Knock: The Virgin's Apparition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (review)

What happened outside of the Catholic church in Knock, County Mayo, on August 21, 1879? Many, of course, believe that the Virgin Mary and two other figures appeared to fifteen observers on that evening 140 years ago. Within months, journalists from the Tuam News and the Nation promoted the story of the apparition and dubbed the town the "Irish Lourdes," a reference to what had already become the most famous site of Marian devotion in France by the late 1870s. Although Knock enjoyed a brief popularity in the 1880s as a devotional destination, it was not until the 1930s that the Knock Shrine came to approximate what it has since become—a site of international importance, as confirmed by Pope John Paul II's visit in 1979 and the subsequent construction of Ireland West Airport (formerly Horan International Airport, after Monsignor James Horan, the indefatigable promoter of the shrine).

But what, indeed, had happened? The sociologist Eugene Hynes provides more context for an answer to this loaded question than any scholar to date in his masterful Knock: The Virgin's Apparition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Drawing on years of archival research, and building off the published and unpublished works of such scholars as James S. Donnelly and John J. White, Hynes weaves together a complex picture of Knock at the ground level prior to the reported apparition. He utilizes folklore, census material, and a memoir written by Knock native Daniel Campbell around 1880 to discern the world-view of ordinary men and women. In this light, historians and social scientists will do well to study his careful application of Geertzian "thick description" and his use of insights from James Scott about the subtle working of power relations between elites, such as priests and their social inferiors, including illiterate and semiliterate rural parishioners.

What emerges is a layered, if sometimes repetitive, picture that works to explain what occurred in 1879 and that advances Hynes's longstanding challenge to Emmet Larkin's devotional revolution thesis. For the present reviewer, this book was both a pleasure and a challenge. We learn, for example, of folk practices known in the prefamine Knock of Campbell's youth that remained a part of everyday life well into the latter half of the century. Further, Hynes explains how popular stories about the towering figure of Archbishop John MacHale of Tuam helped to reinforce the sense of difference between Protestants and Catholics, as well as among landlords, tenants, and subtenants. At the same time, the author's application of Scott enables him to describe with great nuance the uneven—yet far from one-way—power relations between priests and people.

General readers may be surprised, for instance, to learn about such incidents as the strike by the people of Knock in the 1840s against the payment of what they considered to be exorbitant fees to their priest. Yet this and similar incidents provide vital background to the interpretation Hynes provides for the apparition and the manner in which its dissemination was shaped. That interpretation hinges on the conjuncture of four crises that affected the local population in various ways: a succession crisis within the family of farmers that made up the largest segment of the original witnesses; poor harvests that threatened food supplies at home and job prospects for Knock residents who annually worked as harvesters in Britain; the breakdown of landlord-tenant relations that coalesced into the Land War; and a multiform crisis of leadership in the clergy.

The last of these elements was itself two-fold. On the one hand, Roman authorities assigned MacHale's sometime rival Bishop John MacEvilly of Galway to be his successor at Tuam, thus dividing loyalties among the clergy of the archdiocese. On the other, certain clergy had denounced the Land War in its early stages, thus pitting themselves against their poorer parishioners. That these clerical scolds included MacHale, Canon Ulick J. Bourke (the archbishop's biographer and near relation), and the parish...