Nigel Yates provides a major reassessment of the religious state of Ireland between 1770 and 1850. He argues that this was both a period of intense reform across all the major religious groups in Ireland and also one in which the seeds of religious tension, which were to dominate Irish politics and society for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were sown. He examines in detail, from a wide range of primary sources, the mechanics of this reform programme and the growing tensions between religious groups in this period, showing how political and religious issues became inextricably mixed and how various measures that might have been taken to improve the situation were not politically or religiously possible.
Doyle enjoyed an international reputation as an outstanding advocate of the rights of Catholics and Ireland. This book examines in depth Doyle's intellectual and political contribution to contemporary Irish and English public life.
An Immigrant Bishop is a revised examination of the Irish intellectual roots of Bishop John England’s American pastoral works in the diocese of Charleston, South Carolina (1820-1842). The text focuses on his political philosophy and his theology of the Church, both of which were influenced by the Enlightenment and a theological, not a political, Gallicanism. As the study demonstrates, we now know more about England’s intellectual life prior to his immigration than we do about any other Catholic immigrant from Ireland. Neither Peter Guilday’s monumental two-volume biography (1927) of England nor any subsequent scholarly study of England has uncovered and analyzed, as this book does, England’s many unpublished and published writings in Ireland—his explicitly authored texts, his published speeches before the Cork Aggregate meetings, and his pseudonymous articles in the Cork Mercantile Chronicle between 1808, when he was ordained, and 1820, when he emigrated to the United States. John England (1786-1842), the first Catholic bishop of Charleston, was the foremost national spokesman for Catholicism in the United States during the years of his episcopacy and the primary apologist for the compatibility of Catholicism and American republicanism. He was also the first Catholic bishop to speak before the United States Congress and the first American to receive a papal appointment as an Apostolic Delegate to a foreign country (in this case to negotiate a concordat with President Jean Pierre Boyer of Haiti). He is considered the father of the Baltimore Provincial Councils and the nineteenth-century American Catholic conciliar tradition. He was also the only bishop in American history to develop a constitutional form of diocesan government and administration. Among other things he was the first cleric to establish a diocesan newspaper that had something of a national distribution. England’s contribution to the early formation of an American Catholicism has been told many times before, but he has the kind of creative mind and episcopal leadership that demands repeated re-considerations.
At the end of the eighteenth century, an evangelical movement gained enormous popularity at all levels of Irish society. Initially driven by the enthusiasm and commitment of Methodists and Dissenters, it quickly gained ascendancy in the Church of Ireland, where its unique blend of moral improvement and conservative piety appealed to those threatened by the democratic revolution and the demands of the Catholic population for political equality. The Bible War in Ireland identifies this evangelical movement as the origin of Ireland's Protestant "Second Reformation" in the 1820s. This effort, in turn, helped provoke a revolution in political consciousness among the Catholic population, setting the stage for the emergence of the Catholic Church as a leading player in the Irish political arena. Extensively researched, Irene Whelan's book puts forward a uniquely challenging interpretation of the origins of religious and political polarization in Ireland. Copublished with Lilliput Press, Dublin. The Wisconsin edition is for sale only in North America. "Essential reading for anyone interested in the emergence of an Irish Catholic identity in the nineteenth century and in Protestant-Catholic relations in that period not only in Ireland but in the Anglophone world."--Thomas Bartlett, The Catholic Historical Review
A comprehensive cultural history of childhood in nineteenth-century Ireland, which explores how the notion of childhood fluctuated depending on class, gender, and religious identity, and presents invaluable new insights into Irish boarding schools, the material culture of childhood, and the experience of boys and girls in education.
The brilliant Bishop James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin (J.K.L.) was the outstanding Catholic bishop of his time. This major source book is a companion volume to the author's two-volume study of Doyle which won the NUI Irish Historical Research Prize. It comprises the complete corpus of Doyle's pastoral and education letters. The pastoral letters detail the religious renewal and reform of the Irish Church which Doyle led in the era of Catholic Emancipation. The work contains the national pastoral letters written by Doyle in the name of the entire Irish hierarchy. Doyle's letters on education are essential for understanding the background to the founding of the national system of education in 1831. They deal with the education of the poor and include letters to the Catholic Association and Daniel O'Connell.
John Nelson Darby is best known as the architect of the most influential system of end-times thinking among the world's half-a-billion evangelicals. This book re-examines Darby's thought and argues that claims that Darby is the father of dispensationalism may need to be revised.
This book provides a much-needed historiographical overview of modern Irish History, which is often written mainly from a socio-political perspective. This guide offers a comprehensive account of Irish History in its manifold aspects such as family, famine, labour, institutional, women, cultural, art, identity and migration histories.
Daniel O'Connell, often referred to as The Liberator, was an Irish political leader in the first half of the 19th century. One of the most remarkable historical figures in Irish history, he campaigned for Catholic Emancipation, including the right for Catholics to sit in the Westminster Parliament, and repeal of the Act of Union which combined Great Britain and Ireland. Famous in his day as the most feared lawyer in Ireland, O'Connell tormented judges, terrorised opposing barristers, and won a reputation for saving the lives of so many men who would otherwise have been hanged. He became 'The Counsellor', the fearless defender of the people. He secured that reputation through his campaign for Catholic emancipation when he founded the first successful mass democratic movement in European history, and became 'The Liberator'.
The Irish Classical Self considers the role of classical languages and learning in the construction of Irish cultural identities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing in particular on the "lower ranks" of society. This eighteenth century notion of the "classical self" grew partly out of influential identity narratives developed in the seventeenth century by clerics on the European continent: responding to influential critiques of the Irish as ignorant barbarians, they published works demonstrating the value and antiquity of indigenous culture and made traditional annalistic claims about the antiquity of Irish and connections between Ireland and the biblical and classical world broadly known. In the eighteenth century these and related ideas spread through Irish poetry, which demonstrated the complex and continuing interaction of languages in the country: a story of conflict, but also of communication and amity. The "classical strain" in the context of the non-elite may seem like an unlikely phenomenon but the volume exposes the truth in the legend of the classical hedge schools which offered tuition in Latin and Greek to poor students, for whom learning and claims to learning had particular meaning and power. This volume surveys official data on schools and scholars together with literary and other narratives, showing how the schools, inherently transgressive because of the Penal Laws, drove concerns about class and political loyalty and inspired seductive but contentious retrospectives. It demonstrates that classical interests among those "in the humbler walks of life" ran in the same channels as interests in Irish literature and contemporary Irish poetry and demands a closer look at the phenomenon in its entirety.
