A notably successful example of the genre, Representing Irish religious histories is a collection of conference papers – in this case, from a conference of similar title which occurred at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth in 2013. The eighteen eminently readable chapters average less than fifteen pages each, inclusive of endnotes, their accessible brevity achieved without sacrifice of substantive content. Accessibility is further enhanced by the volume's organisation.
The editors acknowledge that for much of the past five centuries, religion has figured prominently in constructions of identity and history. Unsurprisingly, the contributions to this volume, consistent with this premise, enrich (if not complicate) our understanding of the myriad means through which creed and practice served as makers and filters of reality.
The essays encompass a wide range of varying historical interpretations of Christianity in Ireland and the interweaving of religion and identity. To give but a few examples: Evie Monaghan explains how seventeenth-century Irish Protestant historians in their accounts of eucharistic belief and practice saw divine approbation for their churches’ existence; John B. Roney finds Thomas Moore negotiating a ‘middle ground’ of religion and Irish nationalism; Barbara McCormack analyses the Irish-language Bibles in the Russell Library, Maynooth in exploring how the language was used to further the aims of Bible societies; Eamon Darcy examines the use of 1641 depositions in history classrooms; while John Wolffe reports on how Northern Ireland community activists perceive Irish religious history.
Rather than merely rehearsing too familiar religious divisions, the essays’ attention to historiography provides a useful insight into the origins of differing interpretations and religious allegiances. Editors Jacqueline Hill and Mary Ann Lyons have arranged the essays chronologically and thematically; the placement enhances the interplay of Catholic and Protestant assertion and argumentation. Directly and indirectly perhaps all the contributors provide insight into what one might expect: that even (one might say, particularly) in competition and antagonism there exists a remarkable parallelism among the three principal faith traditions.
A minority in Ireland always, although at times a majority in some northern parishes, Presbyterians have seen themselves (in the words of a denominational statesman) as having a ‘precarious belonging’ on the island. Essays by Robert Armstrong and Laurence Kirkpatrick in the first section, and Raymond Gillespie in the second, portray Presbyterians earnestly engaged in working out their place though enjoying neither the rough security of the majority's cohesion and traditions nor the privileges and prestige of the state-sanctioned church.
Parallelism in antagonism and agreement is nowhere more tantalisingly evident than in the repeated references to Saint Patrick and his contested legacy. Among the ‘key foundational contributions’ toward a Catholic history of Ireland identified by Mary Ann Lyons are late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century texts on Patrick which help to assert his role in establishing Ireland as a Catholic bastion. Jacqueline Hill finds that in helping to lay the nineteenth-century foundations of Irish religious history, Reverend William Phelan of the Church of Ireland ‘challenged the suggestion that the early Irish church had come at all within the Roman sphere’. Laurence Kirkpatrick suggests that William Dool Killen, a Presbyterian church historian, ‘illuminated nineteenth-century Irish Presbyterian self-awareness and outlook’ – in part by proposing a ‘Patristic legitimacy for the Presbyterian system of church government’. George Vivilliers Jourdan, a twentieth-century dean of St Patrick's cathedral and fellow of the Royal Historical Society, argued, Miriam Moffitt tells us, that ‘the Church of Ireland was the legitimate descendant of the church of St Patrick’.
Several writers refer to the commemoration in 1932 of the fifteen-hundredth anniversary of Patrick's arrival in Ireland and to the diverging interpretation of the event's significance. The commemoration's prestige earned Dublin the honour of hosting the thirty-first international Eucharistic Congress. ‘The tone of the week-long extravaganza was the confidence and exuberance of Catholic Ireland’, observes Irene Whelan. If Catholicism seemed arrayed ‘as an essential badge of a superior form of nationalism’, Ian d'Alton explains, the southern Protestant response was a Patristic commemoration to display ‘the Church of Ireland as “the most Irish thing there is in Ireland.”’ Brian Walker's essay surveys St Patrick's Day commemorations as a site of conflict and ultimately hesitant conciliation during the century concluding in 2013.
The comprehensiveness of Representing Irish religious histories is praiseworthy and yet not absolute. Surely there is much more to be explored with respect to the Irish language, to mention one area of investigation among many. But this is to anticipate a future conference and collection of papers.
