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  • The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion, and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750–1900
  • Donald Harman Akenson
The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion, and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750–1900. By Mary Peckham Magray. (New York, Oxford University Press, 1998) 182 pp. $45.00.

In most ways, this volume is a pleasure to read: It boasts first-class production values; it is well written and edited; it has a good index and bibliography; and, most important, it touches on several important aspects of Irish history in the modern era. At minimum, Magray’s work convincingly demonstrates that all those fustian biographies of nineteenth-century Irish Catholic bishops were either myopic or sycophantic in ascribing to the Irish episcopate almost all of the important changes in the Church, from the mid-eighteenth century onward. The largely independent agency of the founders and enthusiasts of women’s orders and congregations is beyond cavil, given the evidence here presented. Further, the author convincingly demonstrates the importance of the female religious in the embourgeoisment of the Catholic laity. This is not a new historical observation, but the precision with which the gentling activities of the sisters is described is admirable.

The heart of this book, however, is an oblique attack on Larkin’s concept of the devotional revolution in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland.1 Magray cannot make up her mind if she is engaged in improving Larkin’s theory by showing that it had pre-Famine roots, or attacking it, by virtue of the same historical characteristics. In part, this indecision occurs because she has a touch of a golden-age mythology threaded throughout her work, a belief (perhaps justified) that things were better for the Irish sisters before the reign of Cardinal Paul Cullen, which befogs her thinking about the devotional revolution. Second, since she cannot produce anything like the quantitative data that Larkin can (Magray’s nonanecdotal work is limited to two paragraphs), she attacks Larkin like a green hunter, assaying and then shying away. Further research will sort this matter out. One hopes that she continues in this vein. [End Page 505]

One also hopes that the implicit segregationist (and, nearly sectarian) assumptions that underlie this work will be eschewed in future expansions of this theme. There was very little specifically Catholic in the activities of the Irish nuns. Their domestic missionary activity was similar to that of the wives of Anglican and Presbyterian clerics, and their independence was similar to that of women in the missionary movements begun by Protestants. Further, as Andrea Ebel-Brozyna’s Labour, Love and Prayer (Montreal and Kingston, 1999) reveals, when one controls for social class and geographical variables, the message of Catholic and of Protestant female religious suasion was virtually identical.

Donald Harman Akenson
Queen’s University, Ontario, and
Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool

Footnotes

1. Emmet Larkin, “The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850–75,” American Historical Review, LXXVII (1972), 625–652.

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