Colonial and Ascendancy

Abstract

An application of Renaissance — and Protestant — attitudes to education in Ireland marked the foundation of the University of Dublin in 1591. Before that Irishmen had, perforce, gone overseas to study. Some went to England. The first sixteenth-century writer in English of any note was Richard Stanihurst (1547–1618) who attended University College, Oxford, then read law at Lincoln’s Inn. He had been educated at the school in Kilkenny run by Peter White, a Waterford man who had himself been a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. Stanihurst returned to Ireland with Edmund Campion as his tutor. Using the library of his pupil’s father, John Stanihurst, the Recorder of Dublin and Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, Campion wrote a History of Ireland in ten weeks in 1571. Stanihurst revised this superficial piece and it was published with his own Treatise containing a Plaine and Perfect Description of lreland in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577). Stanihurst was not very sympathetic to Ireland; Geoffrey Keating listed him among those who strove ‘to vilify and calumniate both Anglo-Irish colonists and the Gaelic natives’.