Christian past and primal present

Kim McCone’s recent book Pagan Past and Christian Present favours an anti-nativist over a nativist view of early Irish literature : this literature contains either a coherent Christian senchus from monastic literati working in a cosmopolitan Ireland (anti-nativist), or barely adulterated repositories of pagan belief written by lay scholars from pure oral traditions in an isolated and superficially christianised country (nativist). The author argues that the very terms of this controversy hinder rather than help the interpretation of this literature, mainly because this controversy itself forces one to ignore characteristic ways in which ‘new’ religions manage their encounter with ‘old’ religions. The religionist can illustrate these ways and to that extent throw a more searching light on the literature in question, on ‘monasticism’, sovereignty, prophetic figures

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