The word Irish is seldom coupled with the word civilization. (...) And yet... Ireland, a little island at the edge of Europe that has known neither Renaissance nor Enlightenment —in some ways, a Third World country with, as John Betjeman claimed, a Stone Age culture— had one moment of unblemished glory. For, as the Roman Empire fell, as all through Europe matted, unwashed barbarians descended on the Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all of western literature -everything they could lay their hands on. These scribes then served as conduits through which the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the tribed of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruined vineyards of the civilization they had overwhelmed. Without this Service of the Scribes, everything that happened subsequently would have been unthinkable. Without the Mission of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly refounded European civilization throughout the continent in the bays and valleys of their exile, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one —a world without books. And our own world would never have come to be.
(Thomas Cahill: pp. 3-4)
We'll see later to what extent he manages to come up with clear evidence to back up these statements. However, it's true that until Cahill published this book the importance of the Irish contribution to Western civilization had not been stressed enough. Sure, there had been mentions here and there (Kenneth Clark's seminal work, Civilisation: A Personal View, deserves a special mention in this sense), but they had been ignored for the most part in favor of more familiar (and larger) countries. It is, unfortunately, a frequent bias in the study of History.
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