Christian Ireland: Moral Theology in the Lives of Saint Brigit and Columba. Studia traditionis theologiae 3. Turnhout: Brepols 2009. xiv + 202 pages. Price €55.00. ISBN 9782503533155. Studia traditionis theologiae: Explorations in Early and Medieval Theology, a new series of monographs from Brepols produced under the direction of Prof. Thomas O'

For Irish ecclesiastics, biblical inspiration and Romanisation led them to see the civitas as a holy locus of spiritual/moral and geographical/communal authority that welcomed a multitude of people to its communal lands. When considering the monastic town debate, there can be no doubt that the locations called civitates by Irish ecclesiastics are the most important sites of the time period. Civitates like Armagh, Clonmacnoise, Glendalough, Iona, and Kildare were loci that attracted large numbers of people, as well as being centres of both secular and religious power. These sites are also the ones most commonly used in efforts to prove or deny the validity of monastic towns. This article will focus on both vernacular and Latin sources that were either written before or concurrently to the development of tenth–century Viking towns in Ireland. It will suggest that within the wider debate, arguments to date have missed the point of what these loci meant to the Irish and it will provide a conceptual qualification for a civitas. This can then provide a piece of the puzzle in addressing the problems found in the debate over monastic towns and urbanization in Ireland.

It has become something of an orthodoxy in recent years that in the tenth and eleventh centuries there were two Gaelic-speaking kingdoms occupying the northernmost parts of the island of Britain, 'Alba' and 'Muréb'. 1 In David Dumville's words '[u]ntil about 900 Alba had meant "Britain". Its adoption as the name of the kingdom of the Southern Picts caused a rapid narrowing of usage, but in time, as the kingdom of Alba became dominant in North Britain, the word came also by the twelfth century to adopt its modern meaning of "Scotland".' 2 The territory designated 'the kingdom of the Southern Picts' in this passage was also known as Fortriu, and comprised, broadly speaking, the lands north of the Forth and south of the Mounth (the line of hills which stretch from the central Highlands almost as far as the coast near Aberdeen). The limits of Muréb are less clear. Certainly, it seems to be envisaged as somewhat greater in extent than modern Moray, to which it lends its name, but whether its eastern boundary was the Spey or further east is unclear, as is the extent of its territory to the west and south, in Ross and Lochaber. 3 To a great extent Muréb is imagined as the negative imprint of our knowledge of effective Scandinavian settlement and control in the north of Scotland; what the Vikings cannot be demonstrated, or believed, to have held must, it is assumed, have been held by the Moravians. The affiliation of the north-east, modern Aberdeenshire and the medieval earldoms of Buchan and Mar, is entirely obscure and the possibility that it forms a third unit should not be dismissed.