The Order of St. Patrick

The History of Green and St. Patrick’s Day
by Taylor Phillips

St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated on March 17^th with parades and festivals adorned in green. This color represents the ‘emerald isle’ of Ireland, as well as the famous shamrock that St. Patrick used as a metaphor to teach about the holy trinity. But despite the current popular use of green, the color originally associated with St. Patrick was actually blue.

The life of St. Patrick is surrounded by a mixture of fact and myth. His date of birth is unknown, but he is credited with bringing Catholicism to Ireland around A.D. 400. Only two letters from him survive, accounting for the known details of his life. When he was about sixteen, he was captured and taken from Wales by Irish raiders and was enslaved in Ireland for six years. He escaped, became an ordained bishop, and returned to Ireland in order to spread his faith.

After his death on March 17, A.D. 461, St. Patrick became widely known as the patron saint of Ireland. St. Patrick’s day was already being celebrated in Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries and became more and more popular as a holiday as time went on. In 1783, the Order of St. Patrick was established as the senior order of chivalry in the Kingdom of Ireland. They chose the color blue as the ‘colour of honors’, and this color is still found on Ireland’s coat of arms.

The color green became more popularly associated with the holiday starting with the ‘wearing of the green’ in the 17^th century. On St. Patrick’s Day, green ribbons and shamrocks would be pinned to the clothing. Shamrocks were used by St. Patrick to teach about the holy trinity, which is why they are associated with the holiday to this day. Green symbolizes the shamrock as well as the ‘emerald isle’ that characterizes Ireland’s landscape.

During the Irish Rebellion of 1798, the soldiers combined a national saint and the ‘wearing of the green’ and made their uniforms out of green fabric. This unification of religion and nation led to green being the accepted color of Ireland and the primary color associated with St. Patrick’s Day today.

Sources:

Galloway, Peter (1999). The most illustrious Order: The Order of St Patrick and its knights (2nd ed.). London: Unicorn. p. 172.
Adair, Daryl. The Wearing of the Green: A History of St. Patrick’s Day. Routledge. 2002.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/03/0312_040312_stpatrick_2.html

This week’s image is pulled from the New York Public Library and is a portrait of the actress, Frances Abington. Her rise to notoriety and her prominence in the fashion scene thereafter make her story interesting and romaticized. Frances began as a poor flower girl and street singer. She then moved on to work under a French Milliner who introduced her to high fashion in the French world. From there, she made her theatre debut in 1755, but wasn’t a sensation until 1764 when she rose to fame as a principal in Drury Lane Theatre Company. There, she became the darling of the time; creating characters such as Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal. In later years, she became a fashion trendsetter, even having a hat named the “Abington Cap” in her honor. Frances is often noted with being a pioneer in the acting profession as well as an icon for popular fashion of the eighteenth century.

Nussbaum, Felicity. Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-century British Theater. Philadelphia: Unniversity of Pennsylvania, 2010. Google E-Books. Google. Web. 05 Mar. 2012. <http://books.google.com/books?id=VkZlINhbj0IC&pg=PA226&dq=isbn:9780812242331&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false>.

“Fanny Abington.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 01 Mar. 2012. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1313/Fanny-Abington>.

This week’s image shows how the myth of “sasquatch-like” habitants in the Patagonia region continued to live on during the 18th century in texts like The Habit of the Patagonians. This legend first sprung from Ferdinand Magellan’s accounts of his travels along the coast of South America. It is said that while on his quest to circumnavigate the globe, Magellan saw what appeared to be a giant along the shoreline. The captain sent a few men ashore to inspect this creature and take accounts of his build. After this first encounter, the legend of the Patagonians grew larger and larger with each retelling of their story. These supposed descriptions of the Patagonian’s state them to be at least 12–15 feet tall and broad in stature with incredibly large feet. Other reports considered them to be 7-10 feet. tall. In reality, the native people of the Patagonian region were at most slightly taller than those of other regions. This image from 1764 shows the imagined size of the Patagonian juxtaposed next to a sailor.

Gray, Patrick. Peoples of the Americas. Tarrytown: Marshall Cavendish Corperation, 1999. Print.

“Patagonian Giants.” Princeton University Library. Princeton. Web. 05 Mar. 2012. <http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materials/maps/websites/pacific/magellan-strait/patgonian-giants.html>.

Today’s picture comes from the New York Public Library Gallery and features Francis Marion, a military officer who served in the American Revolutionary War. The 18^th century image depicted shows Marion jumping out of a second story window. Though the scene seems simply comical, it is actually an account of a historically true event. Marion once attended a dinner party with a few friends and noticed that all of the doors to the house had been locked while toasts were going on. This was the custom of the time but Marion was unaware of it. The party continued but Marion began to feel trapped and chose to “escape” through the second story window of the house. This resulted in a broken ankle and, in turn, forced him to return home to recuperate. Ironically, his injury actually ended up saving his life as he was home when his troops were captured by the British in Charleston that May.

Crawford, Amy. “The Swamp Fox | Biography | Smithsonian Magazine.” History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places | Smithsonian Magazine. 1 July 2007. Web. 16 Feb. 2012. <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/biography/fox.html>.

Valentine’s Day brings thoughts of love, engagement, marriage, and passion, but William Hogarth’s fifth picture in his Marriage à-la-mode series (1745) portrays a warning to those who jump into love and marriage for the wrong reasons (such as money). Hogarth’s painting depicts a young wife begging forgiveness from her husband, the new Earl of Squanderfield, after being caught in the bath-house with a lawyer, who fatally wounds the Earl and quickly escapes through the window¹. The painting is part of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs Collection.

1. Fort, Bernadette and Angela Rosenthal, eds. The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.  Web. 1 Feb. 2012.

This beautiful map of Haiti and surrounding islands was created by Jacques Nicolas Bellin in 1754. Many other amazing charts, maps and other documents have been digitized by the University of Florida Library and shared in the Digital Library of the Caribbean, searchable here in 18thConnect.

Though we have no formal way of delivering documents, we are happy to be the source for plain text files: simply send Laura Mandell an email (lauraDOTmandellATgmailDOTcom) to request the texts; we can send you all of them, or selected texts.

As always, we are so grateful to the University of Michigan’s Text Creation Partnership for all the work they are doing to insure that we will send into the future the highest-quality digital surrogates of our eighteenth-century heritage.  And thanks to Gale for its openness to scholarly needs.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO TRY USING TAPoR tools on a subset of the texts, using Voyeur (about; tool itself), please click here:

One subset of the 2,231 documents–more are coming.

This watercolor vignette is part of an album digitized by the New York Public Library, originally created by a woman named Anne Wagner. Called Memorials of Friendship, this album spans the years 1795-1834, and contains a treasure trove of Wagner’s paintings, collages, poetry and letters. Click here to browse the whole album in 18thConnect.

The New York Public Library provides stable links and helpful metadata for each of its digitized objects, making it an ideal resource supplementing 18thConnect’s collections. We’ll be adding more resources from their digital gallery each month, so keep checking in to see more fascinating objects.

Access to 18thConnect will be intermittent between the hours of 5p.m. and midnight (EST) tonight, March 9, in order for us to complete some upgrades and refinements to the site. Please bear with us as we work to make 18thConnect faster and easier to use!