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² John O'Sullivan, Praxis Parochi in Hibernia, vol. 1, 1850–1852, 151. Unpublished manuscript at the Kerry Diocesan Archive, Killarney.

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⁶ Catholic Record of Waterford and Lismore 6 (January 1919): 182–83.Google Scholar

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⁸ Ian Dickson, J. N., Beyond Religious Discourse: Sermons, Preaching and Evangelical Protestants in Nineteenth-Century Irish Society (Milton Keynes, 2007)Google Scholar, 1. For a comparative perspective, see Stout, Harry S., The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar, and Davis, Gerald L., I Got the Word in Me and I Can Sing It, You Know: A Study of the Performed African-American Sermon (Philadelphia, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹³ Ibid., 147.

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¹⁵ For a sample list of sermons preached by the bishop of Kerry in the nineteenth century, see Moriarty, David, Sermons by the Most Rev. Dr. Moriarty, Late Bishop of Kerry, new ed. (Dublin, 1907 [1901])Google Scholar. Ulster evangelicals in the nineteenth century also focused on the importance of preaching and catechizing; see Dickson, Beyond Religious Discourse, 19.

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¹⁹ Edwards, O. C. Jr., A History of Preaching (Nashville, 2004), 426–33.Google Scholar

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²⁶ Potter, Sacred Eloquence, 189.

²⁷ In his work on the medieval Irish popular sermon, Alan J. Fletcher argues similarly: “The late medieval popular sermon, then, needed to engage its audience if it were not to remain an arid exercise and wither on the vine. Consequently, preachers might find themselves treading a fine line between disaffecting their audiences and affecting them too much. The content and structure of the sermon had to be well prepared, of course, but only in delivery would it stand or fall in the moment that its preacher's rhetorical mettle was finally put to the proof.” Fletcher, Alan J., Late Medieval Popular Preaching in Britain and Ireland: Texts, Studies, and Interpretations (Turnhout, Belgium, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 312.

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⁴² Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, “The ‘Merry Wake,’” in Irish Popular Culture, 1650–1850, 173–200, and Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, “The Pattern,” in idem., 201–21.

⁴³ Barry, “The Legislation of the Synod of Thurles,” 148.

⁴⁴ Cullen and others disagreed over the specifics of moving the sacraments into the chapel. While Cullen pushed for all occasions, including all marriages and Masses, to occur only in the chapel, the Thurles legislation did leave some room for some flexibility. Ignatius Murphy, The Diocese of Killaloe, 23–24.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 30.

⁴⁶ Nugent, “Producing Priestliness,” 1, 16.

⁴⁷ Barry, “The Legislation of the Synod of Thurles,” 141.

⁴⁸ Slattery to Rev. P. Canty, Maycarkey. Archbishop William Slattery Papers, File 1852/16, microfilm reel 6004, Archives of the Archdiocese of Cashel and Emily on microfilm at the National Library of Ireland.

⁴⁹ Mountford, The Gendered Pulpit, 5.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 51, 54.

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⁵⁹ Ní Dhomhnaill, “A Ghostly Alhambra,” 68. For comparative analyses, see Bob Bushaway, “‘Things Said or Sung a Thousand Times’: Customary Society and Oral Culture in Rural England, 1700–1900,” in The Spoken Word, 256–77, and Clanchy, M. T., From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307 (Cambridge, MA, 1979)Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ Donald E. Meek argues that clergy “have been of great importance to the creation, maintenance and growth of literacy within the Celtic cultures of Britain and Ireland” from the Middle Ages to the late nineteenth century. Donald E. Meek, “The Pulpit and the Pen: Clergy, Orality and Print in the Scottish Gaelic World,” in The Spoken Word, 84.

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⁶⁵ Although newspaper readership figures for the 1850s are difficult to come by, the great increase in the numbers of newspapers suggests an expanding readership. Comerford, R. V., “Ireland, 1850–70: Post-famine and Mid-Victorian,” in A New History of Ireland: Volume V, Ireland Under the Union; I, 1801–1870, ed. Vaughan, W. E. (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar, 376. See also Corish, Irish Catholic Experience, 131.

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⁷³ Donald E. Meek, “The Pulpit and the Pen,” 111.

⁷⁴ Scribner, “Oral Culture and the Diffusion of Reformation Ideas,” 237–38.

⁷⁵ Corish, Patrick J., Maynooth College, 1795–1995 (Dublin, 1995)Google Scholar, 116.

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⁸⁵ Lankford, The Hope and the Sadness, 21–22.

⁸⁶ Ibid., 37–38.

⁸⁷ Barry, “The Legislation of the Synod of Thurles,” 149.

⁸⁸ O'Sullivan, Praxis, 1:532–34.

⁸⁹ Delay, “The Gates Were Shut,” 31–32.

⁹⁰ Mountford, The Gendered Pulpit, 17, 26.

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⁹⁵ Rev. Guinan, Joseph, The Island Parish (Dublin, 1908)Google Scholar, 135.

⁹⁶ Larkin, “The Parish Mission Movement,” 200–01.

⁹⁷ Lawrence Taylor, Occasions of Faith, 177. According to John Sharp, several Redemptorists were “unfitted for the specific work of their order,” proving incompetent when it came to preaching. Sharp, John, Reapers of the Harvest: The Redemptorists in Great Britain and Ireland, 1843–1898 (Dublin, 1989)Google Scholar, 110.

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⁹⁹ Lawrence Taylor, Occasions of Faith, 173–74.

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¹⁰¹ Guinan, The Island Parish, 141.

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¹⁰⁴ “Mission in Galway,” notes written on the 1852 Galway mission, author and date unknown, Bishop Michael Browne (bishop from 1937 to 1976) Papers, B/11/49 (2), Galway Diocesan Archive, Galway.

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¹¹³ Sharp, Reapers of the Harvest, 24–25.

¹¹⁴ James H. Murphy, “The Role of Vincentian Parish Missions,” 166–67.

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¹²⁰ Ibid.

¹²¹ Delay, “Confidantes or Competitors?” 120.

¹²² William Watson, Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire), to Archbishop McCabe, 11 April 1878, McCabe Papers, 337/3/II/35, Dublin Diocesan Archive, Dumcondra. All misspellings in original.

¹²³ Ibid.

¹²⁴ Here, Adam Fox's arguments on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England are useful. Fox maintains that early modern England “was a society in which the three media of speech, script, and print infused and interacted with each other in a myriad of ways.” The religious changes of Reformation-era England also have parallels with the reforming agenda of the nineteenth-century Irish devotional revolution. The intersections of orality and literacy proved locally vital during both times of upheaval. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 5. Although it is more difficult to record the ways in which nonliterate or semiliterate Catholics interacted with the literacy of the devotional revolution, Gearóid Ó Crualaoich has argued that the lines between orality and literacy were quite blurred, and that even those rural Irish folk who were most wedded to orality also were savvy enough to understand literacy and its uses: “Séan Ó Conaill, despite his inability to read or write, despite his never having been at school, participated in a culture that was literate to a degree. He was aware of and recognized that world of literacy. He knew and had dealings with its agencies and its representative agents: the priest, the schoolmaster, the policeman and the folklore collector.” Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, The Book of the Cailleach: Stories of the Wise-Woman Healer (Cork, 2003)Google Scholar, 17. For a comparative perspective, see Goody, Jack, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar, and Fielding, Penny, Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction (Oxford, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹²⁵ Edna O'Brien, Mother Ireland, 44.

¹²⁶ MSS 517, 419, National Folklore Collection, Dublin (hereafter NFC).

¹²⁷ Hynes, Knock, 42.

¹²⁸ NFC 520, 247–48.

¹²⁹ See Hynes, Knock, chap. 3.

¹³⁰ NFC 437, 396.

¹³¹ NFC 560, 415.

¹³² NFC 560, 545.

¹³³ NFC 37, 90.

¹³⁴ Oral history, Patricia Kelly, Oxmanstown Road, North Circular Road, Dublin, 1920s–30s, cited in No Shoes in Summer, 36–37.

¹³⁵ Lawrence Taylor, Occasions of Faith, 161, 149. Folklorist Diarmuid Ó Giolláin expresses a similar theory, claiming that “[s]uch accounts show an ambivalence towards the idea of Christianity having an absolute superiority of power.” “The Fairy Belief and Official Religion in Ireland,” in The Good People, 204.

¹³⁶ Ó Giolláin, Locating Irish Folklore, 159.

¹³⁷ Ibid., citing Satriani, Luigi M. Lombardi, Antropologia Culturale e Analisi della Cultura Subalterna, 2nd ed. (Milano, 1997)Google Scholar, 91.

¹³⁸ Ó Giolláin, Locating Irish Folklore, 159–60.

¹³⁹ Hynes, Knock, 41. In her work on the legend of the dead priest's midnight Mass, Patricia Lysaght argues that Irish people used legendry to comment on priests who failed to uphold their clerical responsibilities. The most popular legend, according to Lysaght, was one in which a priest who failed to say Mass in his lifetime—after accepting payment for that Mass—must return after his death to fulfill his priestly duties. In order to be released from purgatory, the cleric must return and then have a living person serve Mass for him. In this case, the dead priest must rely on the assistance of his former parishioners. This narrative, as Lysaght elucidates, “makes the utter dependence of the dead priest on human goodwill really evident.” Lysaght, Patricia, “‘Is There Anyone Here to Serve My Mass?’: The Legend of ‘The Dead Priest's Midnight Mass’ in Ireland,” Arv, Scandanavian Yearbook of Folklore 47 (1991): 193Google Scholar, 205.

¹⁴⁰ NFC 517, 383.

¹⁴¹ NFC 560, 138.

¹⁴² For other examples of the ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish Catholics contested and negotiated the power of the state, the Catholic Church, and Protestant missionaries, see McLoughlin, Dympna, “Workhouses & Irish Female Paupers, 1840–70,” in Women Surviving: Studies in Irish Women's History in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Luddy, Maria and Murphy, Cliona (Dublin, 1989), 117–47Google Scholar; Earner-Byrne, Lindsey, Mother and Child: Maternity and Child Welfare in Dublin, 1922–60 (Manchester, 2007)Google Scholar, particularly chap. 3, and Moffit, Miriam, The Society for Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics, 1849–1950 (Manchester, 2010)Google Scholar.

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