New book puts focus on history of famed Tipperary abbey Athassel Priory

Athassel Priory and the Cult of St Edmund in medieval Ireland is a new book about the  English royal saint Edmund, king and martyr (d. 869) who was venerated in Ireland from at least the twelfth century, and Athassel priory in Golden was the centre of a cult focussed on a miraculous statue of the saint. 

The  book by Francis Young argues that the veneration of St Edmund and other English saints in Ireland is essential to understanding the complex identity of the ‘English of Ireland’, the descendants of the Anglo-Norman invaders. 

The history of Athassel priory, a nominally ‘English’ monastery patronised by the Burke dynasty, reflected the changing fortunes of Englishness in late medieval Ireland. 

Although apparent attempts to make St Edmund an additional patron saint of Ireland in the late Middle Ages proved unsuccessful, the spread of the name Éamon (a gaelicised form of Edmund) in Gaelic Ireland in the fifteenth century has left a lasting legacy of this unusual cult of an English saint in Ireland.