In 697 Cáin Adomnáin (The Law of Adomnán) was promulgated in Ireland, claiming to be ‘a perpetual law on behalf of clerics and women and innocent children’ (bithcáin for clérchu ocus banscála ocus maccu encu), to protect and exempt them from violent actions. In so protecting them, this law distinguished these three groups as distinct and separate from lay adult males. This book will examine a part of this distinction, specifically that made between women and men; it is a study of perceptions of femininity in early Irish society. Precisely what this means requires elucidation. Whose perceptions were they? What is meant by femininity? What time period is encompassed in the term ‘early’? Beginning with the final, and perhaps most simple, question, this book undertakes to examine Irish society from its adoption of Latin writing to the end of what is known as the Classical Old Irish period; or, in other terms, from the time of the earliest surviving continuous texts to the emergence of the Viking era. As Elva Johnston has argued, while parts of Ireland may have had ‘limited vernacular literacy’ before Christianisation, the arrival of Christianity ‘was the single most important contribution to changing times’, particularly in terms of the development of Latin literacy. Unusually, however, while in most western European countries the introduction of Christianity resulted in an almost ubiquitously Latin written culture, ‘Ireland possesses the most extensive early vernacular literature in medieval Europe, going back to the sixth century at least’. The earliest extant prose texts of significant length from Ireland are the two pieces of writing by St Patrick, his Confessio (Confession) and his Epistola ad Corotici (Letter to Coroticus), which belong to the fifth century: this will therefore be the earliest period investigated here. While of course the fluid nature of language means that it is impossible to pinpoint precise dates by which one form of Irish had become another, it is generally considered that the Classical Old Irish period had ended by about AD 900, after which the Middle Irish period, with a new phase of language, began. In historical terms, this book spans the period from the emergence of Christianity in Ireland, marked by the beginning of organised Christian missionary activity, to the early Viking period. The date range of this study is therefore limited to the period from the fifth to the ninth centuries.

What then of the term ‘femininity’?