The introductory encomia by Salvador Ryan, Clodagh Tait, Jacqueline Hill, Mary Ann Lyons, Steven G. Ellis, Raymond Gillespie and Bernadette Cunningham convey a clear picture of, literally, an old-school ‘scholar and a gentleman’ (p. 12) who remained nimble enough to adapt to the I.R.C.H.S.S. model of collective scholarship. We are reminded that Colm Lennon’s scholarship on the Anglo-Irish or Old English and the Reformations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century urban Ireland has ‘greatly influenced’ (p. 12) debate on the key question of why and when the Protestant Reformation failed and the Catholic counterpart succeeded: slowly and gradually, would be Lennon’s view. His survey, Sixteenth-Century Ireland was ‘remarkably free’ (p. 18) of the rancour associated with the revisionist debate.
The substantive contributions revolve, more or less closely, around these questions, making this an unusually coherent Festschrift. Mary Esther Clark and Gael Chenard’s study of the religious guild of St George in Dublin (not to be confused with the military guild of that name) and Rory Masterson’s study of parishes impropriated to monasteries in modern Counties Westmeath and Longford are impressive works of excavation. But they do not link their important findings (though Masterson has a stab at doing so) with the wider theme of Reformation(s). Raymond Gillespie describes a number (probably too many for an article of this size) of loosely connected disputes in Belfast between 1660 and 1720. These included internal disputes amongst Presbyterians, debates over how best to fund the port, income for Church of Ireland clergy, and the countess of Donegall’s electoral struggle with George McCartney, sovereign of Belfast. The latter makes an absorbing micro-study of just how difficult it could be to secure control of even a close borough with just thirteen electors. Another corporation, that of Dublin between 1660 and 1674, is the subject of Jacqueline Hill’s study of how oaths were increasingly used to exclude Catholics from guilds and the corporation. And Catholics were the targets: the 1704 Test Act’s impact on Dissenters was merely to exclude them from holding a commission as a military officer. The study’s conclusion concerns the ‘mutability’ (p. 209) of the oath, given the shift in power from monarch to parliament: true, though this reviewer would have been struck by the persistence with which an urban elite clung grimly to penal (small ‘p’) provisions against Catholics.
Alan Ford describes the famous disputation between Henry Fitzsimon S.J. and the young James Ussher which was truncated because Fitzsimon asserted that he ‘came into this land for exhortation not disputation’ (p. 129) but also because Fitzsimon found the starting point, ‘Whether the Pope be antichrist?’, to be ‘absurd’ (p. 119). Reading Ussher’s transcript, I would say that Fitzsimon quickly came to regret engaging in an argument whose premise placed him on the defensive against a tremendously accomplished biblical scholar. Nessa Malone’s study of two lawyers, Henry Burnell and Richard Netterville, and the biography of the physician Thomas Arthur by Mary Ann Lyons might be considered together because Lyons is interested in Arthur not as Ireland’s most celebrated physician but as a prominent Old English figure. The constitutionalist opposition of Burnell and Netterville to cess and, latterly, to the use of prerogative law against recusants was carried on by Burnell’s nephew William Talbot whose son, as earl of Tyrconnell, would be the most doughty defender of Irish Catholics in his day. Arthur was a far more circumspect character: his cure of Ussher’s mysterious ailment (whom he describes in his fee book as the ‘pseudo-archiepiscopus’) brought him instant acceptance even amongst those ‘to whom I have been hateful on account of the Catholic religion’ (p. 76). The ‘limits of liberty’ of the title refers to the extent to which an Old English papist could not only survive but thrive before the 1640s, after which religious conformity was more strictly enjoined.
With his unerring eye for such diverting minutiae, Toby Barnard discovered the single surviving copy of a printed funeral oration on Father John Murphy (d. 1753) of an unspecified Dublin parish. The sermon reveals something of the hopes (no, Murphy was not canonised, the Spanish and Italians had that process sewn up) and anxieties of the urban Catholic audience. As to the latter, the emphasis on Murphy’s educational accomplishments and social graces indicates ‘sensitivity’ (p. 230) to his ‘mechanic’ paternity and to Church of Ireland views that Catholic priests were a rude and uncouth lot. Bernadette Cunningham’s account of the Dominican Poor Clare nuns in Galway city might be grouped with Barnard’s article and makes a convincing case that their story is ‘integral to the story of urban religion in early modern Ireland’ (p.173). Not only did the Poor Clares preserve an almost continuous presence in the city, except for a gap in the 1650s, but they experienced a marked rise in professions in the second decade of the eighteenth century, the grimmest decade of the penal era, to the extent of being able to set up a daughter convent in Dublin.
Two contributions are outliers in terms of content and place. The first is Thomas O’Connor’s intriguing study of seventeen Dublin Protestant weavers in Spain who sought conversion to Catholicism as part of the naturalisation process. The second, Ciaran Brady’s thought-provoking study of Sir John Gilbert who is best known for his History of Dublin and his massive 1880s editions (comprising ten volumes in all) of two contemporaneous Irish Catholic accounts of the Confederate Catholics, one from an Old English, and the other from a Gaelic Irish or nuncioist perspective. One thread that links both pieces and that links them to Barnard’s study of John Murphy is just how much intermarriage, conversion, reconversion, co-working, proximity or even ‘sermon-samplers’ (p. 231) must have blurred the confessional lines of penal era Dublin. Murphy’s father, as a youthful apprentice, had converted to his master’s creed. Gilbert’s father, too, was Protestant, his mother Catholic. Most of the Dublin weavers, the likes of Thomas Gibson, William Sheercraft, Samuel Slattery, and Francis Lawler came from mixed and fluid religious backgrounds.
The diversity, within a recognisably coherent over-arching theme, and quality of the contributions, echo Colm Lennon’s own work and make this a fitting tribute.
