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In the eighth century, St. Brigit of Kildare acquired a reputation for divinity that would haunt her literature to the present day. Brigit's earliest hagiographers - Cogitosus and the authors of Vita Prima and Bethu Brigte - sought different ways to claim authority, power and territory for the saint of Kildare, her churches and her clerical successors. Cogitosus, writing ca. 650, had lacked models for Ireland's first female saint, for hagiography was new to Ireland; Christian women still did not have many ways to become saints in the patriarchal societies of early medieval Europe. He emphasized the physical relics of the saint and the importance of her main shrine at Kildare, with its Roman-style church, to authenticate Brigit's dossier. He established her as a saint despite her gender, who traveled, interpreted Christianity for converts and provided churches for her followers. However, the writers of the slightly later Vita Prima and Bethu Brigte had no body on which to base their claims for the saint. Hence, her hagiographers drew on witnesses' stories of Brigit, Cogitosus' vita, the Bible and continental models to establish the saint's reputation and her church's control of territory.They also looked nearer to home in local literary traditions and heroic history in order to cast Brigit as a mistress of the animals, territory and landscape, and the elements, creating Ireland's first female-gendered saint and also a mold for Celtic sanctity that would last for centuries.
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