Abstract
There is a saying current in Ireland that the Irish were the ‘first to find the faith and last to lose it,’ referring to the very early and peaceful conversion of the Irish and to the continuing conservatism and traditionalism of Irish Catholicism despite the sweeping changes which have rocked the Catholic Church since Vatican II. Although the slogan implies an uninterrupted continuity in religious outlook that is clearly exaggerated, its emphasis on tradition is nonetheless justified and reveals durable aspects of Irish religiosity that are crucial to understanding the religious transformations of the early modern period.
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Notes
Such opposition as was voiced came from the lower house of clerical proctors, who were quickly silenced. See Steven Ellis, Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470–1603 (London: Longman, 1985), 194–5.
Irish historians have long debated this point, particularly the date at which one can definitely say that the Reformation had failed in Ireland. See especially Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Sword, Word and Strategy in the Reformation in Ireland,’ Historical Journal 21 (1978): 475–502;
Nicholas Canny, ‘Why the Reformation Failed in Ireland: Une Question Mal Posée,’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 30, no. 4 (October 1979): 423–50;
Karl Bottigheimer, ‘The Failure of the Reformation in Ireland: Une Question Bien Posée,’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36, no. 2 (April 1985): 196–207;
and Alan Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590–1641 (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Lang, 1985).
Three studies which highlight current historiographical debates in the field of Reformation Studies are: Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991);
Hans R. Guggisberg and Gottfried G. Krodel, eds, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, Special Volume: The Reformation in Germany and Europe: Interpretations and Issues (Dusseldorf: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1993);
and Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko Oberman and James D. Tracy, eds, Handbook of European History, 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, 2 vols. (Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill, 1994).
For a now-classic discussion of the interconnections between religious and social history see Robert Scribner, ‘Is There a Social History of the Reformation?,’ Social History 4 (1976): 483–505, and the same author’s ‘Religion, Society and Culture: Reorienting the Reformation,’ History Workshop 14 (Autumn, 1982): 2–22.
My conclusions are quite different from those of Michelle O’Riordan, The Gaelic Mind and the Collapse of the Gaelic World (Cork: Cork University Press, 1990). Her reliance on literary methodologies and failure to examine the Irish situation in a European context has, in my opinion, seriously marred her interpretations.
My discussion of the role of the aes dána in Ireland should be placed in the overall context of current scholarship on popular culture, literacy, and intermediary groups in early modern Europe. Studies that have been particularly useful in helping provide this context are Tim Harris, ed., Popular Culture in England, c. 1500–1850 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995);
R. A. Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe: Culture and Education, 1500–1800 (New York: Longman, 1988);
Barry Reay, ed., Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1985);
Jonathan Barry, Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994); and of course, Peter Burke’s seminal work, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978) which first raised nearly all these issues.
Patrick Corish, The Catholic Community in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century (Dublin: Helicon, 1981)
and John Bossy, ‘The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Ireland,’ Historical Studies 8 (1971): 155–69 both argue for such ‘survivalism’ but the foundation of their argument, which rests on a functional assessment of religion has been called into question by the more recent work of Robert Scribner and others. See especially, Robert Scribner, ‘The Reformation and the Religion of the Common People,’ in Guggisberg and Krodel, The Reformation in Germany and Europe: Interpretations and Issues, 221–41.
See Bob Scribner, Roy Porter, and Mikulás Teich, eds, The Reformation in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), chapter 13.
See especially André Vauchez, The Religion of the Laity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993) and La spiritualité du moyen age occidental (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975);
Natalie Davis, ‘From “Popular Religion” to Religious Cultures,’ in Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research, ed. Steven Ozment, (St. Louis: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1982), 321–41;
Robert Whiting, ‘The Blind Devotion of the People’: Popular Religion and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
Delumeau’s controversial thesis on Christianization is most explicitly stated in his full-scale treatment, Catholicism From Luther to Voltaire (London: Burns & Oates, 1977). But see also his interesting short essay, ‘Au sujet de dechristianisation,’ Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 22 (1975): 52–60. A detailed critique of Delumeau’s thesis can be found in John Van Engen, ‘The Christian Middle Ages as a Historiographical Problem,’ American Historical Review 91, no. 3 (June 1986): 519–52.
Oberman’s contributions in this field are far too numerous to cite more than a sampling. Some of his works that are most relevant to this study include: Forerunners of the Reformation: The Shape of Late Medieval Thought, trans. Paul Nyhus (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), The Dawn of the Reformation (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, Ltd., 1986), and The Impact of the Reformation (Grand Rapids, ML: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 1994).
Other studies that have helped me situate the Irish experience in the context of European Reformation historiography include: Francis Rapp, L’Église et la vie religieuse en occident à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971);
A. N. Galpern, Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1976);
Lionel Rothkrug, Religious Practices and Collective Perceptions: Hidden Homologies in the Renaissance and Reformation (Montreal: Historical Reflexions, 1980);
William Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981);
Lorna J. Abray, The People’s Reformation: Magistrates, Clergy and Commons in Strasbourg, 1500–1598 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985);
Thomas Brady, Turning Swiss: Cities and Europe, 1450–1550 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985);
Marc Forster, The Counter-Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992);
David Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d’Otranto (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992);
and Sarah Nalle, God in La Mancha: Religious Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500–1650 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Communalism as a defining issue in the acceptance of Reformation thought has a long pedigree, but the most recent debates have centered around Peter Blickle’s study, Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1992). The issue of confessionalism as a social and cultural phenomenon was first highlighted by Ernst Zeeden, Die Entstehung der Konfessionen: Grundlagen und Formen der Konfessionsbildung im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1965).
For more recent interpretations, see Heinz Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Statbildung: Eine Fallstudie über das Verhältris von religiösen und sozialen Wandel in der Frühneuzeit am Beispiel der Grafschaft Lippe (Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1981) and idem, Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), and Wolfgang Reinhardt, especially ‘Gegenreformation als Modernisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des Konfessionalellen Zeitalters,’ Archiv für Reformationgeschichte 68 (1977): 226–52, and ‘Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung?’ Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 10 (1983): 257–77.
One cannot help but notice how thoroughly Ireland has been ignored in current Reformation historiography. Such foundational works as Andrew Pettegree’s The Early Reformation in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Robert Scribner, Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich’s collection of essays, The Reformation in National Context do not mention Ireland at all, and even the excellent coverage of Brady, Oberman and Tracy’s Handbook of European History only gives us three references to Ireland.
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© 1997 Samantha A. Meigs
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Meigs, S.A. (1997). Introduction: The Irish Anomaly. In: The Reformations in Ireland. Early Modern History: Society and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25710-2_1
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