurtured and fed and comforted and healed. And she preached too, which women didn't do, by and large. But effectively, she too proselytized, but in a different way. We don't know about a single historical Bridget figure. We assume there was

one, but since she wasn't an individual who left us writings, we have no idea really of whether and when she lived. And she's got this sort of hanky reputation as maybe have been a goddess figure before. There was a Greek goddess figure. And was that cult mixed with Bridget's saintly cult? Nobody knows for sure. Of course, if you have a daughter of a king, even if she's also a daughter of a slave, you know, the question of whether you can marry her off in a profitable way to the kingdom always comes up.

And not in her earliest Vita, but in a slightly later one, there's a story about how her brothers want to marry her off. Brothers, who knew she had them? To some other, I think it's a Druid even. I can't remember for sure. Because they want the bride price. It says it quite openly in the Vita. And she doesn't want to get married. She wants to dedicate her life to the christian god so she pokes her eye out so that the bridegroom is repulsed and then heals herself which is handy well let's focus in on these miracles now so so feeding people seems to be one of these is it also conversing the landscape do animals seem to feature in these too you know she has a couple of very innovative miracles,

unique ones, you know, when she is actually taking the veil when she's being officially made into a Christian virgin, she puts her hand on a wooden post and it starts flowering, it comes alive, which is a marvelous image. And there's the famous one where she goes into a house and thoughtlessly hangs up her cloak and she hangs it on a sunbeam. But the sunbeam supports her cloak, which is also very pretty, right? But she actually cares for animals. She can tame them so that if her flocks try to go astray, she can call them home. When robbers try to take a flock, they resist and go home. So she can talk to wild animals and tame them.

That's kind of a motif across Irish saints' lives and other saint lives. Anglo-Saxon ones. To be at one with nature, it's not a feminine or masculine virtue, I guess. History tells us that in 1455, the royal houses of Lancaster and York went to war, beginning a 30-year dynastic struggle for the throne that would change the course of English history forever. It became known as the Wars of the Roses.

At this time, the Wars of the Roses are well underway. There's so much uncertainty throughout the country and who's going to come through all of this. This month, we're dedicating a special series of episodes to finding out all the answers to your burning questions. People have just assumed that both of us were bad. But when was this scribbled in? It's effectively an act of graffiti on a parliamentary

roll. Who were the key players? What were the critical battles and switches of allegiance? Was it ever really a case of good and bad? Join me, Matt Lewis, on the Gone Medieval podcast from History Hit, every Saturday for brand new episodes. Well, Lisa, one part of these miracles that I'd love to focus in on now for a bit is one regarding how she can sometimes transform basic elements. But the fact that there is this story, it's a story where she transformed water into beer, water into ale. What is this story, Lisa? Take it away. Yeah, I don't know. Bridget is associated with beer.

There's a prayer, a sort of hymn where it's in Bridget's voice. And she says, I would like to create a great ale feast for Jesus, for Christ. Yeah, so lepers come along and ask her for beer. And she's given away bread and bacon. She might as well give away the beer, right? But there wasn't any. They ran out. And you know, in those days, women were brewing beer pretty regularly for noble households and so forth. It was one of their duties. So she blesses some bath water, and it becomes beer. And wait, who's that like? She turns water into liquor. Saints are always in Imitatio Christi, more often male saints. So this is really a nice early miracle where a woman could still be an imitation of

Christ. Cocytosis, he seems to be very much these various miracles where it's talking to animals or controlling the weather or turning water into ale. Is he very much portraying Brigid as this prophet-like figure who people flock to in the hundreds, maybe thousands? Oh yeah, he is trying to make that same sort of case that look what my saint can do. And it's all the things you would think a saint should be able to do. So for Bridget, besides Jesus-like miracles, well, I guess all her miracles are Jesus-like in a way. Feeding is certainly a Jesus thing. Sermon on the Mount, right? That's what she's in imitation of when she could produce food out of nothing.

And then, you know, canna, bathwater into beer. She cures people of the typical incurable things that only a savior or a saint could cure you, a blindness, you know, lameness. She does one pretty amazing miracle that the Irish didn't really, they weren't really happy about later on in the history of Catholicism she makes a fetus disappear she ends a pregnancy miraculously for a nun a vowed woman the woman comes to Bridget and and feels terrible and wants to repent and Bridget just whisks away the fetus it's gone okay but if we kind of focus a bit more on that because all of these miracles that we've highlighted but of course in our last podcast, we also talked about like the whole mission, the whole aim of St. Patrick when I mean, in some of the vitae, they interact. In fact, there's a great story where she goes to hear a sermon of St. Patrick's and

falls asleep. And it's because she's having a significant dream and she's seen herself weaving his shroud and all this stuff. It's sort of a, I am your successor kind of miracle. But she has to have a guy pal. She has to have someone who can do the Christian sacraments that she can't perform. And she does everything but, you know, she can't say mass, right? She can't baptize officially. But she can sure as heck go to a pagan's house and preach at them until they're ready for baptism. And she can have one of her clerical friends come and do the deed. Or the thought is they would then go to a man and get baptized

after she'd turned them Christian. So she's doing pretty much everything except, you know, the official sacraments. Throughout Cogitose's text, you see her moving away from her home or from Kildare and making wider and wider circuits around her part of the country, even getting up towards Armagh and Patrick's country. What she's doing is what either a bishop or a king would have done at the time. They would travel from one of their clients to another, taking dues, checking in, asserting their authority, and so forth.

So she's making an Episcopal tour there, really, and emphasizing that her church at Kildare is a lordly, prosperous church that should be the head of a network and was, like Armand. You mentioned the word churches there, which seems very different to that of Patrick that we were talking about earlier. So it seems like, Bridget, the whole story of Bridget is very much associated with the construction of a lot of churches, shall we say. It's like in the later accounts of Patrick, too, from the same period, you know, by then, writers, biographers of these saints were looking back thinking it must have been a lot like now, but they were just getting started. You know, they were all building their churches back then, as opposed to what historians of Christianity all over the place now

talk about, which is starting with small groups and people's houses, you know, as they did in the Roman Empire, and then eventually moving into purpose-built structures when Christianity became legal in the fourth century. Oh, they sort of bypassed that in Ireland, right? I mean, by the time most missionaries got there, Christianity was legal in the empire. This is what hagiographers imagined. They went around building churches all over the place, and Bridget did it just like the others did too. In fact, all the stories of saints in Ireland are about people building churches and building networks of churches. I'd like to focus in on one particular church which seems to deserve definite mention, the church at Kildare,

because Cogitosis, he gives us quite a detailed description of this church and its incredible architecture. It's wonderful. It's a wonderful description. And you don't run into this kind of thing in other sources from the period. I mean, the only one I can really think of that's similar is some of Gregory of Tours writing about the Merovingian kingdoms, where he'll describe a church that has, you know, 14 glass windows or something like that. Bridget's church is not quite as sophisticated as some of those in Gaul, but Cogadosus does give us a really amazing description of a, probably a wooden structure that he claims is quite large. And this is after Bridget has

died. She probably had an earlier church at her foundation in Kildare, and it was replaced later on when she'd become so famous and Kildare was getting so many pilgrims that they needed more space to display her shrine and the shrine of her bishop. So this is when Kildare was either in good times or Cogitas was raising awareness and building up Kildare as an important place. It's a wooden church and it has a partition of some sort down the middle and the women are on one side and that would be the abbess of Kildare and her nuns. And on the other side were the men of the community,

the bishop and priests, but also probably male monastics. Because by the 7th century, it was a mixed-sex community, Kildare, like many in Ireland. And then Bridget and her bishop are in the sanctuary at the front, lying side by side, and have these fancy golden crowns hanging over them. I imagine sort of like chandeliers in a way. Scholars have tried to reconstruct a building plan for this church, given what Cogitasus writes about it. But it must have been built for pilgrims, so that traffic could circulate by the tombs, like going to Lenin's tomb or something, I guess,

and people could pray there and so forth. This church in particular, therefore, it becomes this place of pilgrimage, does it pretty quickly? Well, that's what Cogitosis tells us. Yeah, he describes it as a kiotas, a city. You know, there were no cities in Ireland until the Vikings came along, but there were king's settlements and until the Vikings came along, but there were

king's settlements and then ecclesiastical settlements that kind of functioned as towns, and Kildare was apparently one of them. He talks about merchants coming through, you know, pilgrims and basically sightseers. You know, it would have been a place where kings of the region, lesser kings, would meet to make treaties or swear oaths, or maybe their kids would get married there or something. They would make alliances. They kept treasures at Kildare on behalf of kings because it was sacred space. In fact, Cocytosis even says there weren't any big walls around Kildare. And that was a sign of status, actually, for big settlements. But there weren't any because Bridget didn't need them.

You know, nobody could come in and mess with her in her space. And there are even miracles in the building of the church that, you know, he talks about to make it extra special. So it's nice to think of Kildare as a bustling town. I mean, let's talk about one of these other, I guess, triumphs of Bridget at this time, because I always want to talk about Iron Age Ireland and ancient Ireland if I can and this has got to do with this place called once again my my pronunciation is terrible so if I get it wrong just shout Dunalen Dunalen is that how we say it Dunalen yeah Dunalen Dunalen this seems to have been this prominent center it's involved in Brigid's story to an extent too, is it, Lisa? Like the Tara of Leinster. In archaeological terms, it was one of four regional capitals that were also complex, multi-period sacral sites, burials, maybe

worship of some sort, we don't know. But it was symbolic of Leinster's Kings. And in some later literature, it's actually listed as sort of the pagan counterpart of Kildare in this calendar, this liturgical calendar. Thaler Angus has a famous introduction where it tells about how Dunallan and Tara and so forth have fallen, but, you know, Kildare and Armagh now reign in their places. A fabulous symbolic substitution, a very ambitious on church writers' parts. It sounds like from that statement that Brigid and Patrick are very closely intertwined by these later writers.

What always fascinates me is that Kildare's saint was a woman because, you know, you were handicapped from the start with a female saintly patron just because she couldn't be a clergyman. And so Cogitose, he's striving in some ways harder than Patrick's biographers, but his persuasive claim to her power being equal to that of Patrick is just her motherly patronage of her people and her imitation not only of Jesus but of a bishop in a lot of ways and in a later version of her life she's even accidentally ordained a bishop initially

instead of as a being veiled as a nun. The hagiographer says she's the only woman who ever got to be a bishop in Ireland. That claim they couldn't take that to the bank really that didn't go over well among the other clergy of Ireland in the 8th or 9th century. According to Cogitose's account, what happens to Bridget? Well, we can't really tell when the episodes in Bridget's life take place. All we have is she has this life and she does things, whether or not they're chronologically in the Vita, we don't know. And then we have after death and being buried uh at kildare so that she can continue to work miracles that's the real thrust of these posthumous

episodes is that she may be dead in a shrine but she's still doing it for you she's still taking care of you if you pray to her so that's why i wanted to get out so so bridget like so many of these other incredible figures in the ancient world who have these huge effects on the people around them, like Alexander the Great, they have a life after death. She has a significant life after death with these miracles, as you say, and so on. And they all do, although it's interesting that you're pointing it out to me now that in the initial lives of Patrick, that isn't really emphasised as much. But it's quite typical. This is why I guess I wasn't thinking of it. it's quite typical for a saint's life to end with stories that would happen in and around the tomb after death if you remain faithful you pray to the saint those miracles can still go on is that

very much a thing therefore with with bridget's tombs it seems compared to patrick's where we don't know where he is buried but with bridget because they know where she is buried or the source says where she's buried, then that area becomes associated with these miracles. Yeah, I mean, it's clearly part of the story as well as Cogitos' sort of tourist guide, you know, and here's the actual church where it happens. Come on down, big city, you know, lots of people come in and out.

It's often also usual in saints' lives from Ireland and elsewhere that you'll get sort of instructions now that you've learned about the saint here's how to visit her or him in the tomb a description of a church or of spaces around the church and stuff like that that very clever those hagiographers so if we therefore focus a bit more on the legacy of bridges because lisa today is it fair to say that she's become this this national icon oh yeah of course she did um sort of like Patrick did really with the the sort of cultural national rising at the end of the 19th century you know they were seeking heroes symbolic heroes for independence really so Bridget became one of those though not like Patrick I don't know if she made

it to any stamps she probably did postage stamps stamps. But her real interest for people in modern times has been this correlation with some Celtic figure of a goddess. And that's what began with this cultural revival in the 19th century at a time when scholars were digging up these old Irish texts and really and talking about Druids and stuff like that and our independent non-English non-Roman culture that we had long before Romans it included a goddess they found in texts or so they called her a goddess named Brig part of a sort of semi-pantheon from sources from like the 9th to 12th century this mysterious Brig figure turns up as part of the the Tuatha Dé, the tribes of the goddess that supposedly inhabited Ireland before humans. And there are probably some derivation of

divine figures from the ancient past. And one of them's Brig, and she seems to have been one or three women who was the patron of metalsmiths, craftspeople, poets, healers. Not only was she then, Brigida, a useful symbol for cultural revival, both Christian and more ancient in the 19th and 20th centuries, but she really appealed to feminists. Kildare fell into ruin, but it was rebuilt in the 19th century by Protestants, Church of Ireland. But in the 20th century, with feminist religion and so forth, and neo-goddess worshipping and neo-Celtic paganism,

people returned to her as a figure of nurturing, strength, poetry, goddess-come-saint, do-it-for-everyone. And a modern-day order of Bridget still keeps a supposedly eternal flame to her in Kildare. Supposedly, there was one at Kildare in ancient times, not very Christian, but the nuns kept it. So this has really made her popular, I think. But she always had a sort of folk presence for women. She was the patroness of women in childbirth and of keeping your larder full and that kind of stuff. I love the keeping your larder full one. That's brilliant. Absolutely brilliant, Lisa. Well, from what we've been saying in our chat today

as I wrap up now, but it sounds as if Bridget, for you, seems to be a real, really interesting one, shall we say? Yeah, not just to me. I mean, the number of books and articles on Bridget over the last 50 years, oh my gosh, you could spend a lifetime reading them.

And many of them are about this sort of goddess saint thing or about Bridget and Patrick or about politics or Kildare. You know, there's a lot to talk about. And for a person who may not even have been a real human, I don't, we don't know. I mean, I guess that's the other thing. And I think maybe it's unfair to kind of try and draw comparisons between Patrick and Bridget when you're asking who does more to kind of affect the spread of Christianity in Ireland. The stories of them is there's so much that you don't know from what from the earliest

sources but is it quite interesting for sometimes to kind of evaluate the two and see how both of their legacies how much they've influenced let's say christianity in ireland over centuries see now you're talking like a seventh century exactly pedographer. That's exactly what they wanted you to think. To compare them and then to find theirs a more powerful figure, a better patron, someone who could help you out more, you know. And, you know, you've got to remember Christianity, well, it wasn't just one.

There were loads of different kinds. People were Christians in different ways. And, you know, one of the differences was gender, I think. And another difference was, you know, where in Ireland you were from. So there were many, many ways to be a Christian. The amazing thing is that Bridget emerged as one of the two or three most prominent and powerful saints in the scheme of Saints of Ireland. That a woman should do that is kind of amazing.

I mean, you see it in Queen Saints, say, from Merovingian times, but you don't see anything like that after this period. Well, there you go. There was Professor Lisa Battelle talking about the life and legacy of Saint Brigid. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Last but certainly not least from me, if you'd like more ancients content in the the meantime, well you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter via a link in the description below. And if you'd also be kind enough to leave us a lovely rating on either Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts from, I would greatly appreciate it. But that's enough from me today and I will see you in the next episode.