Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Note on Conventions
- Titles in the Series
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Handmaid’ of the English Church: the diocese of Dublin on the eve of the Reformation
- 2 Faithful Catholics of the English nation: patriotism, canon law and the corporate clergy
- 3 Rebellion and supremacy: Archbishop Browne, clerical opposition and the enforcement of the early Reformation, 1534–40
- 4 ‘God's laws and ours together’: Archbishop Browne, political reform and the emergence of a new religious settlement, 1540–2
- 5 The rise and fall of the viceroy's settlement: property, canon law and politics during the St Leger era, 1542–53
- 6 Archbishop Dowdall and the restoration of Catholicism in Dublin, 1553–5
- 7 Rejuvenation and survival: the old religion during the episcopacy of Hugh Curwen, 1555–67
- 8 Archbishop Loftus and the drive to protestantise Dublin, 1567–90
- Afterword
- Appendix 1 The division of administrative responsibilities between the two Dublin cathedrals
- Appendix 2 The parishes of the diocese of Dublin, 1530–1600
- Bibliography
- Index
Afterword
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Note on Conventions
- Titles in the Series
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Handmaid’ of the English Church: the diocese of Dublin on the eve of the Reformation
- 2 Faithful Catholics of the English nation: patriotism, canon law and the corporate clergy
- 3 Rebellion and supremacy: Archbishop Browne, clerical opposition and the enforcement of the early Reformation, 1534–40
- 4 ‘God's laws and ours together’: Archbishop Browne, political reform and the emergence of a new religious settlement, 1540–2
- 5 The rise and fall of the viceroy's settlement: property, canon law and politics during the St Leger era, 1542–53
- 6 Archbishop Dowdall and the restoration of Catholicism in Dublin, 1553–5
- 7 Rejuvenation and survival: the old religion during the episcopacy of Hugh Curwen, 1555–67
- 8 Archbishop Loftus and the drive to protestantise Dublin, 1567–90
- Afterword
- Appendix 1 The division of administrative responsibilities between the two Dublin cathedrals
- Appendix 2 The parishes of the diocese of Dublin, 1530–1600
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
By the early 1590s, it had become an inescapable fact that the Reformation had failed in the diocese of Dublin and, indeed, elsewhere in the English Pale. Writing to the archbishop of Canterbury in March 1591, Archbishop Loftus of Dublin and Bishop Jones of Meath admitted as much, when they acknowledged that the inhabitants of the region had ‘grown into such obstinacy and disobedience that we… find it a matter almost impossible either to reclaim them or to draw them to any good conformity’. This book has contended that the principal cause of this failure was the English Irish community's attachment to a survivalist form of Catholicism. And that this attachment itself had been actively and effectively defended and fostered by the clerical elite of the Pale, especially during the Marian period and theopening decade of Elizabeth's reign.
Yet it is a curiously conservative conclusion. It sits easily, in a number of respects, with some of the main conclusions reached by the two leading writers on Tudor Ireland's religious history in the modern era, Robin Dudley Edwards and Brendan Bradshaw. Edwards's major work Church and state in Tudor Ireland was written with the intention of portraying the heroic struggle of a brave Catholic people to defend its religion against a strong and repressive Tudor state, and to show how this struggle – even as early as the sixteenth century – had contributed to the birth of the Irish national tradition.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Enforcing the English Reformation in IrelandClerical Resistance and Political Conflict in the Diocese of Dublin, 1534–1590, pp. 317 - 321Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009