Abstract

Reviewed by: The Rhetorical Arts in Late Antique and Early Medieval Ireland by Brian James Stone Conor O'Brien Brian James Stone, The Rhetorical Arts in Late Antique and Early Medieval Ireland, Knowledge Communities. Amsterdam, NL: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. 275 pp. ISBN 978-94-6298-445-5. This is a volume in the history of rhetoric, rather than the history of Ireland. The author's aim, apparent from the first page, is to introduce the [End Page 214] intellectual riches of early medieval Ireland to fellow scholars of the rhetorical arts and to make the case that Irish writings deserve serious attention from historians of rhetoric interested in the development of the discipline in the post-Roman West. The assumed audience of the book knows little about early medieval Ireland or its intellectual history, and indeed may have been seriously misled by the portrayal of Ireland in previous work on early Irish rhetoric which relied on out-dated ideas of the island as some untouched bastion of Celtic culture, removed from the rest of Latin Europe. Stone is well aware that the past decades have seen these Celtic mists blown away from the study of early Irish intellectual history and he sets out to do the same for early Irish rhetoric in this book. Consequently, the first two chapters of the book essentially summarize much of our existing knowledge about Ireland in its late antique and early medieval context and provide an overview of the evidence for education, learning, and scholarly activity in Ireland between the fifth and the ninth centuries. Little here will be new to historians of the early Middle Ages, but clearly such information is a necessary prelude to Stone's rhetorical analysis of particular primary sources that forms the bulk of the text. Nonetheless, I wonder if the historian of rhetoric, coming to this material for the first time, might not have benefitted from an earlier introduction to the social significance of rhetoric and oral communication in early Ireland. Stone actually provides a very clear and useful discussion of precisely this topic in chapter six: his discussion there of the links between native and ecclesiastical learning, of the social functions of the filid (the poet class which provided Ireland's equivalent to the rhetor), of the real impact of the public performance of praise and satire, all that is both lively and insightful. Providing readers with this discussion earlier in the volume would I think have been useful for putting the enumeration of texts read and written in early medieval Ireland (of which much of chapter two consists) into a richer context. Chapters three through six provide a detailed rhetorical analysis of three primary sources: St Patrick's Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, the Hisperica famina, and the Old Irish "Cauldron of Poetry and Learning." Stone identifies rhetorical tropes utilized, suggests sources or analogues in late antique rhetorical writings, and generally provides detailed case studies of how early medieval Irish authors used language to persuade people or reflected on the nature of a rhetorical education. Stone is less successful in contextualising these texts and explaining what rhetorical analysis can tell us about them as historic works. The problems are most obvious in the section on Patrick, whose Letter receives the most attention despite being the least Irish of the texts surveyed (Patrick was neither born nor educated in Ireland and wrote primarily, if not exclusively, for a non-Irish audience). Stone provides a lot of background discussion drawing on the vast literature on Patrick in a manner which manages to be exhausting, but not exhaustive. We have much summary of mid-twentieth-century debates about Patrick's dating, but nothing on Roy Flechner's recent controversial suggestions for Patrick's purposes in going to Ireland. The analysis of the Letter [End Page 215] itself is overall solid and convincing, but its most original claim (namely that Patrick's rhetoric serves an implicit aim of late Roman "frontier management") remains under-developed. Stone has drawn on some recent important developments in the scholarship of late antique Ireland, especially the work of Elva Johnston, but more time reflecting on the implications of his ideas and explaining...