Saint Patrick Retold
By Roy Flechner
Princeton, 320pp, £22/$28
The Irish have a talent for promotion in a way their Celtic cousins – the Welsh, the Cornish, the Bretons or even the Scots – do not. Irish pubs and shops dot the world and St Patrick’s fame far exceeds Wales’s St David or Scotland’s St Andrew. Even without having appeared in Renaissance paintings in the way of Ss Jerome and Sebastian, St Patrick is a legend.
Not that many people know much about him. The stories concerning the shamrock and St Patrick supposedly ridding Ireland of serpents – “the medieval myth of Patrick as saintly pest controller”, as Roy Flechner writes in this new book – are almost certainly apocryphal. He is usually assumed to have been born near the end of the 4th century and dying somewhere in the middle of the 5th, and much of his life is shrouded in the mists of antiquity.
