In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Enforcing the English Reformation in Ireland: Clerical Resistance and Political Conflict in the Diocese of Dublin, 1534–1590
  • Ian Hazlett
Enforcing the English Reformation in Ireland: Clerical Resistance and Political Conflict in the Diocese of Dublin, 1534–1590. By James Murray. [Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History.] (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2009. Pp. xvi, 353. $108.00. ISBN 978-0-521-77038-5.)

This is a new, profoundly researched, highly disciplined, and thoughtful study on efforts to both implant and repudiate the Protestant Reformation in sixteenth-century Ireland. It emerges from the wave wash of new approaches, activated in the 1970s, to what was a sterile topic not helped by failed, mono-causal explanations of failure. Originating as a doctoral thesis, the book has evolved over about fifteen years. Hence its depth and finesse—yielding a research outcome that will be hard to match in current circumstances of increasingly tight completion plans. Another benefit of the study is its “deliberately old-fashioned narrative form” (p. 18). Happily, this means departure from the virtual norm in historiography in recent generations—the sacrifice of form to content. Here, one has not only history proper and analysis but also a lively narrative—episodic, full of human interest and suspense, but earthed in factual evidence. The sources are chiefly church and government records, as most of the parochial sources crucial to regional micro-studies are not extant in Ireland.

The focus is on the keyword enforcing and the English enforcers, be they viceroys, lord-deputies, archbishops, or deans of Dublin. The task was Sisyphean. James Murray zooms in on responsible clergy and administrators down the chain of command. They were “English Irish,” the old colonial English residing in the gated community of the “Pale”—Ireland’s Cape Colony, as it were, that was antipathetic to the conquered but unpacified Gaelic Irish majority outside it. The narrative delineates the zigzags of different strategies born of frustration and exasperation. In the Pale, the new ecclesio-political problems were acute following various responses to government policies. There was formal conformity, grudging compliance, and semi-acceptance of a new bottle that retained the old wine, so that Catholic piety survived. There was also nonconformity, dissidence, recusancy, and increasing Catholic reaffirmation and confession. Catholic revivalism seems to have been nourished partly by the Elizabethan Protestant drive to command more obedience and partly by the impetus of Tridentine reform, usefully aided by some martyrs’ blood.

In this book, Ireland refers to part of it: the Pale. Further restriction is to the county, city, and Archdiocese of Dublin. Clerical resistance pertains to that of the senior clergy (“clerical elite”) below the archbishop forming the chapter of the secular one of Dublin’s two cathedrals, St. Patrick’s, which was of totemic significance to the colonials. Cathedral corporate identity, solidarity, and obstructionism are a central component of this book. The Reformation on the agenda is not related to any (known or recorded) local demand in any sector of society or ethnic group, but rather to the Tudor, constitutional, topdown one—Ireland being part of the English Crown’s domains. [End Page 369]

The introduction provides a magisterial survey of recent studies. The first two chapters illuminate the distinctive, confident, but rigid culture of Dublin Christianity. The double nature of its historic mission is clarified—an English Irish Church embodying not only a superior, more conscientious Catholicism but also a superior civil culture and legal system. The remaining chapters follow a chronological continuum, reporting and analyzing conservative neutralizing of progressivist pressures.

If Murray abides by the ineluctable conclusion of Reformation failure, his analysis is distinctive. He proposes that Protestant Reformation was rejected by most of the Old English community not just because it was un-Catholic but also because it was un-English. Its self-perception was as a bearer of traditional (medieval), indivisible, Anglo-Roman Catholic culture. Its founding charter was understood to be a papal bull, Laudabiliter, granted in 1155 by an English pope to an Anglo-Norman king authorizing invasion of Ireland to reform undisciplined Irish religion and life according to the “faith of Christ,” canonical moral laws, Gregorian reform, and the Ecclesia anglicana. This vocation...

pdf

Share