In Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, Clodagh Tait has produced an engaging cultural history of death and dying in early modern Ireland. Her work ranges broadly, addressing discourses on “good” and “bad” deaths, beliefs associated with dying and the dead, and the cultural practices of burial, disinterment, and commemoration. Tait argues that the history of death in early modern Ireland reflects a complicated religious history. Within the struggle between Catholics and Protestants, she finds that “the dead played a significant symbolic role” (4). Conflicts over burial rituals and the treatment of physical remains and claims over burial spaces reflect the religious fragmentation of Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the same time, extensive evidence of negotiation over burial places and the rituals associated with death suggests that Catholics and Protestants in early modern Ireland found ways to accommodate one another.
Physical space plays a central role in Tait's analysis. Because of Ireland's religious diversity in the seventeenth century, the physical space of the church was contested ground. Although the Church of Ireland claimed ownership over the churches, Roman Catholics utilized sacred spaces well into the mid-seventeenth century. Evidence from funerary monuments demonstrates that Roman Catholic dead were being interred and commemorated in Protestant churches until the Cromwellian invasion. Although occasionally these shared spaces became the sites of contest, what is striking about Tait's evidence is the extent to which it suggests a process of negotiation between Catholics and Protestants. For example, the construction of side chapels commemorating Catholics within Protestant places of worship created “a part of the church which, while connected to the main body … was also in some way aloof from it” (81). Because of the nature of the historical sources, much of this negotiation—as well as more covert forms of worship among the Catholics—is difficult to recover. However, Tait's work persuasively highlights important material on the practice of religion in Ireland during a period of cultural stress.
During times of social and political crisis, the physical space inhabited by the dead could lead to clashes. Tait documents episodes of corpse mutilation and the disinterment of Protestant corpses from churches during the 1641 rebellion. She argues that such acts were in part attempts to humiliate the living, but they also marked a formal reclamation of contested sacred space. The attention devoted to removing Protestant dead from sacred spaces can be understood as a cleansing process, based on “the principle that the offending body was a source of pollution and danger to the community” (93).
The concept of honor is also an important part of Tait's analysis. Both Catholics and Protestants concerned themselves with dying well. The careful preparation of wills and postmortem bequests were part of an individual's preparations for social death and separation from the community of the living. Tait finds that both Catholics and Protestants concerned themselves with preserving their honor and sustaining beyond death “the web of social relations to which the deceased individual would have been central” (11). Discourses on honor could also be central to conflict over confessional identities. Tait notes a number of cases in which the bodies of individuals who had recently changed religions became objects of struggle between Catholic and Protestant clergy. Likewise, discourses on the treatment of the dead could reflect negatively on entire confessional communities. Narratives of Catholic martyrdom used the execution of prominent Catholics or deaths in prison as evidence of the dishonorable nature of the Protestant persecutors. For Protestants, the mistreatment of corpses in 1641 similarly reflected the inherent dishonor of the Catholic rebels.
Although much of the evidence Tait utilizes refers to interpersonal and communal violence in Ireland, her work does address the relationship between beliefs about death and violence. Much of Tait's information from the 1640s comes from the 1641 depositions, which contain often spectacularly gruesome accounts of violence against the living alongside descriptions of disinterred or desecrated corpses. Recent works on the 1641 rising by Nicholas Canny and Raymond Gillespie argue that the violence of 1641 reflected unresolved grievances over socioeconomic inequalities and perceived transgressions of neighborhood and community. Tait's conclusion that the treatment of corpses during the rebellion reflected fears of pollution suggests a deeper cultural motive for some of this violence, but she does not pursue the implications of this interpretation.
Also absent is an explicit discussion of ethnicity in Ireland in the period covered by this work. Tait notes the well-known descriptions of keening by late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century writers such as Edmund Spenser, Fynes Moryson, William Brereton, and Barnaby Rich (35–36). She does not, however, explore very deeply the ways that these references to excessive displays of grief by the Irish informed the wider arguments regarding Irish “incivility” in these same texts. Likewise, Tait's work acknowledges but does not address in detail the ways that death culture may reflect tensions between the Old English and Native Irish within the Catholic community or between Anglican New English and Presbyterian Scots-Irish within the Protestant community.
That having been said, this is a very good piece of scholarship that speaks to a significant gap in our understanding of Ireland's cultural history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By focusing on a set of cultural practices and beliefs that transcended confessional lines, she also has produced a work that does much to illuminate the complex negotiations and accommodations that characterized this period in Irish history.
