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2 English humanism against Gaelic Irish society ሉሊ Degeneration, for Elizabethans and Jacobeans, meant leaving the civil or political life of Englishmen and taking up the barbarous or unpolitical life of Gaelic Irishmen. Richard Stanihurst wrote a description of the process in the late 1570s while living in the London household of Gerald Fitzgerald, eleventh earl of Kildare, as tutor to the earl’s heir Garret.1 The instance which Stanihurst chose took place when Gerald’s half-brother, ‘Silken’ Thomas Fitzgerald, lord Offaly and tenth earl of Kildare, rebelled
Identity is contingent and dynamic, constituting and reconstituting subjects with political effects. This book explores the implications of Protestant and 'British' incursions for the development of Irish Catholic identity as preserved in Irish language texts from the early modern period until the end of Stuart pretensions. Questions of citizenship, belonging, migration, conflict, security, peace and subjectivity are examined through social construction, post-colonialism, and gendered lenses from an interdisciplinary perspective. The book explains the issue of cultural Catholicism in the later middle ages, by way of devotional cults and practices. It examines Catholic unionism vis-a-vis Victorian politics, military and imperial service, the crown, and the position of the Catholic Church with relation to the structures of the state in Ireland. In particular the North American experience and especially the importance of the USA for consolidating a particular interpretation of Irish Catholic nationalist identity, is explored. Children studied in English Catholic public schools like Stonyhurst and Downside where the establishment Irish Catholics and rising mercantile classes sought to have the characteristics of the Catholic gentleman instilled in their progeny. The book sets out to detect the voices of those Catholic women who managed to make themselves heard by a wider audience than family and friends in Ireland in the years between the Act of Union of 1800 and independence/partition. It considers what devotional interests both Gaelic Irish and Anglo-Norman actually shared in common as part of a wider late medieval Catholic culture.
1 Two problems in the history of Irish humanism and ethnicity ሉሊ Shortly after the battle of Julianstown on 29 November 1641, the leaders of the Gaelic Irish who had risen in rebellion in Ulster met with representatives of their fellow Catholics from the English Pale at the hill of Crofty.1 Writing in the 1670s, Richard Bellings, himself a Pale Catholic, assigned one of the Gaelic Irish a short speech explaining his recourse to arms. This man, Rory O’More, complained that Irish Catholics were forced to choose either slavery in this world, because they were
3 Gaelic humanism against English Irish society ሉሊ During the course of the seventeenth century a number of Gaelic Irish radicals distinguished Catholic and therefore truly civil Irishmen, from heretical and therefore truly barbarous Englishmen; some even insisted that all those of English descent carried a natural inclination towards heresy. This anti-English radical tradition proceeded in an historical mode and rested on relationships between law, custom, habituation, and religion. The natural law that rendered present actions just or unjust, had also applied
, while the patrons of such collections came from both Gaelic Irish and Anglo-Norman backgrounds, delineating the boundaries of religious identity and devotional taste ‘across the divide’ is not a simple task for, in most cases, these boundaries (if they were boundaries at all) were quite porous. This chapter will confine itself to considering what devotional interests both communities actually shared in common as part of a wider late medieval Catholic culture. Medieval Irish cultural Catholicism 63 In her recent study of the transformation of the twelfth
English adventurers had to say of the social and political mores of the populations of Ireland, especially the Gaelic Irish. It also considered the reverse of this: how English adventurers in Ireland sometimes likened what they described as the ‘manners’ of the Gaelic Irish to social practices they associated with the native population of America. Quinn was keenly conscious of the preposterous nature of Elizabethan claims that the Gaelic Irish and Native Americas were kindred peoples. He had no doubt, however, that some Elizabethan authors, and their readers in England
their unwilling hosts among the Old English with ‘impunity’. 8 As ‘viceregal clients’, some well-connected English officers made use of their often significant autonomy and powers to establish themselves as land-holders in competition with displaced Gaelic-Irish septs. 9 Commissions of martial law were used by officers in this colonial environment as an attractive means of improving their pay and of extending their property, as those who executed the law ‘were entitled to one-third of the possessions of the dead “rebels
boundaries associated with the use of the written word were already familiar. In Gaelic Ireland the social rules for writing were significantly different. To understand the impact that print would have in these two worlds the history of the development of a textual culture is central. I In the course of the sixteenth century English and Anglo-Irish commentators on, and analysts of, the Irish world came into increasing contact with those parts of Ireland outside the pale. What they discovered there was a world which operated on social and political principles that were very
lord and baron, and this pseudo-nobility held those offices in the parliament and the council of the Irish kingdom from which the Gaelic Irish nobility, distinguished by ancient valour and piety, had been excluded. According to O’Ferrall, the greed of the English Irish nobility, and their English language and manners, made them easy for the crown to bribe and manipulate with church lands at the time of the Reformation. It was their desire to retain these lands, O’Ferrall argued, that caused the Irish nobility of English descent to resist the restoration of the holy
period. The small size of tower houses meant their construction was within the financial reach of many, including lords, ecclesiastics and merchants. They were also popular with the emerging gentry class. As prominent features of both rural and urban Ireland, they can be used to understand not only the people who lived inside them, but also the individuals who lived and worked around them. Few studies have looked at Gaelic-Irish, Anglo-Irish and early modern building forms as a unified whole. Fewer still have sought to locate tower houses within a wider tradition. Ó