Revisionism and the Irish Reformation A Rejoinder

Abstract

Karl Bottigheimer succeeds in consigning my study of the ‘English Reformation in Wales and Ireland’ to a genre of outmoded nationalist historiography by means of a distortingly reductionist account of it. In the first place, despite its title and large sections of the analysis, he assures the reader that its concern is simply the Reformation in Ireland. In fact it seeks to address a problem presented by the Reformation as a phase of what is variously called the ‘new British history’ or the ‘history of the Atlantic archipelago’, namely the contrasting outcome of the attempt to extend the state-sponsored reform of religion to the English crown's two Celtic borderland dominions, to Wales, where it succeeded, and to Ireland where it failed. Prima facie that outcome seems puzzling since it faced similar obstacles in both places, a deeply traditionalist society, remote from the intellectual currents that helped prepare the ground for the religious changes in England, and beyond the reach of effective government from the centre. Two questions arise therefore. How were these obstacles overcome in Wales, and since they proved surmountable there why not so in the case of Ireland?

Second, Bottigheimer makes my explanation for the Irish outcome seem naively idealistic by representing it as attributing the failure totally to the pastoral zeal with which the Franciscan Observants campaigned against the change, and to the devotion of the Irish to ‘faith and fatherland’.