Christianity and the Irish Landscape in Lady Augusta Gregory's A Book of Saints and Wonders

Abstract

As the heavily industrialized cultures reassess their environmental ethics in the face of a new millennium, many of their religious responses to environmental degradation have sought to renew ancient religious traditions of earth care. This is not a recent trend, but is deeply rooted in Romanticism and Euro-American thought. Almost invariably, modern admirers restructure the older religious traditions, adapting Iron Age or medieval myths and artistic motifs to current social concerns. The revival of Celtic Christianity in the last two decades has a better scholarly foundation than many similar experi-ments with pre-Christian European religions. Twentieth-century interpretation of religious rituals and literature, however, has different emphases than that of pre-modern Celts.