Abstract

Patrick has long been celebrated as the apostle to the Irish, responsible for bringing Christianity from Britain to Ireland for the first time during the fifth century. Due to the numerous hagiographical and mythical tales that have built up around Patrick over the centuries, as well as his importance as a symbol of Irish national identity, it can be extremely difficult to disentangle fact from fiction. Recent work has sought increasingly to move away from the mythical accretions to the story of Patrick and instead to contextualise him historically, in terms of the social and political contexts in which he operated, as well as the broader religious situation in post-Roman Britain and Ireland. Rather than the singular action of a charismatic individual, when viewed in this context Patrick and his mission can be viewed as another episode in the transformation of the Roman into the medieval world on the edge of the empire.