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Historical revisit: R. Dudley Edwards, Church and state in Tudor Ireland (1935)*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

James Murray
James Murray*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Science, Dublin City University
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Extract

Robert Dudley Edwards’s Church and state in Tudor Ireland is an extremely durable, almost monolithic, work. Despite recent judgements that it is shot through with the confessional bias of its author, it has managed to retain an eminent place in the Irish historical canon since its publication in 1935. Two plausible reasons for this durability are readily identifiable. The first concerns Dudley Edwards’s role as a ‘founding father’ of ‘scientific’ historical scholarship in Ireland. In this context, Church and state stands out as an archetypal publication of the ‘new history’ and, for the author’s increasingly self-conscious successors, an important reference point in any endeavour to analyse or explain their profession and its work. The second reason concerns the book’s recurrent utility. Despite its age, Church and state is still the most reliable single-volume history of sixteenth-century Ireland’s Reformation experience, a volume which provides informative and citable material for present-day students and researchers alike.

Type
Research Article
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 118 , November 1996 , pp. 233 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 1996

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Footnotes

*

Church and state in Tudor Ireland: a history of the penal laws against Irish Catholics, 1534–1603. By Robert Dudley Edwards. Pp xliii, 352. Dublin & Cork: Talbot Press. 1935.

References

1 See, for example, Clarke, Aidan, ‘Robert Dudley Edwards (1909-88)’ in I.H.S., xxvi, no. 102 (Nov. 1988), p. 128 Google Scholar; Ellis, S.G., ‘Historiographical debate: Representations of the past in Ireland: whose past and whose present?’ in I.H.S., xxvii, no. 108 (Nov. 1991), pp 295-6Google Scholar; Murray, James, ‘The Church of Ireland: a critical bibliography, 1536–1992. Part 1:1536-1603’ in I.H.S., xxviii, no. 112 (Nov. 1993), p. 346 Google Scholar; Ford, Alan, ‘“Standing one’s ground”: religion, polemic and Irish history since the Reformation’ in Ford, Alan, McGuire, James and Milne, Kenneth (eds), As by law established: the Church of Ireland since the Reformation (Dublin, 1995), p. 10 Google Scholar.

2 For a recent analysis of this role see Ciaran Brady, ‘ “Constructive and instrumental”: the dilemma of Ireland’s first “new historians” ‘ in idem (ed.), Interpreting Irish history: the debate on historical revisionism (Dublin, 1994), pp 3–31.

3 For some recent studies of the religious history of sixteenth-century Ireland which cite Church and state heavily or acknowledge it as the ‘standard account’ of the Irish Reformation see Ellis, S.G., Tudor Ireland: crown, community and the conflict of cultures, 1470–1603 (London, 1985), ch. 7Google Scholar; Lennon, Colm, ‘The Counter-Reformation in Ireland’ in Brady, Ciaran and Gillespie, Raymond (eds), Natives and newcomers: the making of Irish colonial society, 1534–1641 (Dublin, 1986)Google Scholar; idem, Sixteenth-century Ireland: the incomplete conquest (Dublin, 1994), chs 5, 11.

4 Edwards, R. Dudley, ‘The history of the penal laws against Catholics in Ireland from 1534 to the treaty of Limerick (1691)’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1933)Google Scholar; idem, Church & state, p. xxiv; idem and O’Dowd, Mary, Sources for early modern Irish history, 1534–1641 (Cambridge, 1985), pp 208–9 Google Scholar; Clarke, , ‘Robert Dudley Edwards’, p. 122. The thesis is summarised in I.H.R. Bull., xi (1934), pp 185–9Google Scholar.

5 Edwards, Church & state, pp xxiv-xxviii.

6 For some good examples of Dudley Edwards’s authoritative footnotes see ibid., pp 31–2 n. 4 (his correction of misreadings of documents by Myles Ronan and G.V. Jourdan which had led to incorrect assertions that Archbishop Browne of Dublin held heterodox opinions on the mass in early 1538); pp 140–41 n. 2 (his exposure of Robert Ware’s forged accounts of episcopal conferences in the reign of Edward VI).

7 Ibid., pp xi-xix.

8 In I.E.R., 5th ser., xliii (1934), pp 196–211.

9 Edwards, Church & state, pp 157–69.

10 Clarke, ’Robert Dudley Edwards’, p. 126.

11 Edwards, Church & state, pp 109, 192–205, 239, 247–52, 262–80.

12 Ibid., pp vii-x, 240–41.

13 Ibid., p. xxxv.

14 Edwards, ‘Tudor religious policy’, p. 195.

15 “Edwards, Church & state, pp 191,283; idem, summary of thesis in I.H.R. Bull., xi (1934), p. 186.

16 Edwards, Church & state, pp 197–8.

17 Ibid., pp 304–5.

18 Ibid., pp 101–8. This argument was also published as a separate article, ’The Irish bishops and the Anglican schism, 1534–1547’ in I.E.R., 5th ser., xlv (1935), pp 39–60, 196–205.

19 Edwards, Church & state, pp 242–3,268-70.

20 lbid., pp 206–21.

21 Ibid., pp 1–10, 253–61, 281–97.

22 Dudley Edwards was later to admit that he gave greater weight to religious faith as a motive for the rebellion of James Fitzmaurice in Church and state than he would then favour (Edwards and O’Dowd, Sources for early modern Irish history, p. 209).

23 Edwards, Church & state, p. 289.

24 Ibid., pp 301–2.

25 Ibid., p. 244.