Complaints about strict governance, use of spies among the students, financial irregularities, administrative incompetence, and the siphoning off of students for the Society of Jesus resulted in visitations, memorials and expulsions. Jesuit, especially English, rectors blamed discontent on agents sent by the Elizabethan government to infiltrate the college, and on the exploitation of naive students by unscrupulous anti-Jesuit English exiles. Catholicism and Presbyterianism were the most powerful alternatives to the varieties of Protestant episcopalianism, which more often than not secured the backing of governments from the 1560s to the 1680s, challenging that order in each of the three insular kingdoms. The Society of Jesus did develop a pedagogical strategy, the famous Ratio studiorum, but in the case of the English, Irish and Scots colleges, Jesuit superiors did not proceed so clearly and coherently. The progress of Hugh O'Neill's war against England furthered a rift between Irish and English exiles.
Sacred Journeys in the Counter-Reformation: Long-Distance Pilgrimage in Northwest Europe. By Elizabeth Caroline Tingle. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2020. xiii + 246. $99.99 hardcover. - Volume 90 Issue 4
This focused collection of essays offers a dynamic new perspective on the evolution of post-reformation religious communities within Britain and Ireland. A wide-ranging comparison of Catholicism and Presbyterianism across the archipelago has not previously been attempted, though telling points of comparison are readily apparent between two communions which aspired to the religious formation of national communities of faith, yet which, periodically or permanently, adapted to the disempowered position of dissident or proscribed faiths. The proposed book, the first volume to be prepared by the "Insular Christianity Network" founded in 2008 through a grant from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, is the fruit of a carefully planned collaboration which assembled many of the most distinguished scholars of Early Modern Religion in Britain and Ireland to engage with a number of pre-selected themes. Current study of Early Modern religious confessions in Ireland and Britain tends to be concentrate on one religious perspective in one particular part of the archipelago. This volume breaks new ground by offering a genuine cross-national comparative perspective on the manner in which two profoundly different and yet in some respects strikingly similar communions formulated aspirations, secured achievements and made adaptations.
456 Studies • volume 106 • number 424 Catholic Reform in Ireland in a European Context Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin While exceptionalism is rightly considered a particularly hazardous form of historical explanation, the religious evolution of Ireland during the early modern period can be considered anomalous in European terms.1 First, within the wider family of European Catholicism, Ireland was unusual in that the majority of the island’s inhabitants continued to identify themselves as members of the Church of Rome, although for practically the entirety of the period the monarch of Ireland was Protestant. The closest analogy to this situation was probably the Dutch Republic immediately following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, when the inclusion of the Generality lands boosted the Catholic proportion of the Dutch population to between forty to fifty per cent. Elsewhere on the continent, however, Catholicism was the majority religion only in those areas where state power rested in Catholic hands, and often where that state power was highly aggressively deployed. Ireland represents a sharp contrast, therefore, with large areas of Scandinavia, most notably Norway, where little enthusiasm for an externally-imposed Reformation existed but where Catholicism nevertheless declined steeply in the face of state hostility. Even in polities such as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Hungary and, to a lesser extent France, where the monarchy was restricted in its capacity to deploy outright coercion to promote adherence to Catholicism, the Church of Rome benefited from active support and partisanship rather than, as in the case of Ireland, facing harassment, restriction and hostility. Ireland as a special case This continued disjunction in religion between monarch and subjects also rendered the island unusual within the wider history of the continent’s confessional states. The early modern European state system was founded on a union of throne and altar in which religious dissidence was not only seen as a deadly threat to the stability of the body politic, but ius reformandi came to be seen as one of the most highly prized attributes of state sovereignty Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin Studies • volume 106 • number 424 457 by European monarchs. Pious princes also conceived it as their duty to promote the mission of the (approved) Church in their dominions and could take heart that this activity both rendered the polity more pleasing to the Almighty, and thus less likely to provoke a divine chastisement, while also isolating and weakening a potential fifth column of religious dissidents who might be driven to make common cause with an external foe in the interests of their deviant beliefs. The advantages conferred by control over the state coercive apparatus and patronage were enormous and allowed monarchs to accomplish some extraordinary metamorphoses. In Austria and Bohemia, the Habsburgs transformed Catholicism from the church of a threatened minority to the accepted religion of the vast majority of the population, while the Elizabethan regime successfully transmuted the religious allegiance of the majority of the English population, although in a manner which stored up significant issues for her successors. Ireland was certainly not a unique case of state confessional failure. Philip II’s attempts to reconfigure both the political and religious governance of the Netherlands provoked a revolt which ultimately saw the Habsburgs lose control over the seven northern provinces of what became the Dutch Republic. Strong resonances can be seen between the Dutch and the Irish experiences in that it can be argued that an original a-confessional cause, in the Netherlands the defence of local autonomy,2 in Ireland resentment of the militaristic state-building wars of the later Tudors, eventually polarised into religious conflict. Where Ireland differed from the Netherlands, however, was the sheer longevity, indeed the institutionalised instability, of the confessional conflict. Eighty years of war in the Netherlands eventually gave the Habsburgs free rein in the southern provinces while in the north an unusually tolerant western European society developed. While religious antagonisms remained potent, they did not represent a mortal threat to the continued viability of the Republic. In Ireland, by contrast, confessional hostilities continued to have the potential to threaten the stability of the entire kingdom to the end of the eighteenth century and beyond. Within the more narrow confines of the Atlantic archipelago...
This article examines the evolution of religious conflict in Early Modern Ireland from a starting date of circa 1500 until the end of the Interregnum in 1660. At the beginning of this period Ireland was highly fragmented in political terms. In religious terms, the world of Irish Christianity differed in many respects from the pattern of late medieval Catholicism, although the parts of the island where English influence and settlement was strongest corresponded more closely to the European norm. The reformation in Ireland was almost entirely external in origin. Protestantism attracted few adherents among either the Irish Gaelic population or the pre-Elizabethan English community. The article argues that the chief reason for this historically vital development was the fatal coincidence of religious change and Tudor state-building in Ireland.
By the beginning of Stuart rule, the English State had conquered the entire island but the State Church was extraordinarily unpopular. Between c. 1580 and 1641, however, an authentic Protestant identity was created in Ireland through large-scale immigration of English and Scots. Favoured by the government, these enjoyed rapid economic success and gained a monopoly over office-holding. The State Church, however, enjoyed little evangelical success. The conquest of Ireland by the victorious regicides of the second English Civil War led to enormous loss of life and a massive diminution in Catholic landownership and the destruction of Catholic urban elites.
Taken together the events of the 1640s and 1650s were to have a critical influence on the nature of confessional identities in Ireland in the centuries that followed. The memory of sectarian attacks by Catholics on unprepared Protestants in 1641 laid the basis for a strident insistence on the need to repress Catholic power and property. On the Catholic side, the great hardships of the 1650s became central to a shared conviction of persecution and loss on religious grounds. In Ireland confessional differences had become mapped onto ethnic and colonial antagonism adding a depth and complexity to confessional divisions largely absent elsewhere in Western Europe.
Abstract The fourteen months from the end of November 1646 to February 1648 marked a particular phase in GianBattista Rinuccini's career in Ireland. During this time, Nicholas Plunkett and the bishop of Ferns, Nicholas French, exercised a great deal of influence in confederate politics, while the nuncio occupied a less overtly prominent role. This period was inaugurated, and much of its subsequent character determined, by the decision to convene a confederate General Assembly. The most important problem confronted at this Assembly was the Ormond peace: the lord lieutenant's supporters hoped to have the treaty ratified by the supreme confederate authority, while Rinuccini and his adherents sought the assembly's approval for their overturning of the peace the previous year. The result was a qualified victory for the clerical party because the treaty was indeed rejected. The clergy then secured a second victory when their new formulation of the confederate oath was accepted.
Abstract Barely eight months after GianBattista Rinuccini's departure from Ireland, the Cromwellian conquest began. In some respects, it is ironic that neither the nuncio, nor Owen Roe O'Neill, the two figures of this time easiest to portray as Catholic crusaders, directly engaged in the struggle against God's Englishman. That conflict between the Catholic population of Ireland and the saints of the English revolution was certainly harsh enough to qualify as another outcrop of the ferocity of the European religious wars, and it distinguished the Irish experience of the interregnum from anywhere else in the archipelago. Rinuccini was not the only papal nuncio retreating to Italy in the late 1640s following the collapse of his mission. Fabio Chigi, the papal delegate at Munster, had endured a similar fate following the Treaty of Westphalia. Both the Chigi and the Rinuccini nunciatures were creations of the period covered in this book and their frames of reference were remarkably similar.
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