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Article: Irish Pilgrimage -- Holy Wells and Popular Catholic Devotion.(Review)
- Article from:
- Sociology of Religion
- Article date:
- June 22, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Association for the Sociology of Religion. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Irish Pilgrimage -- Holy Wells and Popular Catholic Devotion, MICHAEL P. CARROLL Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, 226pp. $38.00
This fascinating and engaging book comprehensively examines the rather esoteric subject of certain rituals of old Irish Catholicism which centered on 'holy wells' and stones, in an attempt at illustrating the adaptation of culture and tradition to the construction of locally contextualized devotional habits. Carroll takes Hobsbawm's notion of the 'invention of tradition' as a theoretical starting point, along with his suspicion that Irish Catholics of the post-Reformation period had much greater independent creative ...