Thomas O’Connor. Irish Voices from the Spanish Inquisition: Migrants, Converts, and Brokers in Early Modern Iberia.

Abstract

The primary objective of Thomas O’Connor’s study is to reveal the spectrum of interactions between early modern Irish people and Iberian Inquisition tribunals, from the middle of the sixteenth through the end of the eighteenth centuries. The resulting narrative also suggests the extent of the Irish presence in the Iberian world and its fluctuation over time. Irish Voices from the Spanish Inquisition: Migrants, Converts, and Brokers in Early Modern Iberia thus adds to a key historiographical trend, underlining the importance of mobility in constructing early modern societies. In so doing, the book enriches our understanding of how new patterns of migration intersected with the religious transformations of the Age of Reformations; it complements current large-scale rethinking of the dynamics of early modern European history, such as that proposed in Nicholas Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation (2015). O’Connor also proposes that studying Irish migrants affords alternate vantage points from which to view Anglo-Iberian relations; he contends that the ability of Iberian societies to absorb potentially rebellious Irish Catholics did far more to stabilize the English crown than to challenge it, despite persisting rhetoric to the contrary.