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Making the Irish European: Gaelic Honor Politics and Its Continental Contexts*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Brendan Kane
Brendan Kane*
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut, Storrs
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Abstract

This article looks at Irish attempts to fashion Gaelic elites as members of a European-wide aristocracy. Historiographical consensus holds that a modern Ireland, defined by a confessionalized sense of national consciousness, emerged from the ashes of the Gaelic political system's collapse ca. 1607. Central to that process was the exile experience of Irish nobles in Counter-Reformation Europe. This article reads two Irish texts — Tadhg Ó Cianáin's Imeacht na nIarlaí and Lughaidh Ó Cléirigh's Beatha Aodha Ruaidh Uí Dhomhnaill — to argue that inclusion in a pan-European nobility was not antithetical to traditional Gaelic cultural norms. In doing so, it attempts to soften the contrast between medieval and modern Ireland, to study the relation between provincial elites and central authority in this period of European state formation, and to explore the interplay between new international identities and traditional local authority.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 61 , Issue 4 , Winter 2008 , pp. 1139 - 1166
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

*

Earlier versions of parts of this essay were read at the Renaissance and Early Modern Colloquium, Princeton University (29 November 2001); the Irish Studies Seminar, Columbia University (4 April 2003); the Keough Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame (12 November 2004); and the Flight of the Earls conference, Letterkenny Institute of Technology (19 August 2007). I wish to thank the attendees at those talks for their comments and criticisms. Individual thanks are due Peter Lake, Mícheál Mac Craith, Breandán Ó Buachalla, Eamonn Ó Ciardha, Brían Ó Conchubhair, Clare Carroll, and the anonymous readers for Renaissance Quarterly, all of whom were extremely generous in their efforts to sharpen both this article and my thinking on early modern Ireland. Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to the University of Notre Dam's Keough Institute and to Princeton University's Center for Human Values for providing material and intellectual support, without which this article could not have been written.

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