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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Competing confessional claims to the early church played a hugely significant part in the revival of the writing of ecclesiastical history during the period of the European Reformations. This question of Christian origins led rival religious groups to contest vigorously the right to claim to be the early church’s legitimate heirs. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works of ecclesiastical history would, moreover, strive to attain and preserve the rigorous standards set by Renaissance humanist scholarship and, in turn, exploit any perceived weaknesses in the work of their opponents in this regard. This essay examines a seventeenth-century Irish example of such ecclesiastical history-writing: Cambrensis Eversus (‘Cambrensis Refuted’), written in Latin, largely for a continental audience, by a County Galway priest-scholar, John Lynch (1599/1600–73), and published in St Malo in 1662. The work is ostensibly a reply to the twelfth-century works of Giraldus Cambrensis (c.1146–1223) on Ireland, which had attained a new importance in the confessional controversies of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cited afresh by scholars as evidence of the depraved nature of the medieval Irish (and, by extension, of medieval Irish Catholicism) and the need for their moral and religious reform. This had a particular resonance in the Reformation period: if medieval Catholicism could be proved to have been in a state of decay, then this would further legitimize the argument that it was in need of reform and would underscore the correctness of the Protestant return to a purer and more authentic early Christianity.
1 See esp. Van Liere, Katherine, Ditchfield, Simon and Louthan, Howard, eds, Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World (Oxford, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Lynch, John, Cambrensis Eversus (St Malo, 1662)Google Scholar, ed. and transl. Matthew Kelly, 3 vols, Celtic Society 2 (Dublin, 1848–52).
3 The putative bull’s existence was known of from quite early on. In his Metalogiais, written in 1159, John of Salisbury mentioned the Laudabiliter bull and claimed to have been the ambassador sent by Henry II to Pope Adrian IV to obtain it. However, the text of the bull first appears in Giraldus Cambrensis’s Expugnatio Hibernica some thirty years later as one of Giraldus’s five justifications for the invasion of Ireland: see esp. Michael Haren, ‘Laudabiliter. Text and Context’, in Flanagan, Marie Therese and Green, Judith A., eds, Charters and Charter Scholarship in Britain and Ireland (Basingstoke, 2005), 140–63 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Duggan, Anne J., ‘The Making of a Myth: Giraldus Cambrensis’ Laudabiliter and Henry II’s Lordship of Ireland’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History ser. 3, 4 (2007), 107–69.Google Scholar
4 Finnegan, David, ‘Old English Views of Gaelic Irish History and the Emergence of an Irish Catholic Nation, c.1560–1640’, in MacCuarta, Brian, ed., Re-shaping Ireland 1550–1700: Colonization and its Consequences (Dublin, 2011), 187–213, at 190.Google Scholar
5 This refers to the controversy over whether the word Scotia actually referred to Ireland or Scotland and the assertion among some Scottish writers such as Dempster that many early ‘Irish’ saints had not actually been Irish at all, but Scottish.
6 For the response to the earlier generation of writers, see Ryan, Salvador, ‘Reconstructing Irish Catholic History after the Reformation’, in Liere, Van et al., eds, Sacred History, 186–205.Google Scholar For the continuing polemic after Lynch’s Cambrensis Eversus, see Williams, Mark and Forrest, Stephen Paul, eds, Constructing the Past: Writing Irish History, 1600–1800 (Woodbridge, 2010).Google Scholar
7 Harris, Jason, ‘A Case Study in Rhetorical Composition: Stephen White’s two Apologiae for Ireland’, in idem and Sidwell, Keith, eds, Making Ireland Roman: Irish Neo-Latin Writers and the Republic of Letters (Cork, 2009), 126–53, at 127–9.Google Scholar
8 See Ryan, ‘Reconstructing Irish Catholic History’.
9 René D’Ambrières and Éanion Ó Cíosáin, ‘John Lynch of Galway (c. 1599–1677): His Career, Exile and Writing’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society 55 (2003), 50–63; see also Campbell, Ian W. S., ‘John Lynch and Renaissance Humanism in Stuart Ireland: Catholic Intellectuals, Protestant Noblemen, and the Irish Respublica ’, Éire-Ireland 45/3-4 (2010), 27–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 On 7 June 1642 in Kilkenny, a meeting of lay and clerical leaders (drawn from native Irish and Old English backgrounds) formed a Confederation of Irish Catholics, who wished to assert their rights as loyal subjects of King Charles I. They set up a provisional executive and held nine general assemblies. Blake was to serve as Chairman to the Assembly. Major divisions would emerge between various factions within it, especially over the Ormond peace of 1646, which the papal nuncio Giovanni Battista Rinuccini rejected outright because it did not fully restore freedom of Catholic worship. He also had theologians who spoke in favour of the Ormond Peace excommunicated. It would be Blake, as Speaker of the Supreme Council, who would order the divisive Rinuccini to leave the country in October 1648: see Cunningham, Bernadette, ‘Representations of King, Parliament and the Irish People in Geoffrey Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Erinn and John Lynch’s Cambrensis Eversus (1662)’, in Ohlmeyer, Jane H., ed., Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Kingdom or Colony (Cambridge, 2000), 131–54, at 134.Google ScholarPubMed
11 Cunningham, Bernadette, ‘Annalists and Historians in Early Modern Ireland’, in Wright, Julia M., ed., A Companion to Irish Literature, 2 vols (Oxford, 2010), 1: 76–91, at 87.Google Scholar
12 Leersen, Joep, Mere Irish and fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Ideas of Irish Nationality, rev. edn (Cork, 1996), 320.Google Scholar
13 Ibid. 97.
14 See Bradshaw, Brendan, ‘Geoffrey Keating: Apologist of Irish Ireland’, in idem, Hadfield, Andrew and Maley, Willy, eds, Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660 (Cambridge, 1993), 166–90.Google Scholar
15 Cunningham, ‘Representations’, 142.
16 Ibid. 143. Although Lynch was based in France, his audience was surely not solely a continental one. We know that Bishop Luke Wadding (1628–92) of Ferns in the south-east of Ireland possessed a copy of Cambrensis Eversus in his library, although the fact that Wadding had spent many years teaching in Paris weakens the significance of this evidence somewhat: see Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘Introduction: For God, King or Country? Political Thought and Culture in Seventeenth-Century Ireland’, in eadem, ed., Political Thought, 1–34, at 29; also Corish, Patrick J.. ‘Bishop Wadding’s Notebook’, AH 29 (1970), 49–113, at 56.Google Scholar
17 Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, 1: 325.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid. 325–7.
20 Bernard of Clairvaux: The Life and Death of Saint Malachy the Irishman, transl. Robert T. Meyer, Cistercian Fathers 10 (Kalamazoo, MI, 1978).
21 Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, 2: 337–41.
22 Ibid. 343.
23 Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, 2: 405.
24 Ibid. 401–5. This story refers to Marianus Scotus (d. 1088) who later became abbot of the monastery of St Peter at Regensburg.
25 Ibid. 407.
26 Ibid. 429.
27 Ibid. 441.
28 Ibid. 473–5.
29 Ibid. 479–81.
30 Ibid. 553.
31 Ibid. 487.
32 Ibid. 483.
33 Ibid. 579–81.
34 Ibid. 581–3.
35 Ibid. 601–5.
36 Ibid. 623–5.
37 Ibid. 625.
38 Ibid. 627.
39 Ibid. 663.
40 Ibid. 675.
41 Ibid. 681.
42 Ibid. 681–3. For a discussion of some of these earlier controversies regarding Irish orthodoxy, see Bracken, Damian, ‘Rome and the Isles: Ireland, England and the Rhetoric of Orthodoxy’, PBA 157 (2009), 75–97.Google Scholar
43 Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, 2: 689.
44 Ibid. 725.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid. 727.
47 See Flanagan, Marie Therese, The Transformation of the Irish Church in the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge, 2010).Google Scholar
48 Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, 2: 729. Gilbert of Limerick presided over the Synod of Rathbreasail in 1111 when the Irish church was first divided into dioceses.
49 Ibid. 731.
50 Ibid. 433–7. Lynch proceeded by the argument that even if such a donation had been made, Ireland had never been conquered by the Roman Empire and, furthermore, that there remained no evidence whatsoever of Constantine’s authority in Ireland.
51 Rankin, Deana, Between Spenser and Swift: English Writing in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge, 2005), 236.Google Scholar
52 Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, 1: 99–101.
53 Ibid, iii, 161.