The Reformation Ireland ‘With the Religion Left Out’ Une Paradigme Erronée ?

Abstract

The Reformation Ireland ‘With the Religion Left Out’: Une Paradigme Erronée? Henry A Jefferies According to The Church of Ireland and its Past, Irish Reformation studies have regressed ‘full circle’ to a point ‘barely distinguishable to that which existed half a century ago’ because there is a renewed interest in religion as a factor in the Reformation in Ireland.1 In fact, there has been a ‘paradigm shift’ with fundamental changes in the underlying assumptions and approaches to the study of the Reformation in Ireland. In concrete terms, there has been a shift from a paradigm or interpretative framework based on a conscious decision to study the Reformation ‘with the religion left out’, as Nicholas Canny termed it,2 to one characterised by an appreciation of the importance of religion in the lives of men and women in sixteenth century Ireland, a focus on the means by which the Reformation was propagated in Ireland and a concern with the responses of people in Ireland to the Reformation.3 As Peter Marshall recognised, such an approach bears comparison to that underlying current English Reformation studies.4 It offers a better fit for the evidence available, and therefore a truer understanding of the Reformation in Ireland. The Reformation in Ireland ‘with the religion left out’ In The Church of Ireland and its Past, Canny explained why, when condemning Brendan Bradshaw’s paper of 1978 about why the Reformation failed in Ireland, he decided ‘to write history with the religion left out’.5 He identified two influences in particular from the 1970s that encouraged him to discount religion as a significant factor in shaping Irish history during the Reformation era. One was the debate conducted by the ‘educated public in the United States’ about the ‘high moral purpose’ of their country’s war in Vietnam. Another was Cardinal William Conway’s insistence that the conflict in Northern Ireland was ‘not confessional in nature, despite the fact that religion seemed to determine which side local combatants took in the struggle’.6 Canny wrote that those influences led to his ‘attempting to write Studies • volume 107 • number 426 185 history with the religion left out’. However, just as it is impossible to fully understand the United States’ engagement in theVietnamWar without some consideration of the ideological basis for the war; nor, indeed, the Troubles in Northern Ireland ‘with the religion left out’, one cannot discount religion as a significant factor in the Reformation era. That is axiomatic in contemporary Reformation studies.7 In his recent magisterial book on the English Reformation Marshall wrote of his ‘unapologetic assumption … that the conflicts of the Reformation were indeed principally about religion: that questions of faith were not merely a convenient covering for more fundamental or “real” concerns about political power, social domination or economic assets.’8 Yet, Canny’s interpretation of the Reformation in Ireland ‘with the religion left out’ resonated with an Irish historical establishment that was anxious to disassociate itself from the Catholic orthodoxy that had characterised much of the writing of history in the Republic of Ireland until the 1970s. It also reflected the Zeitgeist of a time when the onset of the secularisation of Irish society was contentious, and a growing number of intellectuals were keen to exorcise Catholicism as a powerful force from Ireland’s past as well as its present. This paradigm was embedded in undergraduate lectures, postgraduate seminars, conferences and textbooks until very recently. When Bradshaw tried in 1998 to explore why the Reformation was accepted by the Welsh but rejected by the Irish, his work was dismissed by Karl Bottigheimer as ‘a troublesome distraction which reanimates the partisan polemics of an earlier age’.9 He condemned Bradshaw for ‘clinging to antipodal sectarian verities’instead of striving for ‘ecumenical interpretations of the past’. It was an unwarranted indictment but symptomatic of a wider determination to shut down any discussion of how religious preferences influenced Irish responses to the Reformation. Perhaps the most striking feature of the ‘Reformation 500’ conference held in Dublin in October 2017 was the absence of any discussion of how people in Ireland responded to the Reformation – a proverbial ‘elephant in the room’! A fundamental problem with...