Women, Identities and Communities in Early Modern Europe

Stephanie Tarbin, Susan Broomhall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351871631
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Addressing a key challenge facing feminist scholars today, this volume explores the tensions between shared gender identity and the myriad social differences structuring women's lives. By examining historical experiences of early modern women, the authors of these essays consider the possibilities for commonalities and the forces dividing women. They analyse individual and collective identities of early modern women, tracing the web of power relations emerging from women's social interactions and contemporary understandings of femininity. Essays range from the late medieval period to the eighteenth century, study women in England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Sweden, and locate women in a variety of social environments, from household, neighbourhood and parish, to city, court and nation. Despite differing local contexts, the volume highlights continuities in women's experiences and the gendering of power relations across the early modern world. Recognizing the critical power of gender to structure identities and experiences, this collection responds to the challenge of the complexity of early modern women's lives. In paying attention to the contexts in which women identified with other women, or were seen by others to identify, contributors add new depth to our understanding of early modern women's senses of exclusion and belonging.

Part 1
Reading Communities in History

Chapter One
Real and Imagined Communities in the Lives of Women in Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Identity and Gender

Anne Laurence

Writings on Irish identity range widely over many subjects, offering subtle interpretations of the mentalities of elites in Ireland and of the relations of Gaelic Irish, Old English and New English men. The analysis of the nuances of men’s confessional allegiances and practice has proceeded apace.¹ But it is striking how rarely gender features in these discussions or in the host of writings by people discovering their Irish roots.² This lack of engagement with gender issues was noted in 1997 when a collection of essays produced under the auspices of the American Conference for Irish Studies justified its concentration on gender and sexuality ‘rather than on a more traditionally accredited theme or area of Irish studies’. In the intervening ten years little has changed.³ The kind of work done by Patricia Crawford to integrate gender into the wider study of early modern English history has no real parallel in early modern Irish history except in the publications of Margaret MacCurtain and Mary O’Dowd. ⁴ This chapter is a brief excursion into that project. By looking at the religious, national and linguistic communities of which women were a part, it considers some of the ways in which taking gender into account may influence our view of historical developments in early modern Ireland and, in particular, with the ways in which this may inflect differently our understanding of identity.

Identity is such a significant subject because Ireland was, in seventeenth century terms, a multi-cultural society. The Catholic, Gaelic-speaking Irish had close relations with the Catholic descendants of the Anglo-Norman invaders of the twelfth century – the so-called Old English – who, until the late sixteenth century, formed the governing class and political nation of Ireland. In 1541 Henry VIII was declared King of Ireland (until then the English monarch had been ‘lord of this land’) and, in the 1550s, in an attempt to extend the influence of ‘Englishmen born in England or Ireland’ who were loyal to the king, the first of many plantations was established in the counties of Laois and Offaly (renamed respectively Queen’s and King’s County).⁵ These planters were predominantly unmarried men and the contact between male colonists and Irish women persuaded planners of subsequent plantations always to allow for the transport of women planters. (As we shall see, English governors had decidedly ambiguous attitudes to marriage between Protestant planters and Catholics.) Further schemes brought married Protestant Englishmen to settle Munster in the later sixteenth century (on lands confiscated from the rebellious Earl of Desmond), and Protestant English and Scots families to Ulster in the early seventeenth century (on lands confiscated from the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell). Further land was transferred from Catholics to English Protestants in the 1650s, and in the 1690s there was an influx of Scots emigrants. The planners of 1650s settlements hoped that if contact were to take place between English men and Irish women it would lead to the conversion of Irish women to Protestantism.⁶ Concerns about contact between Catholics and protestants highlight one of the features of life in Ireland: none of these communities lived in isolation. Everywhere, people of different religions, nationalities and languages lived in close proximity as landlords and tenants, as neighbours, and as masters and servants.

The project of early modern Irish history has been primarily concerned on the one hand with writing the political and economic history of the country (Irish social history, especially for the early modern period, is an underdeveloped area) and, on the other, with locating mentalities of colonized and colonizers.⁷ In neither case have women been regarded inescapably as actors except in work that has emerged from women’s and gender history.⁸ The political, confessional and economic communities which historians have examined both for historical change and for marks of identity have been largely male ones and studies of Irish identity have taken little account of the work of women’s historians who have attempted to explore the gendered impact of cultural change.⁹

Characteristic of historians’ difficulty in integrating women into their work is a contribution to the debate about Protestant identity in the period after 1691, in which the author writes that ‘The political nation of the 1690s was composed of landed families … The defining characteristic of this social and political elite was religious rather than ethnic’.¹⁰ He then goes on to say, ‘Although [this elite was] overwhelmingly composed of men of English extraction, those of Scottish, Irish or more exotic ancestry could obtain entry to the political nation by conforming to the established church’. Of course the families of the political elite were not made up overwhelmingly of men; they included women and children. While not themselves full members of the political nation, they were important conduits into it, providing access to networks as well as to material assets. Fathers made connections with other families through their daughters – none more so than the 1st Earl of Cork. Women were transmitters of property, by marriage, by remarriage, and by inheritance. Considerations of property or patronage might cut across religion and nation.¹¹ So the colonists and Protestants who are the subject of so many studies of identity were not men alone, they were families and households. It was concerns of family survival that dictated the strategies people embarked on in their marriages, their religious conversions and their education. Religious and linguistic cultures existed in households, not amongst disparate individuals. And it was often the female members of the household who introduced the anomalies and inconsistencies that made it so difficult for the governments of Dublin and London to undertake their neatly set-out programmes for the Anglicization and Protestantization of the whole population.

Defining identities

Toby Barnard’s work has confronted one of the difficulties in considering identities: whether to look at individual or collective identities.¹² This chapter is primarily concerned with collective identities. It would be a worthy enterprise to try to say something about the more inaccessible subject of women’s individual identities, about how women thought of themselves: as women as opposed to men; as adults as opposed to children; as Catholics or as Protestants; as married women or widows or unmarried women; as noblewomen or commoners; or as English speakers or Irish speakers. Regrettably, the documentary evidence that is in shortest supply for early modern Ireland is women’s accounts of their own lives and material from which one may search out indirectly what women themselves thought. Even for those families about which we know a good deal (the Boyle/Cork and Butler/Ormond families) it is striking how difficult it is to learn what individual family members thought about who they were. Mary Boyle, Countess of Warwick, who left copious records of her spiritual life, gives little account of her childhood spent in Ireland.

Collective and individual identities coincided in the household, where servants and their masters and mistresses lived together in close proximity. The household brought together people not only also of different social statuses, but of different confessions and national identities and who spoke different languages.¹³ The responsibilities of the householder for the spiritual welfare of servants were confused in the Protestant household with Catholic servants, and there can have been few households with servants where most servants were not Catholic and many where employers and employees had different mother tongues. And at what point did Protestant householders cease to define themselves as English or Scots in relation to their Irish servants?

Benedict Anderson’s work recognizes the significance of religion in forming national identity. His influence is apparent in the myriad of different approaches to identity; his notion of the ‘imagined community’ has been widely, and often inappropriately, coerced into discussions of identity.¹⁴ Although he is primarily concerned with the period after the eighteenth century, he argues that an essential element is that the identity of which nation is an expression looms out of an immemorial past and that nationalism was preceded by the cultural systems of the religious community and of the dynastic realm.¹⁵ We might integrate gender with this by arguing that of the religious community women in Ireland were most certainly members, though on rather different terms from men, while of the dynastic realm or political nation, they were occasional and honorary members. The rest of this essay will consider women’s participation in the communities of religion and the political nation in early modern Ireland and will look at the role of language as a badge of identity.

Religion

It is customary to characterize Ireland as a society divided between two religious communities, Catholic and Protestant, but, as Patricia Crawford observes, ‘Belief made for contradictions’.¹⁶ Aidan Clarke has shown how, in the early seventeenth century, the Catholic religion common to the Gaelic Irish and the Old English (the descendants of the Anglo-Norman conquerors of the twelfth century) ‘was not an agent of union, but a source of disagreement’ because the Counter-reformation ‘was tinged with Old English assumptions’ which allowed the Old English to continue in the ‘ideological assurance of superiority’.¹⁷ How long this separation continued, especially after the alliance between Gaelic Irish and Old English in the Confederation of Kilkenny in 1642, is difficult to discern as historians largely neglect the Old English as a separate group after 1660. From then on, historians are more concerned to chart the oppositional characteristics of Irish Catholicism, the move into the penal era and the identification of Irish nationalism with Catholicism.

Women were an active part of the formation of a Catholic religious identity in opposition after the Reformation, indeed Tadh Ó hAnnracháin has argued that the illegality of the Catholic church in Ireland facilitated an occasional public role for women representing Old English opposition to the state’s religious policy.¹⁸ Sir John Dowdall, writing to Lord Burghley in 1596, noted that 30 years earlier Irish men and women had attended the services of the Church of Ireland, but when wives drifted away and went unpunished for non-attendance, their husbands, many of whom were civic officers, joined them.¹⁹ There were also rumours that prominent Protestants had Catholic wives, a conspicuous example being the Church of Ireland Bishop of Kilmacduagh in 1615.²⁰ Where the religion of the household was at odds with that of the state, women were essential figures in the survival of a religious tradition. Household religion was intrinsically conservative and was passed by mothers to their children, contributing to the survival of denominational differences.²¹ There was also little incentive for women to convert to Protestantism for, while men could render themselves citizens by conformity to the Church of Ireland, women could not. Yet, just as they were liable for paying taxes, women were liable to penalties for nonconformity although, as we have seen, these were not necessarily enforced.

The history of the female religious orders in Ireland after the Dissolution is particularly mysterious, though a good deal is known about the houses established abroad after 1626.²² The male houses were officially dissolved in 1537–40, but a few, such as Timoleague in Co. Cork, persisted into the 1640s.²³ The leading historian of the Dissolution in Ireland is persuaded that women’s houses did not survive, though more recent studies suggest that some women’s communities continued until the nuns who had surrendered their convents in 1540 died, some of them as late as the 1570s.²⁴ In the 1620s it was reported that a group of women in Dublin aspired to the religious life and there seem to have been a number of groups of Poor Clares.²⁵ In 1641 the Bishop of Clonfert and Kilmacduagh reported that though there were no nunneries in his diocese, divers women there went un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Reading Communities in History
• Part 2 Domestic Polities
• Part 3 Social Networks
• Part 4 Negotiating the City
• Part 5 Gentry Communities
• Part 6 Queens and Court
• Select Bibliography
• Index