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"This book disperses the shadows in an obscure but important landscape. Lisa Bitel addresses both the history of women in early Ireland and the history of myth, legend, and superstition which surrounded them. It is a powerful and exact book and an invaluable addition to our expanding sense of Ireland through the eyes of Irish women."―Eavan Boland, author of In a Time of Violence: Poems"It is refreshing to read in a book by a woman on medieval women that not all clerics hated women and that not all men were oversexed villains consciously bent on exploiting women. [Bitel] challenges not only the medieval Irish male construct of female behavior, but she is also courageous enough to question constructs of medieval women invented by modern Irish medieval historians."―Times Higher Education Supplement
Popular books like Celtic Women: Women in Celtic Society and Literature by Peter Berresford Ellis make the mistake of assuming that the strong, independent women of Irish myth realistically depict the lot of women in early medieval Irish society. By contrast, Lisa Bitel presents a well-documented case for Irish women having fewer rights than men in the same class. Although Bitel is an academician, this book is highly readable as well as thoroughly researched. Some may quibble with Bitel's acceptance of a French origin for the sheela-na-gig figures that appear in medieval buildings, especially churches, but that does not detract from the book as a whole. Whether your interest is in the history of women or Celtic culture, this is a valuable contribution to both fields and a wonderful follow-up to Bitel's history of early Irish monasticism, Isle of the Saints: Monastic Settlement and Christian Community in Early Ireland.
