Education and Religious Identity in Early Modern Ireland

Abstract

This article explores the role of education in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in early modern Ireland. Set within the framework of ecclesiastical change, Tudor and Stuart attempts to promote educational reform at all levels were also an integral part of the programme of socio-political engineering designed to bring about the anglicisation of the island. Yet for much of the sixteenth century, activists of both the Protestant and Catholic faiths shared a common background of Christian humanist ideas and exhibited similar strategies for the attainment of religious objectives, including the training of priests. Chronic weaknesses in the state's administrative machinery, however, coupled with the lack of material resources in the localities militated against efforts to build on private and municipal initiatives for providing schools and catechesis. And differences in the ideological approaches of protagonists of reform did eventually obtrude upon a fairly ecumenical climate for educational innovation in the Elizabethan period. The struggle to found a native university which challenged prominent scholars and churchmen in the later sixteenth century encapsulates the theological and practical difficulties which beset educational advances in Tudor Ireland. Attention will focus on the corps of educators who may have proved to be extremely influential in the exodus of scholars to continental Catholic colleges. Ultimately Irish higher education polarised about the divines and printing presses of Trinity College, Dublin, culturally an English, Protestant bastion, established to foster evangelisation in the Anglican church, and the overseas Irish Catholic seminaries such as Louvain whence were disseminated works of catechesis, as well as history and hagiraphy, for the Counter-Reformation. The forging of religious identity in close association with either colonialism or nationalism took place in the context of experiences of opposing educational programmes.