Abstract
This collection of 15 essays honours the career and scholarly achievements of Colm Lennon, retired Professor of History at Maynooth University. The first three essays feature contributions by Lennon’s colleagues, which highlight not only his seminal contribution to Irish historiography (seven monographs, five edited collections, and an abundance of articles), but also his long-standing dedication to teaching and pastoral care of students, as well as his commitment to Maynooth University’s History Department and to the university more widely.
The remaining 12 essays incorporate a broad range of themes and are both geographically and chronologically expansive, ranging from the late medieval era down to the late 19th century. They reflect key aspects of Lennon’s research, dovetailing around the central theme of religion and politics in urban Ireland. Indicative of Lennon’s ongoing interest in guilds and confraternities, Mary Esther Clark and Gael Chenard’s essay focuses on the religious guild of St George Martyr in Dublin from the late medieval period down to the early 17th century. As the guild of the Dublin City Assembly, St George Martyr played a central role in creating and sustaining a sense of civic identity among the city’s urban population. As Clark and Chenard highlight, however, the onset of religious reform during the late Tudor and early Stuart era would prove fatal for this urban association, viewed as it was by the City Assembly as ‘superstitious’ (p. 36).
The theme of religious change and reform is continued in an essay by Henry A. Jefferies, who surveys the progress of Tudor reform in Cork. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including state papers, wills, inventories, and funerary monuments, Jefferies reconstructs the devotional practices of Cork’s urban élite and their willingness (or not) to embrace the crown’s religious reform programme, both immediately after the Henrician Reformation and subsequently, down to the late Elizabethan period. Rory Masterson’s essay examines the role of monasteries as rectors of parishes in the western liberty of Meath, before and after the suppression campaigns. As Masterson demonstrates, on the eve of the dissolutions, the majority of parishes in that liberty were impropriated to monastic institutions and this was to have implications for the success of the Crown’s reform programme in the region.
The female experience of religious change and reform is the subject of an essay by Bernadette Cunningham, who examines the emergence of female religious communities in Galway during the mid-17th century. As Cunningham discusses, the early 1640s witnessed the establishment of at least three communities of female religious in Galway (the Poor Clares, the Dominicans, and the Augustinians). This development reflected not only the Catholic Church’s growing prosperity under the Confederate administration, but also the support afforded emerging or re-emerging religious communities (both male and female) by Galway’s urban recusant lay élite. The history of another urban region, Belfast, is charted in an essay by Raymond Gillespie, who traces the development of this ‘new’ Irish town between 1660 and 1720. Gillespie highlights how Belfast was confessionally distinct from older medieval Irish towns, being ‘resolutely confessionally Protestant’ (p. 177), with only a very small Catholic population. Yet despite its limited confessional diversity, tensions nevertheless emerged in the town, most notably between the Presbyterian congregation and members of the Established Church.
Confessional tensions in Dublin at the beginning of the 17th century are considered in an essay by Alan Ford, who provides an account of a religious disputation which occurred in 1600 between the Irish Jesuit Henry Fitzsimon (1566–1643) and James Ussher (1581–1656), and the subsequent treatment of this incident in Irish historiography. As Ford contends, the conference between Fitzsimon and Ussher was significant, being ‘the first formal theological encounter between the rival faiths in Ireland’ (p. 119), and marked ‘the theological coming-of-age of the Irish Reformation and Counter-Reformation’ (p. 109). Jacqueline Hill’s essay draws our attention to the evolution of oath-taking in late 17th- and early 18th-century Dublin. Hill highlights how a proliferation in oath-taking (both civic and state) between 1660 and 1774 served to enhance Protestant distrust of the Catholic community and further underlined denominational divisions during ‘the age of the penal laws’ (p. 201).
Mary Ann Lyons’s essay explores the career of physician Thomas Arthur (1593–1675). Born into an Old English and staunchly Catholic family in Limerick, Arthur was among the first Irish students to graduate from the Faculty of Medicine at Rheims University in France. Returning to Ireland in c.1619, Lyons reveals how, despite his own fervent religious convictions and Old English background, Arthur successfully established himself as one of Ireland’s leading medical practitioners, boasting a clientele base that traversed both confessional and political boundaries. The career trajectory of two other 17th-century Old English professionals is outlined in an essay by Nessa Malone, who discusses the fortunes of lawyers Henry Burnell (d. 1614) and Richard Netterville (c.1545–1607), focusing in particular on their involvement in the cess controversies during the late 16th and early 17th century. Malone demonstrates how, although a study of the careers of Burnell and Netterville is impeded by a lack of surviving sources, such challenges can be overcome by embracing prosopographical methods pioneered by Lennon in his monograph, The lords of Dublin in the age of Reformation (1989).
Reflecting the European dimension of Lennon’s research, Thomas O’Connor’s essay examines the role of conversion in aiding the social and economic assimilation of Irish economic migrants in Spain during the mid-18th century. Drawing on an expansive range of Spanish Inquisition records, O’Connor focuses in particular on the conversion records of 17 Irish Protestants who converted between 1745 and 1753, revealing hitherto unexplored aspects of the Irish migrant experience during the 18th century. Toby Barnard’s essay analyses the circumstances surrounding the publication of the 1753 biography of the Dublin-born Catholic priest John Murphy (1710–53). As Barnard argues, the publication of Murphy’s Life was indicative of an emerging print trade aimed specifically at an Irish Catholic market which, up until that point, had been largely unexploited due to the effective monopolization of the press by the Church of Ireland down to the 1690s. Finally, Ciaran Brady provides an account of the life and career of Sir John Gilbert (1829–98), charting his achievements as a historian of Dublin and revealing hitherto overlooked aspects of his scholarly career.
This collection marks a significant contribution to the field of early modern Irish religious, social, political, urban, and intellectual history. Its expansive coverage and high standard of scholarship are a fitting tribute to the honorand, who, as Ciaran Brady points out, deservedly holds the title of ‘doyen of the historians of early modern Dublin’ (p. 249). Tá iomlán an chirt aige.