Negotiating identities : Irish women religious and migrations (original) (raw)

Negotiating religious change and conflict: Female religious communities in early modern Ireland, c.1530–c.1641

British Catholic History, 2017

This article explores how communities of female religious within the English sphere of influence in Ireland negotiated their survival, firstly in the aftermath of the Henrician dissolution campaigns of the late 1530s and 1540s and thereafter down to the early 1640s. It begins by examining the strategies devised by women religious in order to circumvent the state’s proscription of vocational living in the aftermath of the Henrician suppression campaigns. These ranged from clandestine continuation of conventual life to the maintenance of informal religious vows within domestic settings. It then moves on to consider the modes of migration and destinations of Irish women who, from the late sixteenth century onwards, travelled to the Continent in pursuit of religious vocations, an experience they shared with their English counterparts. Finally, it considers how the return to Ireland from Europe of Irish Poor Clare nuns in 1629 signalled the revival of monastic life for women religious on...

Irish Catholic Identities, edited by Oliver P. Rafferty

Journal of Jesuit Studies

The topic of identity has circulated in academic discourse since at least the 1970s, responding to the political developments of the period. Later postmodernist critiques of identity as an essentialist concept have not dimmed the interest in the analysis and critique of identity formation in Ireland, a field that has had a huge impact on not just sociology and history but also literary studies. Oliver P. Rafferty's Irish Catholic Identities primarily includes pieces by historians-among them some of the most frequently published and senior scholars of the topic-Donnchadh Ó Corráin, Raymond Gillespie, Thomas Bartlett-as well as relatively recent PhDs such as David Finnegan, Brian Jackson, and Richard Keogh. The two excellent articles on literature-one by the distinguished literary critic and poet Bernard O'Donoghue, mainly on Yeats and Heaney, and the other by Frank Shovlin and John McGahern-leave the reader disappointed that some study of identity in literature was not provided for the earlier periods, or, for that matter, on writing in the Irish language. Another unfortunate omission is the lack of any other articles by a female historian or on the subject of women's history other besides Catriona Clear's "The voice of Catholic women in Ireland, 1800-1921" and Louise Fuller's "Identity and political fragmentation in independent Ireland, 1923-83." The role of women-both religious and lay, Gaelic Irish and English-deserves more than thirty-five pages in a book of over 350. As is so often the case in Irish historical circles, women are given a kind of token position in the conferences and collections, even though there are outstanding female Irish historians working in a variety of time periods, including