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‘Holding up a lamp to the Sun’: Hiberno-Papal Relations and the Construction of Irish Orthodoxy in John Lynch’s Cambrensis Eversus (1662)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
Competing confessional claims to the early church played a hugely significant part in the revival of the writing of ecclesiastical history during the period of the European Reformations. This question of Christian origins led rival religious groups to contest vigorously the right to claim to be the early church’s legitimate heirs. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works of ecclesiastical history would, moreover, strive to attain and preserve the rigorous standards set by Renaissance humanist scholarship and, in turn, exploit any perceived weaknesses in the work of their opponents in this regard. This essay examines a seventeenth-century Irish example of such ecclesiastical history-writing: Cambrensis Eversus (‘Cambrensis Refuted’), written in Latin, largely for a continental audience, by a County Galway priest-scholar, John Lynch (1599/1600–73), and published in St Malo in 1662. The work is ostensibly a reply to the twelfth-century works of Giraldus Cambrensis (c.1146–1223) on Ireland, which had attained a new importance in the confessional controversies of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cited afresh by scholars as evidence of the depraved nature of the medieval Irish (and, by extension, of medieval Irish Catholicism) and the need for their moral and religious reform. This had a particular resonance in the Reformation period: if medieval Catholicism could be proved to have been in a state of decay, then this would further legitimize the argument that it was in need of reform and would underscore the correctness of the Protestant return to a purer and more authentic early Christianity.
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- Part I: The Churches’ Use of the Past
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2013
References
1 See esp. Van Liere, Katherine, Ditchfield, Simon and Louthan, Howard, eds, Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World (Oxford, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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3 The putative bull’s existence was known of from quite early on. In his Metalogiais, written in 1159, John of Salisbury mentioned the Laudabiliter bull and claimed to have been the ambassador sent by Henry II to Pope Adrian IV to obtain it. However, the text of the bull first appears in Giraldus Cambrensis’s Expugnatio Hibernica some thirty years later as one of Giraldus’s five justifications for the invasion of Ireland: see esp. Michael Haren, ‘Laudabiliter. Text and Context’, in Flanagan, Marie Therese and Green, Judith A., eds, Charters and Charter Scholarship in Britain and Ireland (Basingstoke, 2005), 140–63 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Duggan, Anne J., ‘The Making of a Myth: Giraldus Cambrensis’ Laudabiliter and Henry II’s Lordship of Ireland’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History ser. 3, 4 (2007), 107–69.Google Scholar
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17 Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, 1: 325.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid. 325–7.
20 Bernard of Clairvaux: The Life and Death of Saint Malachy the Irishman, transl. Robert T. Meyer, Cistercian Fathers 10 (Kalamazoo, MI, 1978).
21 Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, 2: 337–41.
22 Ibid. 343.
23 Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, 2: 405.
24 Ibid. 401–5. This story refers to Marianus Scotus (d. 1088) who later became abbot of the monastery of St Peter at Regensburg.
25 Ibid. 407.
26 Ibid. 429.
27 Ibid. 441.
28 Ibid. 473–5.
29 Ibid. 479–81.
30 Ibid. 553.
31 Ibid. 487.
32 Ibid. 483.
33 Ibid. 579–81.
34 Ibid. 581–3.
35 Ibid. 601–5.
36 Ibid. 623–5.
37 Ibid. 625.
38 Ibid. 627.
39 Ibid. 663.
40 Ibid. 675.
41 Ibid. 681.
42 Ibid. 681–3. For a discussion of some of these earlier controversies regarding Irish orthodoxy, see Bracken, Damian, ‘Rome and the Isles: Ireland, England and the Rhetoric of Orthodoxy’, PBA 157 (2009), 75–97.Google Scholar
43 Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, 2: 689.
44 Ibid. 725.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid. 727.
47 See Flanagan, Marie Therese, The Transformation of the Irish Church in the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge, 2010).Google Scholar
48 Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, 2: 729. Gilbert of Limerick presided over the Synod of Rathbreasail in 1111 when the Irish church was first divided into dioceses.
49 Ibid. 731.
50 Ibid. 433–7. Lynch proceeded by the argument that even if such a donation had been made, Ireland had never been conquered by the Roman Empire and, furthermore, that there remained no evidence whatsoever of Constantine’s authority in Ireland.
51 Rankin, Deana, Between Spenser and Swift: English Writing in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge, 2005), 236.Google Scholar
52 Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, 1: 99–101.
53 Ibid, iii, 161.