Enforcing the English Reformation in Ireland: Clerical Resistance and Political Conflict in the Diocese of Dublin, 1534–1590 (review)

Abstract

Enforcing the Reformation in Ireland: Clerical Resistance and Political Conflict in the Diocese of Dublin, 1534-1590. By James Murray. [Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History] (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2009. Pp. xvi, 353. $108.00. ISBN 978-0-521-77038-5.) This is a new, profoundly researched, highly disciplined, and thoughtful study on efforts to both implant and repudiate the Protestant Reformation in sixteenth-century Ireland. It emerges from the wave wash of new approaches, activated in the 1970s, to what was a sterile topic not helped by failed, monocausal explanations of failure. Originating as a doctoral thesis, the book has evolved over about fifteen years. Hence its depth and finesse- yielding a research outcome that will be hard to match in current circumstances of increasingly tight completion plans. Another benefit of the study is its deliberately old-fashioned narrative (p. 18). Happily, this means departure from the virtual norm in historiography in recent generations- the sacrifice of form to content. Here, one has not only history proper and analysis but also a lively narrative- episodic, full of human interest and suspense, but earthed in factual evidence. The sources are chiefly church and government records, as most of the parochial sources crucial to regional micro-studies are not extant in Ireland. The focus is on the keyword enforcing and the enforcers, be they viceroys, lord-deputies, archbishops, or deans of Dublin. The task was Sisyphean. James Murray zooms in on responsible clergy and administrators down the chain of command. They were English Irish, the old colonial residing in the gated community of the Pale- Ireland's Cape Colony, as it were, that was antipathetic to the conquered but unpacified Gaelic Irish majority outside it. The narrative delineates the zigzags of different strategies born of frustration and exasperation. In the Pale, the new ecclesio-political problems were acute following various responses to government policies. There was formal conformity, grudging compliance, and semi-acceptance of a new bottle that retained the old wine, so that Catholic piety survived. There was also nonconformity, dissidence, recusancy, and increasing Catholic reaffirmation and confession. Catholic revivalism seems to have been nourished partly by the Elizabethan Protestant drive to command more obethence and partly by the impetus of Tridentine reform, usefully aided by some martyrs' blood. …