Revisionism and the Irish Reformation

Abstract

The Irish Reformation remains a troubled subject, and not from lack of recent scholarly attention. It has attracted an abundance of high-quality work, but its vexed nature as a topic is illuminated by a long, authoritative essay published in 1998 by Brendan Bradshaw, one of the foremost students of early-modern Irish history. The essay is entitled ‘The English Reformation and identity formation in Ireland and Wales’, as befits the volume in which it appeared: British consciousness and identity: the making of Britain, 1533–1707. But the pageheads of the sixty-nine-page article call it ‘The Reformation in Ireland’, and this is a much more accurate description of its contents, as even its author might agree.

Whether denominated ‘The Irish Reformation’ or ‘The Reformation in Ireland’, the event lacks the familiarity of historical chestnuts like the Congress of Vienna or The Thirty-Years War, well-worn, frequently-taught subjects (at least in the old canon of European history) about which there was a modicum of consensus, sufficient at least to allow them to be discussed. But in order for events to be debated, there needs to be agreement that they happened, and in that respect the Irish Reformation is something of a non-starter.