Writing Medieval Irish Religious History in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This chapter argues that the complexity of the early medieval Irish church allowed nineteenth-century historians to find evidence that supported the interpretation of medieval Irish ecclesiastical history which best accorded with their own worldview. Many Catholic historians highlighted evidence that seemed to suggest continuity between medieval Irish Christianity and the Catholicism of their own day. Protestant scholars, by contrast, presented evidence that suggested a distinct form of 'Celtic Christianity’ in Ireland: non-Roman, non-hierarchical, and doctrinally idiosyncratic. This chapter uses the work of George Stokes, the late nineteenth-century Church of Ireland scholar at TCD, as a case study of popular Protestant historiography. Stokes published many studies of the early Irish church: his Ireland and the Celtic church (1896) was a particular success and ran to six editions. The latter part of the chapter considers contributions from contemporary Catholic scholars: Margaret Cusack ('the nun of Kenmare’) provides the case study here. It is argued that the tendency by nineteenth-century scholars from both traditions to use modern analogies, and to comment on contemporary religious issues, reflects the extent to which the medieval Irish church functioned as a site of discourse on modern, rather than medieval, religious divisions.