Historiographical Controversies
The reformers of the 16th century often assumed that medieval Catholic practices embodied lingering remains of Pagan religious practices, and thought of holy wells in that way. This affected the outlook of those who came to study holy well traditions later. The pioneers of folklore study took the view that the customs and legends they were recording were debased versions of Pagan rites and myths. Thus it became standard to begin any account of holy wells with the statement that the Christian church had adopted them from the Pagans and replaced the Heathen gods with Christian saints, in order to win people over to the new religion more smoothly.
Among the earliest enthusiasts for holy wells in modern times was the Neopagan movement, for whom wells formed part of 'earth mysteries' study along with ley lines and ancient sites; the view that the Christians had ‘stolen’ holy wells from the Pagan religions fitted in well with their position. The magazines Wood and Water and Meyn Mamvro, among others, helped shape this approach. During the early- and mid-1990s this viewpoint was under increasing attack crowned by the publication of Ronald Hutton’s The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles (1991) which argued that the evidence for what constituted pre-Christian British religious practices, certainly outside Romano-British times, was next to nil. As far as wells themselves were concerned, the controversy emerged in the pages of Source, the holy wells journal edited by Roy Fry and former Benedictine monk Tristan Gray-Hulse. A number of articles in the journal challenged long-standing myths about holy well history, and the editors published an exchange between the authors and Cheryl Straffon, editor of Cornish earth mysteries magazine Meyn Mamvro, about the evidence for a particular Cornish well’s supposed association with the Irish goddess Brigid. The eco-pagan movement has largely accepted the new historiographical approach, but occasionally rather more old-fashioned accounts of holy wells are published, for instance Gary Varner’s Sacred Springs (2002).
A linked argument was over the nature of the influence of the Celts on the well cult. The late Francine Nicholson, an independent student of Celtica, argued forcefully and controversially that the Celts had a unique sensitivity to sacred wells, but never elaborated this in any published work.
More recently, radically minded scholars have begun questioning the unity of concepts imposed by the term ‘holy well’. In a paper in the Living Spring Journal, Jeremy Harte distinguishes between early Anglo-Saxon ‘holy wells’ and those Christianised in the late Middle Ages, and argues ‘apart from being venerated and being wet, they have little in common’; Harte has also stressed that limited evidence may mean that scholars are considerably overestimating the number of holy wells which were active at any one time.
Read more about this topic: Holy Wells