It is fitting that Donnchadh Ó Corráin's last publication should focus on the end of early medieval Ireland, the subject to which he made such an incomparable contribution as an outstanding researcher, inspirational teacher and mentor, and energetic facilitator of collaboration in the field. The twelfth century was one of the most important periods in Irish history, one that decisively shaped the lives of people in Ireland for many generations afterwards, and whose ramifications affect us still. To make sense of the very complex and significant developments of that time Ó Corráin deployed his unrivalled scholarship, incisive intellect and inimitably direct style of communication in this book. He cautioned his readers in the introduction that, ‘[t]he historian's mind must ever be ruled by constant questioning, constant doubt, without respect of persons or office’; ‘One cannot, as a historian, take the assertions of clerics, the holy, even unctuous words of those eloquent in the deceptive language of piety, well-endowed with the goods of the world, as simple statements of self-evident truth and devotion’ (p. 3). For illustration he pointed to Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of Malachy, a key source; ‘his lamentable comments about the Irish Church and Irish culture are demonstrably false’ yet ‘for him it was truth; for us successful self-serving lies’ (p. 3). Yet this book is not iconoclastic in intent. It was motivated by the desire to explain how the ‘reform’ of the Irish church in the twelfth century culminated with appalling consequences for the people of Ireland, and warped historians’ understanding of their history.
Ó Corráin made it clear from the start of his book that the term ‘reform’ ought not to be understood as signifying a change for the better, ‘morally, spiritually, socially or administratively’ as some historians have assumed through ‘thoughtlessness’ (p. 1). The reformers themselves had different priorities; some wanted organisational change – a ‘managerial revolution’ in ‘the business of souls’; some wanted to introduce ‘exotic monasticism’ in place of the Irish variety – ‘They appear over-impressed by foreigners, and as fatuous as their historians’ (p. 2); others wanted to bring marriage practices in Ireland into line with the latest church prescriptions – ‘One scarcely learns from reformers of all colours (and their naive historians) that their prescriptions were nowhere observed in Christian Europe’ (p. 2).
The book opens with a detailed consideration of how the Irish church was organised before the changes of the twelfth century. Ó Corráin showed that it had a number of different types of bishops responsible for pastoral care; some exercising significant and growing jurisdiction over large kingdoms or provinces, while numerous chorepiscopi or ‘country bishops’ exercised limited jurisdictions delegated to them in localities, and there were also bishops associated with great monasteries. This complex system had operated for centuries, but in the wake of the Gregorian reforms implemented elsewhere in Europe it came to seem ‘decadent and eccentric’ to church reformers in the twelfth century (p. 10). In addition, there were the superiors of monasteries, commonly called coarbs or erenaghs, who were the ‘real proprietors’ of church land and sometimes ruled a number of dependent churches (p. 16). Ó Corráin likened the greatest of them to the rulers of imperial German episcopal cities; they were high-status professional churchmen, eminent religious leaders, managers of far-flung properties, and patrons of schools and scholarship, of secular as well as ecclesiastical studies and creative literature. Often too they were married, as their predecessors had been before them.
Much of this book is devoted to an examination of the means by which the distinctive features of the Irish church were replaced by ‘a conventional contemporary episcopal hierarchy’ by indigenous reformers who sought nothing less than ‘the overthrow, from within, of the traditional Irish church, an institution whose unbroken history stretched back over nearly 700 years to the early centuries of Christianity in Ireland, to a unique age of the saints, and that had created (and continued to create) a remarkable literary and artistic Christian culture’ (p. 71). Chief among the iconoclasts was Malachy of Armagh, ‘a man of steely ambition and unquestioning self-confidence. He felt he could dismiss the leadership of powerful churches, reject all Irish forms of monasticism, transfer enormous assets from one institution to another, reshape the whole Irish Church, and if possible Irish society at large’ (p. 79). Inevitably, he faced resistance and he castigated his critics in hyperbolic terms.
He found a willing listener and a powerful relayer of his hypercritical rants in Bernard of Clairvaux, whose widely-read Life of Malachy (1149), ‘made Malachy a saint but did his country grave wrong’. Based on what he had been told by Malachy and his associates, Bernard proclaimed that ‘the godly man came from a barbarous and wicked people and thus his sanctity was truly remarkable’ (p. 45). The tropes of barbarism and wickedness were central to Pope Adrian IV's bull, Laudabiliter satis (1155), which authorised Henry II of England to enter Ireland ‘to extend the boundaries of the Church, to declare the truth of the Christian faith to untaught and barbarous people’, and Pope Alexander III's letters of September 1172, one of which declared that he was ‘overjoyed’ that Henry II had subjected to his rule, ‘that barbarous and uncivilised people, ignorant of the divine law’. At the heart of this misrepresentation of the Irish was their reluctance to adopt the increasingly abstruse prescriptions of celibate canon lawyers obsessed with sexual relationships.
As for the ‘harvest of reform’ Ó Corráin was very clear: ‘Without, the Irish church now had the appearance of the contemporary European model … [but the] impact on the Irish church was disastrous’ (p. 122). The great monastic schools of literature, history, law, scripture and theology, and the artistic workshops, rapidly declined, but the new bishops, with one or two exceptions, did not endow cathedral schools: ‘It does not seem that the clergy became more virtuous, more learned or more dutiful’ (p. 121). The new religious orders generated no saints, and their cultural contribution to Irish life never equalled their wealth. Royal interference in the church grew, ‘and the English invasion brought chronic warfare, racial conflict in the church and the wider society, legal inequity and severe social disruption’ (p. 116). One could hardly have a more damning indictment of the twelfth century ‘reform’ of the Irish Church. It is epitomic of the work of Ó Corráin; a very convincing and highly original conclusion to an outstanding work of scholarship.
