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In 1559/60 the parliaments of England, Ireland and Scotland proscribed the practice of Catholicism in their respective kingdoms and prescribed Reformed religious settlements in its place. By the end of the sixteenth century the English and the Scots had become nations of Protestants, but contemporary estimates of the number of Irish Protestants ranged between 40 and 120 individuals. Protestantism in Ireland was born of conquest and colonisation in the seventeenth century. Yet the remarkable contrast in the outcomes of the Reformation across the Atlantic archipelago was not predestined. England and Ireland shared the same Tudor monarchs and the Pale around Dublin was, in effect, an appendage of England. Nonetheless, while Elizabeth I’s religious settlement was a ‘runaway success’ in England it failed to win any significant support in Ireland. Indeed, because Irish women were particularly loath to embrace the new religion no self-sustaining community of Irish Protestants was spawned in the sixteenth century. On the other hand, the Scots created a Reformed Church establishment despite the wishes of their monarch, Mary Stuart, queen of Scots. This chapter adopts a comparative approach to help explain the experiences of Reformation in England, Ireland and Scotland before 1603.
Despite being inundated with publications on the subject historians today feel less confident than ever that they truly understand the Reformation. The prevalence of national paradigms, such as ‘confessionalisation’ in German Reformation studies and ‘revisionism’ in English Reformation studies, encourages scholars to focus their attention on local circumstances and on specific individuals in those localities without due attention to the bigger picture. The sheer volume of case-studies being generated risks the loss of an overall perspective, and threatens to obscure the magnitude and significance of the Reformation as a European phenomenon of the first order. It is critically important to appreciate the continental scale of the Reformation because it reflected the scale and severity of the crisis of authority that beset the Catholic Church during the half-century or so following Fr Martin Luther’s announcement of the sola scriptura principle. That crisis cannot be explained by reference to local circumstances only. It went to the very heart of the institution, and it posed an existential threat to the Catholic Church. Reformation historians have yet to explain convincingly why Luther’s challenge resonated with such devastating effects across the continent. This collection of essays reflects the impact of the Reformation across Europe and offers explanations of its impact.
Reformations Compared presents a collection of comparative studies of the Reformation as it reverberated across Europe in the sixteenth century. Each chapter is focused on two or more comparable geographical spaces, isolating the variables that help explain how and why the Reformation unfolded as it did in each separate setting. Rejecting notions of insularity, the contributors seek out the connections and contrasts that shaped the experience of the Reformation, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, and from Ireland to Transylvania. In doing so, the volume offers a fresh understanding of the conditions in which the movement succeeded, whether wholly or partially, and those in which it did not. Reformations Compared provides a broad vantage point which encourages readers to reshape their understanding of this decisive episode in European history.
European political parties, particularly radical right parties (RRPs), increasingly use religious symbols during elections. Despite the prevalence of these symbols, evidence on the association between religion and far-right vote share is mixed. We compare two leading arguments explaining the relationship between religion and RRPs. We hypothesize that the number of religious buildings, identifiable as Islamic or Catholic, will be associated with higher RRP support. We test this as a most likely crucial case using results from the French 2017 presidential election. Controlling for other demographic factors, more Catholic buildings in a commune are associated with a decrease in votes for the Front Nationale (FN). An increase in the number of mosques in non-urban communes is associated with increased support for FN. We argue these findings are evidence that RRPs use religious symbolism to draw on nativist or anti-Islamic support rather than traditional religious support.
Preserved among the so-called ‘Armagh registers’ is an act book of the consistory and metropolitan court of Armagh that was compiled in the early sixteenth century. Its fortuitous survival facilitates a systematic study of how an Irish church court processed litigation concerning women's marriages or other sexual relationships, and their sexual reputations, and in doing so reveals a great deal about important aspects of the lives of women in early Tudor Ireland.
This paper addresses a major historical lacuna by highlighting some of the ways through which women helped to shape Irish responses to the English Reformation in Ireland. It reveals that women were often key to a web of contacts linking English resistance to the Tudors’ reformations to Irish resistance. It affirms that women played a significant role in the Reformation in Tudor Ireland, not least of all in its ultimate failure. Because virtually no Irish women became Protestants in the sixteenth century, though a small number of Irish men was converted, no self-perpetuating indigenous community of Irish Protestants was generated.