"Felix Hiberniam beat Lagenia, de clara Brigidiam gignens prosapia," begins one of the responsory chants from the Office of Matins for the Feast of St Brigit on February 1st. Not, perhaps, the opening line one might expect from a piece of medieval Irish plainchant: "Favoured Leinster brings blessings on Ireland, producing Brigit from a famed and noble stock. . .," writes Arminta Wallace
But, say admirers of the fifth-century abbess, that's precisely the point. A great woman for the unexpected, St Brigit. Many of her most famous miracles concern the sudden appearance of generous quantities of beer, butter and bacon; and according to a legend documented in the Book of Lismore she was, at one point in her career, "accidentally" ordained as a bishop.
A millennium and a half later, of course, such stories are impossible to verify. But at a time when feminist theologians are focusing on feisty religious women through the centuries, Brigit - usually reckoned as being second only to Patrick in the Irish saintly hierarchy (and yes, the "t" at the end is correct) - is an uncommonly encouraging role model. "A lot of her ideas are very post-modern, and highly ecological," says Ann Buckley, a Government senior research fellow at the Department of Music at NUI Maynooth. "She was profoundly interested in the balance and harmony of all living things."
Ann has collaborated with the Scottish female early music ensemble Canty and a group of scholars known as Music of Medieval Celtic Regions to record the Matins for St Brigit's day on a new CD called Flame of Ireland.
As was the case with many early Christian saints, Brigit's iconography was deliberately grafted on to an already flourishing pagan root. Her feast day merges elements of Candlemas, with its powerful symbolism of flames and light, with the ancient Celtic spring festival of Imbolc, which celebrated the lactating of ewes as the first animals of the year gave birth. The pagan goddess Brigit, said to be the daughter of the Celtic god Dagda, is revered - under various names - across the British Isles and beyond. She may even have been the source of the word "Britannia": the name may refer to a female Celtic deity also known as "Brigantia".
The Christian saint is believed to be the illegitimate offspring of a chieftain. She founded a small oratory at Cill Dara around 468 AD. A typically Celtic monastic foundation, it would have included both men and women, and later grew into a celebrated centre of spirituality and a cathedral city. The office in her honour comes from a manuscript from the library of Trinity College, Dublin - and according to Ann Buckley, we're very lucky to have it. Only 17 source manuscripts for medieval Irish liturgical music remain in these islands.
"We'll never know how much music disappeared at the time of the Reformation," she says. "Many manuscripts were burned. Many more passed into private hands. Henry VIII employed people to go around and take all the good stuff out of the monasteries and destroy it."
Happily, not all the king's men obeyed. James Ussher - he of the notorious dating of Creation to October 23rd, 2004 BC - preserved a huge number of plainchant manuscripts, while, thanks to the efforts of a certain Archbishop Parker, a great deal of music also ended up in a library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
The Office for the Feast of St Brigit is the first in a planned series of recordings by Canty of music associated with Irish saints. "St Patrick will be next, and then St Canice," says Dr Buckley. "On the Continent, of course, there are many more - Gaul is very important, and Columbanus, and Kilian, who was a founder of Wurtzburg. Many of them weren't very well known in Ireland because they made their reputation wherever they established their monasteries."
As Brigit made her reputation in Kildare, it is particularly apt that the first performances of "her" Matins to be heard in Ireland since the Reformation will take place in that county, with Canty beginning a concert tour in Maynooth College Chapel on Wednesday, February 2nd and continuing to the parish church of St Brigit, Kildare town, on Thursday 3rd and to the Chapel of Trinity College, Dublin, on Friday 4th. The first but, one hopes, the the first of many; for this beautiful music, neglected for four centuries because it didn't fit comfortably into a divided set of religious traditions, deserves to be counted among our national treasures. The CD is available online from www.sanctuaryclassics.com.