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Cunningham, Bernadette
2014.
Christianities in the Early Modern Celtic World.
p.
151.
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Providence and exile in early seventeenth-century Ireland
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2016
Extract
The depth of change which the country experienced in the reign of James I has become an axiom of early modern Irish historiography. The extension of crown government throughout the island, the flight of the northern earls, the subsequent plantation in Ulster and the putative religious reformation of the indigenous inhabitants contributed to a climate of flux and tension. The burgeoning scholarly interest in this phase of Irish history has resulted in a more detailed understanding of administrative, political, regional and religious trends in the period. Progress has also been made in the study of contemporary mentalities. An interesting development has been the use of sources in the Irish language for the reconstruction of previously obscure intellectual currents amongst the Gaelic élite. The recent appearance of Michelle O Riordan’s monograph on the Gaelic reaction to the collapse of traditional society represents the fullest exposition yet of an interpretation which has characterised the early modern Gaelic ideological response to conquest and social change as fundamentally passive and backward-looking. O Riordan has, in effect, elaborated upon the conclusions of preceding commentators, notably Tom Dunne and Bernadette Cunningham, in portraying the Gaelic understanding of socio-political transformation as lacking in critical perception. This essay is intended as a further contribution to the elucidation of the mental climate of the time. More particularly, it will focus on two themes which figured prominently in the separate, but in this instance similar, communal reactions of the Gaelic Irish and the New English settlers to their respective political and social environments.
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References
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36 Mór do mhill aoibhneas Éireann remains unpublished; it is extant in two manuscripts: R.I.A., MS 23 F 16, pp 70–73 (the O’Gara manuscript, written in the Low Countries between 1655 and 1659); and the nineteenth-century B.L., MS Eg. lll, ff. 63–64r (see cat, B.M.. Ir. MSS, i, 382-3Google Scholar). In the O’Gara manuscript the date 10 December 1655 follows directly after this poem (p. 73); this is presumably the day of its entry into the manuscript. The poem has been edited by Macháin, Pádraig Ó in his ‘Poems by Fearghal Og Mac an Bhaird’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1988), ii, poem XII, pp 719-62Google Scholar.I am grateful to Dr Ó Macháin, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, for providing me with a copy of his edition of the poem. All quotations cited here, however, are from R.I.A., MS 23 F 16.
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38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., p. 72.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Gillies (ed.), ‘A poem on the downfall’, p. 209, quatrain 24.
45 Duanta Eoghain Ruaidh Mhic an Bhaird, ed. Ó Raghallaigh, no. 14, pp 210, 216, quatrains 8, 23.
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69 Ibid., p. 42.
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73 See Stephen Jerome’s comments: ‘So to reflect upon our selves, for this our English Israell, hath not the Lord sequestred and separated us from Pagans and heathens, yea even from Turkes, (and Jewes themselves)’ (Jerome, Irelands jubilee, p. 153).
74 Ford, Protestant Reformation, pp 244–5.
75 Jerome, Irelands jubilee, pp 90, 151, 204.
76 Ibid., pp 154–5.
77 Ibid., p. 162.
78 Leslie, A warning for Israel, p. 5.
79 Ibid., p. 11.
80 Ibid., p. 42.
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