Medieval memories and the reformation of religious identity: Catholic and Anglican interactions with parish church sites in County Limerick, Ireland (original) (raw)
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The Catholic Footprint in Victorian Dublin
Journal of Victorian Culture
Religions make their mark in cities already bearing the legacies of earlier spiritual encodings, decodings and re-codings. We might describe these marks as a sort of footprint. The Catholic footprint, then, would, in the manner of the urban figure-ground relation, include the churches, schools, hospitals or other edifices that comprise the mission of the Catholic Church. 1 It would extend to various street-and place-names that, for many people, have Catholic associations. Less tangible but still evident, the Catholic footprint in a city might include land owned by the Church, and the control that this allows over urban development. All senses might register the Catholic footprint. Candles and incense are most intense within the walls of a church, but even they are occasionally carried in procession into city streets. Bells call the faithful to mass or, as with the Angelus, to other religious observance. The footprint extends to the realm of memory and cities are replete with religious relics, from graveyards to sites where once stood religious institutions, or where in time past sacred matters transpired. Some of these sites are invested with commemorative practice and in this way become places of public memory. 2 Others are more covert, haunted by histories of state-perpetrated violence or under the erasure of active state suppression, they serve as a spectral trace of injury and elision. 3 In many cities, faith-based communities are not hegemonic and in claiming a space must contend with competition both from a range of secular functions, and from communities expressing a different or even no faith. 4 Hervieu-Léger describes the legal and political settings in which religious expression must be negotiated as framing the 'territorial modalities of the communalization of religions', and how in turn this shapes the 'religious symbolizations of space'. 5 The Catholic footprint in Ireland's cities is an expression of just such a contentious history. As in many parts of northern Europe, the Reformation devalued Catholic institutions in Ireland and claimed their property for other purposes, some religious some not. However, the principle of cuius regio, eius religio was only ever an aspiration in Ireland and unlike in the rest of Europe the religion of the vast majority of the people did not follow that of their nominal ruler. In these circumstances, the spectres of Catholic hegemony were more insistent in Ireland than in most nominally Protestant countries.
Everyday Religion and Sanctuary Cities in Early Medieval Ireland
Medieval Irish monks are often imagined as lone ascetics secluded at the edge of the world, offering flashes of the sacred to the rest of us. Archaeology has done much in recent decades to elaborate this portrait of monks into a fuller vision that engages all the mundane entanglements of life at monastic settlements. Monasteries are now well-recognized as places with rubbish dumps, latrines, and political-economic agendas. Developing such settlement-based views of monasteries has been an important advance over earlier perspectives that saw monasteries as separated from the mundane realities associated with the secular world. But, this settlement-based approach to monasteries can marginalize sacred elements, to the point of deconstructing them out of existence. We must remember that monasteries are not just settlements: they are sacred settlements. Our approaches to them must reckon with the enchantments that pairing enables. “Everyday” or “lived” views of religion provide one promising means for understanding monasteries as settlement and sacred. Such approaches ground sacred practices in embodied experience (Bell 1997) and direct attention to the vital importance of and the diverse possibilities for enchantment in everyday life (Bennett 2001). Monasteries are not sacred because they have reserved space for otherworldly activities. They are sacred because they articulate domains from bodies to cosmos.
Irish church records : their history, availability, and use in family and local history research
2001
BRIEF NOTICES147 world is founded on pride and moved by the lust for domination. Even if all citizens were good Christians, human society would still be under sin. There is no such thing as a Christian commonwealth, only "a secular society based on the social contract of collective self-interested love" (p. 154). Christians must make the best of a bad situation but can, at most, make it less evil, not really good. They are sustained by the hope of heaven, their true goal. Her conclusions are based on analyses of ordo, civitas, and love.
Catholicism in Early Modern Ireland and Britain
History Compass, 2005
This article examines recent historiographical literature concerning catholicism in early modern Britain and Ireland suggesting, perhaps most surprisingly with regard to Ireland, that in general this remains a somewhat under-researched field. There has also been an unfortunate lack of cross-fertilization between the research of historians of the counter-reformation in both islands. This is particularly regrettable with regard to English historiography because the confessional strength which catholicism acquired in Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was of genuine significance to developments in Britain. The counterreformation took very different forms in Ireland and Britain. In many ways, the historiographical debate about the success or otherwise of the reformation in England and Scotland offers the most valuable comparison with early modern Irish catholicism: catholicism emerged as the most successful confession in Ireland as protestantism did in Britain, but the degree to which the process of evangelization went deeper than the mere inculcation of denominational affiliation is open to question. The second part of this article offers a brief analysis of some of the most significant developments in the recent historiography of catholicism in both islands, highlighting in particular issues of church organization, popular mentalité and print culture.
Sixteenth Century Society & Conference, 2017
Today I'm going to advocate for the value of applying borderlands theory to the study of the English Reformation, with my dissertation project as an example of how aspects of borderlands theory may be fruitfully applied to the subject. Drawing on the work of historians working outside the field of early modern England, this paper asks that we reconsider the physical and mental geography of the early Tudor reformations, seeing the parish church as a newly created "borderland" over which different interest groups, none with the power to impose its authority completely, fought for control. Churches became the material vessels upon which each inscribed their own religious identities.