The English Reformation and identity formation in Ireland and Wales

Abstract

Current revisionist interpretations of the history of the Reformation in England and Ireland provide an intriguing paradox. In England the received wisdom, as variously purveyed in the magisterial studies of A. G. Dickens and G. R. Elton, represents the reform movement as triumphing under the Tudors. In latter years, however, the long established consensus has been shattered by means of a revisionist enterprise, heralded in the work of localist historians such as Margaret Bowker but mainly recently under the aegis of Christopher Haigh. This has challenged the notion of a decadent late medieval church heading for extinction and, conversely, has demonstrated the widespread survival of the ritualistic, quasi-magical elements of late medieval religion throughout the sixteenth century, despite the general acquiescence in the ‘religion by law established’ – a thesis now massively corroborated in both respects by Eamon Duffy's authoritative study of the religious culture of the period. The effect of the revisionist challenge, therefore, has been to throw serious doubt upon the impact of the Reformation on English religion in the sixteenth century whether from ‘above’ (Elton) or ‘below’ (Dickens). In contrast the conventional wisdom which held that the attempt to convert the Irish to the Reformation failed in the sixteenth century has also been challenged. Nicholas Canny has boldly asserted that the conventional approach which takes the failure for granted and seeks simply to explain it is begging the real issue. It assumes what requires to be demonstrated, namely that the religious struggle between the Reformation and the Counter Reformation was fought to a conclusion in sixteenth-century Ireland.