The view from the shore: perceiving island monasteries in early medieval Ireland

This paper considers how island monasteries may have been perceived by ordinary people in early medieval Ireland. It is suggested that perceptions of island monasteries were not structured exclusively by Judeo-Christian ideas. They may also have been coloured by the fact that island monasteries share certain characteristics with other sacred islands, including royal crannogs and the Otherworld islands that were a prominent topos of contemporary Irish literature. Other variables were also crucial in determining peoples’perceptions, including geography, topography and the extent to which an establishment enforced separation according to gender. It seems that islands were rarely chosen as the sites of independent nunneries so, to a greater or lesser extent, island monasteries would have been primarily associated with men. There is, however, evidence for cemeteries specifically for women and for particular groups of lay people. Mortuary rituals and pilgrimages provided the laity with opportunities to access such holy islands. There are interesting similarities, of character and purpose, between the rituals performed on island monasteries, and other ecclesiastical sites, on the founder’s feastday on the one hand and those performed at royal ceremonial complexes on the other. Such similarities have significant implications for our understanding of how these sacred landscapes were perceived and experienced.