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3 The devotional landscape of medieval Irish cultural Catholicism inter hibernicos et inter anglicos, c.1200–c.1550 Salvador Ryan In his 1985 survey entitled The Irish Catholic Experience, Patrick J. Corish points to ‘the complexity of the patterns of culture in which Christianity existed in Ireland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, while noting that the source material allows little more than an impressionistic survey of what was distinctive about the Christian religion inter hibernicos as against its equivalent inter anglicos.1 Difficulties arising
economy. This is true, to a certain extent, but it is the trade networks originating in this economy that sustained them. Late medieval Ireland was both a commercialising economy and an urbanising one, and these trends were especially marked in port towns (Galloway, 2015 ). As Agnew said, ‘the rapid growth of a port is a sure indication of the existence of a stable and prosperous merchant community’ (1996: 1), and, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, this ‘prosperous merchant community’ liked to build ostentatiously. This building accompanied the growth in
This book examines the rise and fall of the aristocratic Lacy family in England, Ireland, Wales and Normandy. As one of the first truly transnational studies of individual medieval aristocrats, it provides a fresh look at lordship and the interplay between aristocracy and crown from 1166 to 1241. Hugh de Lacy (†1186), traded on his military usefulness to King Henry II of England in Wales and Normandy to gain a speculative grant of the ancient Irish kingdom of Mide (Meath). Hugh was remarkably successful in Ireland, where he was able to thwart the juvenile ambitions of the future King John to increase his powers there. Hugh was hailed by native commentators as ‘lord of the foreigners of Ireland’ and even ‘king of Ireland’. In this study his near-legendary life is firmly grounded in the realities of Anglo-Irish politics. The political career of Hugh’s less famous son and heir, Walter de Lacy (†1241), is in turn illuminated by surviving royal records and his own acta. Walter was one of the major actors in the Irish Sea province under Kings Richard I, John and Henry III, and his relationship with each king provides a unique insight into the nature of their reigns. Over the course of fifty-two years, Walter helped to shape the course of Anglo-Irish history. That history is recast in light of the transnational perspective of its chief participants. This book is a major contribution to current debates over the structure of medieval European society.
—lost folios may also have contained further entries. 5 LL separates the poetic and prose texts; and my analysis concentrates on the poetry to track ideas about the use of verse as an appropriate literary form in which to write and formalize Ireland’s landscape. Specifically, this chapter focuses on those LL poetic texts that provide insights into the concept of place-making poets as medieval Ireland’s geographers, and our intermediaries in accessing Ireland’s verbal topographies. While other countries, like
Medieval Irish literature contains an intriguing level of frankness about anatomical and sexual matters, which is perhaps unexpected if one is familiar with the postcolonial prudishness of modern Ireland. This is especially noteworthy given that a great deal of this literature was not translated or made more accessible until the Victorian and slightly later periods. Translating potentially graphic passages often had scholars like Whitley Stokes resorting to Latin and even Greek, sometimes in
financial investment necessary for the stone structure implies inhabitation at least most of the time. As pastoralism increased, arable agriculture, or crop growing, has been said to have decreased, with only some regions of the Pale continuing with the farming practices developed by the Anglo-Normans in the high Middle Ages. In contrast to these long-accepted conventions of late medieval Irish agriculture, there is strong documentary evidence for water mills located close to, and controlled from, tower houses. This demonstrates that grain was
function in order to explore the nature of humanity. In medieval Ireland, the theme of body and soul, as a religious and penitential motif, made its way into secular literature designed CONTZEN 9780719089701 PRINT (MAD0059) (G).indd 102 01/12/2014 15:34 Body and soul: from doctrine to debate 103 to instruct as well as to entertain. The folktale, Días macclerech (‘The Two Clerics’), found in the twelfth-century Book of Leinster, tells a minatory story about a soul which leaves its body prematurely, before the body is actually dead. A fellow scholar, previously
In recent decades, spatiality—the consideration of what it means to be situated in space and place—has become a key concept in understanding human behavior and cultural production across the disciplines. Texts produced by and about the medieval Irish contain perhaps the highest concentration of spatial writing in the wider medieval European milieu, and only in Ireland was a distinct genre of placelore formalized. As Mulligan shows, Ireland provides an extensively documented example of a culture that took a pre-modern ‘spatial turn’ and developed influential textual models through which audiences, religious and secular, in Ireland and Europe, could engage with landscapes near and far. Ireland’s peripheral geographic position, widespread monastic practices of self-imposed exile and nomadism, and early experiences of English colonialism required strategies for maintaining a place-based identity while undergoing dispossession from ancestral lands. These cultural developments, combined with the early establishment of Latin and vernacular literary institutions, primed the Irish to create and implement this poetics of place. A landscape of words traces the trajectory of Irish place-writing through close study of the ‘greatest hits’ of (and about) medieval Ireland—Adomnán’s De locis sanctis, Navigatio Sancti Brendani, vernacular voyage tales, Táin Bó Cualnge, Acallam na Senórach, the Topographia and Expugnatio Hibernica of Gerald of Wales, and Anglo-Latin accounts of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory. A landscape of words provides rigorous source analysis in support of new ways of understanding medieval Irish literature, landscape and place-writing that will be essential reading for scholars on medieval Ireland and Britain. Mulligan also writes for non-specialist students and researchers working on the European Middle Ages, travel and pilgrimage, spatial literature, and Irish and British history and culture, and allows a wide readership to appreciate the extensive impact of medieval Irish spatial discourse.