Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Aidan Clarke: an appreciation
- Conventions
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Making good: New perspectives on the English in early modern Ireland
- 2 The attainder of Shane O'Neill, Sir Henry Sidney and the problems of Tudor state-building in Ireland
- 3 Dynamics of regional development: processes of assimilation and division in the marchland of south-east Ulster in late medieval and early modern Ireland
- 4 The ‘common good’ and the university in an age of confessional conflict
- 5 The construction of argument: Henry Fitzsimon, John Rider and religious controversy in Dublin, 1599–1614
- 6 The Bible and the bawn: an Ulster planter inventorised
- 7 ‘That Bugbear Arminianism’: Archbishop Laud and Trinity College, Dublin
- 8 The Irish peers, political power and parliament, 1640–1641
- 9 The Irish elections of 1640–1641
- 10 Catholic Confederates and the constitutional relationship between Ireland and England, 1641–1649
- 11 Protestant churchmen and the Confederate Wars
- 12 The crisis of the Spanish and the Stuart monarchies in the mid-seventeenth century: local problems or global problems?
- 13 Settlement, transplantation and expulsion: a comparative study of the placement of peoples
- 14 Interests in Ireland: the ‘fanatic zeal and irregular ambition’ of Richard Lawrence
- 15 Temple's fate: reading The Irish Rebellion in late seventeenth-century Ireland
- 16 Conquest versus consent as the basis of the English title to Ireland in William Molyneux's Case of Ireland … Stated (1698)
- Principal publications of Aidan Clarke
- Index
4 - The ‘common good’ and the university in an age of confessional conflict
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Aidan Clarke: an appreciation
- Conventions
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Making good: New perspectives on the English in early modern Ireland
- 2 The attainder of Shane O'Neill, Sir Henry Sidney and the problems of Tudor state-building in Ireland
- 3 Dynamics of regional development: processes of assimilation and division in the marchland of south-east Ulster in late medieval and early modern Ireland
- 4 The ‘common good’ and the university in an age of confessional conflict
- 5 The construction of argument: Henry Fitzsimon, John Rider and religious controversy in Dublin, 1599–1614
- 6 The Bible and the bawn: an Ulster planter inventorised
- 7 ‘That Bugbear Arminianism’: Archbishop Laud and Trinity College, Dublin
- 8 The Irish peers, political power and parliament, 1640–1641
- 9 The Irish elections of 1640–1641
- 10 Catholic Confederates and the constitutional relationship between Ireland and England, 1641–1649
- 11 Protestant churchmen and the Confederate Wars
- 12 The crisis of the Spanish and the Stuart monarchies in the mid-seventeenth century: local problems or global problems?
- 13 Settlement, transplantation and expulsion: a comparative study of the placement of peoples
- 14 Interests in Ireland: the ‘fanatic zeal and irregular ambition’ of Richard Lawrence
- 15 Temple's fate: reading The Irish Rebellion in late seventeenth-century Ireland
- 16 Conquest versus consent as the basis of the English title to Ireland in William Molyneux's Case of Ireland … Stated (1698)
- Principal publications of Aidan Clarke
- Index
Summary
In 1547, in one of the earliest of what was to be a long sequence of proposals arguing for the establishment of a university in Ireland, Archbishop George Browne suggested that the archbishop and the mayor of Dublin should together contribute to the expense of founding a university for the sake of serving the ‘common good’. Generally passed over in accounts of the prehistory of Trinity College, Dublin, in favour of political, administrative or religious themes, Browne's phrase concerning the ‘common good’ is nonetheless laden with significance. The idea that, beyond its narrow seminarian functions, a university should serve the interests of the broader community was more than cant. In fact, when viewed against the broader canvas of early modern cultural history, it can be shown to have been a sincere and profound commitment in the foundation of universities not only in Ireland but also in early modern Europe as a whole.
The idea that the university should care for the interests of its extramural community surfaces in several of the proposals put forward in Ireland from the 1540s onwards. But it is highlighted in one particular memorandum which itself arose from a particular community, the municipality of Dublin. John Ussher, alderman of Dublin and a decidedly Protestant member of the civic establishment, was concerned to make the values of his co-religionists the norms for all in the interest of shaping a new society.
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- British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland , pp. 73 - 96Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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