Abstract
Irish fortune-tellers (c.1691–1840) were conspicuous male and female magical practitioners who predicted the future by a number of means, including reading palms, coffee grounds, cards, and tea leaves. They were patronized by all sections of Irish society, but practitioners were mostly drawn from the lower orders, some more respectable, law-abiding and prosperous than others. Wandering Irish fortune-tellers were not identified with Irish traveling or Roma communities. The eighteenth-century Irish parliament was unconcerned with fortune-tellers, but their activities had been outlawed under sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century vagrancy laws, which were removed in 1772 and not replaced for over a century. These laws were rarely used, clerical authorities rarely targeted divinatory practices, and lay elites largely ignored or tolerated fortune-tellers, if indeed they did not patronize them themselves. When Irish fortune-tellers and their clients were criticized in the late eighteenth century, it was on moral, social, and religious grounds. Along cultural representations, in paintings, poems, plays, and masquerade costumes, this discourse was used to articulate and maintain hierarchal gender differences and the patriarchy it upheld. Opposition to Irish fortune-telling was thus not articulated and condemned as anti-Enlightenment, as magic in Ireland was only considered inimical to Enlightenment values when political considerations made it so.
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