This significant collection of essays explores women religious in Ireland from the early medieval period up to the seventeenth century, providing an insight into the various roles and identities of Irish female religious and how they changed and adapted over time. While surviving evidence of female religious communities in Ireland can be scarce, this collection provides a multifaceted exploration of the lives and work of religious and quasi-religious Irish women throughout this period. It explores a multitude of topics including asceticism (the denial of all forms of indulgence to attain a spiritual ideal), roles of female religious in the community, literary works and financial contributions of women to local religious institutions. An impactful addition to this collection are the colour plates of maps of Ireland and Europe which contain place names associated with the women religious mentioned in the text. These help to contextualise the far reach of these women in Ireland and beyond.
Several of the essays provide overviews that demonstrate the scale and impact of the communities under consideration. An overview of archaeological evidence for the early medieval period is provided by Tracy Collins, who divides the fifty-one sites of female religious communities into three broad categories: the major communities, such as Kildare; the satellite communities adjacent to larger ecclesiastical sites; and lesser or stand-alone communities. Collins notes that it was rare for these religious communities to be completely single-sexed or strictly enclosed. Looking at familial networks of Irish women religious in early medieval Ireland, Mary Ann Lyons notes a system whereby the ‘permeable cloisters’ (p. 115) of female religious communities promoted close ties with the local gentry as a source for new postulants and financial donations. At times, this could lead to political tensions spilling into these cloistered communities. Colmán Ó Clabaigh‘s essay considers the many iterations of quasi-religious vocations available to women in medieval Ireland, from vowesses and anchoresses to tertiaries and nursing sisters. Bronagh Ann McShane provides a comprehensive overview of female religious life in Ireland throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Ireland experienced huge upheaval throughout this period, so too did the female religious communities, often enduring short-lived foundations, resettlement and exile. Looking at the writings and translation work of the Irish Poor Clares, McShane positions this work within the wider Counter Reformation nexus.
Other contributions provide concentrated studies of a smaller scope that explore a multitude of factors, demonstrating that a wealth of knowledge can be uncovered from existing source material. Elva Johnston looks to the depiction of female saints and their foundations in the Irish martyrologies (a tradition of Irish vernacular lists of the daily feasts of saints inspired by continental works) to search for evidence of the role of women in the Catholic Church, noting that the representation of women in the corpus is lower than men, yet not insignificant. Johnston fascinatingly outlines how the Martyrology of Tallaght indicates the importance of female asceticism to the community. She argues that this may have inspired the commemoration of a distinct group of female saints in the local area. When comparing the Lives of Sts Íte and Brigit, Catherine Swift shows how these writings depict a female religious life rooted in the secular, emphasising the pastoral role of female religious in their communities. The similarities Swift notes between these texts and that of fourth-century Cappodacian monastic communities are interesting and worthy of further study. Dagmar Ó Riain-Raedel explores Irish-German connections by looking at the evidence for Irish pilgrim nuns in the female monasteries in late medieval Regensberg, a city on the Danube River in Germany. Although only names survive in registers, Ó Riain-Raedel looks to literary and hagiographical works to provide information on the community and the Irish connections. Considering the question of order affiliation, Yvonne Seale compares the female religious communities of Ballymore-Loughsewdy, County Westmeath with communities of Prémontré, France. In doing so, Seale demonstrates it is beneficial to consider these communities within their local and political landscape rather than by order affiliation to better understand a community's monastic identity and vocation. In his essay, Colm Lennon focuses on the female members of the confraternity of Christ Church, Dublin in the late middle ages. For lay religious, a confraternity offered ritual kinship and a means for building social capital. Looking at contributions to the church, Lennon notes that a sizable amount of endowments were made by women, which were considered a means of securing intercession with the saints on behalf of the departed.
This edition is an important contribution to the developing study of female religious lives and communities in medieval and early modern Ireland. It will benefit anyone with an interest in medieval and early modern Irish ecclesiastical and women's history.
