In this book, Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin explores how mobility —in the form of migration to and from Ireland, internal displacement, and identity linked to Biblical narratives and contemporary confessional texts —shaped the emergence of the three main religious denominations in early modern Ireland (the focus is largely on the seventeenth century). The author extends his earlier scholarly engagement with the Catholic world, to include the Church of Ireland and the Presbyterian communities, resulting in a broad inclusive rereading of these faith communities’ experience and self-understanding through the prism of migration. Even for one relatively small geographical entity (the kingdom of Ireland) on the edge of Europe, for which local ecclesiastical records and personal papers of significant actors are relatively scarce, this is a herculean task.
The work is divided in two sections, the first of which treats of mobility and the evolution of the three groupings; this review focuses on the Catholic community. Clerical migration to the continent was persistent, though involving only a proportion of all clergy serving in Ireland, and had a huge impact, for pastors educated abroad mediated the post-tridentine Catholic renewal in Ireland. Between 1578 and 1680, almost thirty Irish continental colleges were established, chiefly in Spain and Portugal, France, and the Spanish Netherlands. Because of the costs involved, students were drawn disproportionately from the Old English grouping, whose wealth was founded (broadly until the 1650s) on stable landownership and control of overseas trade, in contrast to the poorer Gaelic Irish. This movement led to the professionalization of Catholic clergy: the leadership cadre (bishops, and leaders in religious orders) were drawn almost exclusively from those with a continental training, and these sought to promote tridentine norms among their subordinates, though with varying degrees of success. Mobility characterized their life also on returning to Ireland: occasional state harassment (including short-term imprisonment for some bishops) dictated fairly constant movement, not to mention the pastoral exigencies of visitation, and confirmation ceremonies, to which flocked numerous crowds of faithful. While the author gives the broad contours of this migration, the curriculum of study these men followed, and its possible influence on their service on returning, would be an interesting further field of research.
Profound instability characterized the 1640s and 1650s, beginning with violence against settlers (overwhelmingly Protestant) in 1641-2, and the subsequent forced migration of Catholics in various areas. Under the Catholic Confederate government which emerged in 1642, clergy trained on the continent exercised a considerable influence on political developments. In the effort to reach an understanding with the royalist party, Italian papal emissaries (most notable Rinuccini) added legitimacy to clericalist claims for a preeminent position for the Catholic Church under any settlement. Lived exposure to Catholic Europe also predisposed many Confederate military officers to expect a privileged role for the Catholic Church in any arrangement with the crown’s emissaries. This stance led to the collapse of negotiations and to a bitter and enduring conflict among the Catholic representatives.
A different type of migration ensued with the arrival of Cromwell in 1649. An estimated one thousand Catholic clergy went into exile, mostly to the continent, but some to the West Indies. By the end of 1653, only one Catholic bishop, aged and infirm, remained in Ireland. By the Restoration (1660), bishops were again being appointed by Rome, a selection process in which educational criteria played a significant role. On their return, as in the pre-1641 era these bishops faced occasional resistance from some lower clergy, who did not have a continental formation. The author concludes by noting that the continentally-trained leadership were a numerically significant grouping, wielding religious and political influence within the Catholic community over the decades.
Military migration (underway by the late 1580s) had a confessional dimension, favoring the Spanish forces, typically in the Netherlands. The first Irish regiment was established there in 1605, and until 1659, a further thirteen regiments have been identified. The Catholic adherence of these soldiers facilitated integration of competing Irish ethnic identities (Gaelic Irish, and Old English), and determined an option for serving in Catholic European forces. More generally, whether among the estimated ten thousand Munster Irish who landed in north-west Spain in the years after the battle of Kinsale (1602), or among the mercenaries, Irish migrants identified themselves as Catholic victims of religious pressure from an alien and heretical monarchy. A similar self-presentation may be observed among the urban merchant families who transferred their operations to French and Iberian ports after their expulsion from the towns under Cromwell.
In the second section, ‘Mobility practices, ideas, and influences’, Ó hAnnracháin adopts a literary approach. Here he explores how biblical imagery of migration, exile, and return was used in the various confessions in shaping identity in the respective community. He also devotes a chapter each to an analysis of Protestant and Catholic confessional identity texts relating to seventeenth-century Ireland. The Catholic materials (in Latin) are the major publications on Ireland by three writers whose cultural and ecclesial formation were forged on the continent: Peter Lombard (born in Waterford), who spent most of his career first in Louvain, and then in Rome; David Rothe (born in Kilkenny), who studied in Douai and Salamanca, and served in Rome; and Philip O’Sullivan Beare, a layman of a Munster family settled in Spain. Each author sought to give Ireland a venerable and intrinsically Catholic past, comparable in antiquity and fidelity to that of any contemporary Catholic nation, presented in a literary style attractive for a continental Catholic readership. A further concern is to frame Ireland’s recent history of war and displacement from the mid-sixteenth century as arising from Irish loyalty to the Catholic faith, when faced with the onslaughts of a heretical regime.
Four of the nine chapters treat explicitly of the Catholic community. In other chapters, the insight that the vast majority of Irish Protestants were recent immigrants comes into view. How immigration from Scotland shaped what became the Presbyterian church in Ireland is considered, including the migration pattern of Scots within Ireland, and the recruitment and training of its clergy in Scotland. For Irish Anglicans, England as the source of clerical personnel and training played an analogous role, while the author allows for a serious engagement with Irish history and culture among some Church of Ireland figures. Mobility in the Protestant imagination is explored through Sir John Temple’s The Irish Rebellion (1646), the work of Andrew Stewart on the progress of Presbyterianism in Ireland, and John Vesey’s biography of that episcopal survivor, Archbishop John Bramhall.
This work is bold in its conceptual approach, its attention to terminology informed by the social sciences, and its broad canvas which integrates consideration of the three confessions. It draws on a vast array of secondary literature which attempts to set Irish experience within a European context. In these ways it offers a fresh reading of Irish denominational history for the seventeenth century. However the lack of maps is regrettable, and there are a number of misprints. This book, large in size and in scope, considerably advances our understanding both of the experience of mobility, and of denominational identity formation, in seventeenth-century Ireland.
