Welsh Journals

to undertake the task of compiling lists of eminent Welshmen whose portraits are to be found in the National Portrait Gallery and elsewhere. GLANMOR WILLIAMS. Swansea. THE AGE OF THE SAINTS IN THE EARLY CELTIC CHURCH (THE RIDDELL MEMORIAL LECTURES). By Nora K. Chadwick. Published for the University of Durham by the Oxford University Press, 1961. Pp. viii + 166. 12s. 6d. The Riddell Lectures at King's College, Newcastle, have on several occasions provided the opportunity for an eminent scholar to expound a major theme in brief compass; and it was a happy and fitting choice which led Mrs. Chadwick to make the age of the saints in the Celtic Church the subject of hers. She reveals, as we have learned to expect, how devotion and affection for her subject can be combined with refined scholarship and a securely critical attitude to her sources. Although few scholars have done more than she in investigating later documents in the hope of gaining new light on earlier Celtic history, she is most careful not to allow these later documents to stand between us and the age of the saints-as so many less critical historians have done. Thus St. Patrick is shown to us, as in some other recent studies, in the light of his own writings (here accepted as authentic), not of his biographers-independent, that is, from the world of monks and co-arbs; and the Welsh Church is hardly shown to us at all. This is not because she underestimates the importance of the Welsh Church, or the part that it played in the age of the saints; nor that she is unduly sceptical about such traces of genuine evidence as survive; but because she is determined to see the early period in its own terms, not in those of documents many centuries younger. The subject has been intensively studied, and we should not expect any startling novelties. In the opening lecture, however, Mrs. Chadwick sketches the background to the story, and marks out the roads which lead from the Gaul of the fifth century to St. Patrick's Ireland, and from the fathers of the desert to the Celtic monks and hermits, with a firmness and clarity which are, in certain respects, new. She owes much to other scholars-in her account of St. Patrick, for instance, to the recent studies of Professor Bieler. But she has shown, more clearly than in any com- parable work known to me, how the Celtic Church, with its strong links with the East, and yet its long periods of isolation, with its strong sense of tradition sometimes combined with a strong aversion to authority, was yet less eccentric, less isolated, less out of the context of the Church at large in the early centuries than has often been supposed. One of the major difficulties in understanding Patrick is that we know so little of the British Church from which he sprang. But Mrs. Chadwick is able to a fair degree to make this good from contemporary Gaul; and in examining the background to Celtic monasticism she is helped by her