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  • The Templars, the Witch, and the Wild Irish: Vengeance and Heresy in Medieval Ireland by Maeve Brigid Callan
  • Sarah J. Sprouse
Maeve Brigid Callan, The Templars, the Witch, and the Wild Irish: Vengeance and Heresy in Medieval Ireland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2015) xxi + 280 pp.

Most scholars are aware of the papal bull Laudabiliter and its lasting effects on society in Ireland. Authorizing the English conquest of Ireland on the basis of a deviation of Christian orthodoxy naturally seems absurd for an island known as the “sanctuary of saints and scholars” (1). However, as Maeve Brigid Callan notes in the introduction to her first book, The Templars, the Witch, and the Wild Irish: Vengeance and Heresy in Medieval Ireland, “heresy trials in medieval Ireland did not involve actual alternative understandings of Christianity but were used to discredit one’s opponents and to attack groups or individuals whom the accusers feared and resented” (19). This is the driving thesis of Callan’s excellent book and one which she deftly supports. Callan sets out to review the evidence concerning the heresy trials in Ireland in the fourteenth century by offering the wider European context, including the Albigensian Crusade in France, the first crusade directed at Christians, and the radical turn against the Templars that bled into the political climate of England and its governance in Ireland. In each chapter, Callan examines the allegations available in the primary sources as well as subsequent misconceptions or misinterpretations that continue to persist in modern scholarship, relying on a survey of the evidence from both Ireland and the continent to satisfactorily refute such allegations or better contextualize them. Utilizing these contexts as well as a history of Christianity in Ireland, the history of Laudabiliter and the English Conquest of Ireland, and the targeted revision of the definition of “heresy,” Callan demonstrates that it was simply a means to persecute Irish and Anglo-Irish individuals in order to achieve a variety of personal or political ends.

Callan divides out her chapters to cover the development of the heresy trials, featuring heavily the central figure of Bishop Richard de Ledrede. The governing structure is three primary types of heresy trials that occurred in fourteenth-century Ireland, each part investigating all or the most important cases. These three types are the cases against the Templars, the witch trials, and the more general persecution of the native Irish. The first chapter covers the development of the trial against the Templars, revealing the motivations that produced false witness testimony and examining the fraught conditions that produced the likely untrue confessions. Of particular note is Callan’s examination of the use of torture to elicit the desired results. Callan notes that the inquisitors in the Templar trials made “their most detailed report about the need for torture” after the initial trial in Ireland concluded and after the successful introduction of their desired method, the inquisitors obtained “confessions of a [End Page 269] caliber unknown previously in the British Isles” (62–63). Charting the shift in methodologies and the results of such moves strengthens Callan’s case for the importance of applying a European context to the history of heresy in Ireland. She emphasizes the differing results in each country and the increasing pressure on the Templars that resulted in their dissolution in Ireland as well as the connection to the increasingly popular use of heresy charges for personal benefit.

The second and third chapters evaluate Richard de Ledrede’s handling of the Alice Kyteler case, a witch trial that became a heresy case due to Ledrede’s apparently intentional mischaracterization of Kyteler’s past, the surprising number of former husbands she had, and the considerable wealth she had accrued from those marriages. While this trial is well-documented, Callan points out that the coverage is heavily biased in Ledrede’s favor. Given Callan’s interests in gender and women’s history in Ireland, these chapters outshine the others in terms of their lively discussion of the curious characters of Kyteler and her associate Petronilla, as well as Callan’s thorough examination of the variety of interesting charges against them, including consultation with demons, sexual misdeeds, and rituals (85...

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