Confessionalism & mobility in early modern Ireland offers an outstanding analysis of the national and transnational movement of religious figures in the period in which that movement became more important than ever before. Drawing upon recent work in the study of Catholicism, Protestantism and dissent in early modern Ireland, Ó hAnnracháin draws out the significance of religious mobility in terms of education and vocation, and shows how it created opportunities — and sometimes dangers — for those it involved. While fully engaging with the scholarship on early modern mobility, without descending into the theory of networks, Ó hAnnracháin discovers the connections that constructed and sometimes threatened communities of the faithful.
Confessionalism and mobility in early modern Ireland is divided into two parts. Part 1 considers mobility and the evolution of confessional communities in Ireland, and looks in turn at the situation of clergy from the Catholic, established and dissenting Protestant communities. These are ground-breaking chapters, which reconstruct the details of individual clerical careers in the context of cultural and intellectual change in Ireland, England, Scotland and on the continent. Ó hAnnracháin excels in this prosopographical approach, detailing the subtle local rivalries that could work to accelerate the foundation of, for example, Irish colleges in different parts of the continent. He illustrates the challenges faced by Catholic clergy in Ireland by documenting their often very impressive learning, and their sometimes extremely brief careers, often cut short by untimely death. He notes that Protestant mobility was sometimes more successful in establishing lasting religious influence. The colonies of Scottish Presbyterians that were established in north-eastern districts in the first half of the seventeenth century gave birth to a distinctive and long-lasting regional culture, with enduring links to an often but not always supportive hinterland on the other side of the north channel. Ó hAnnracháin notes the reverse influence of colonists upon this larger transnational religious culture, not least in promoting the revivalism that became a key feature of religious life in early modern Scotland. By the mid-seventeenth century, of course, the sphere of mobility for religious leaders in Ireland stretched across western Europe (in the case of many Catholics), to the American colonies (in the case of a number of Cromwellians). Irish religion was being globalised, being impacted upon even as it influenced religious centres elsewhere.
Part 2 considers mobility practices, ideas and influences, and, taking a more thematic approach, thinks about the representation and practice of religious movement and its impact upon the formation of Catholic and Protestant identities. For Ó hAnnracháin, networks of mobility were key drivers of the rapid transformations of belief and practice that mark this period of Irish history. He carefully distinguishes religious from other forms of exile, and adopts a critical distance from the claims of some political exiles that their forced mobility had religious explanations. Even the Cromwellian invasion, he notes, effected very little religious mobility beyond the forced exile of Catholic priests. But general conclusions are in order: Protestant communities were most immediately shaped by inward migration, although the reasons for this inward migration were not often religious; while for the larger religious community the experience of out-migration and eventual return was often religious in motivation, as religious leaders worked to maintain in practice as well as theory their commitment to catholicity.
Overall, this book makes an excellent contribution to recent work on religion and mobility in early modern Ireland. All too often, historians of this period have been content to focus on a single religious community, and to reconstruct its social and theological dimensions. Of course, these kinds of contributions have done a great deal to illustrate the complexities of individual religious cultures and to open up new lines of enquiry as to the ways in which they manufactured religious consent. Within this literature, a small number of scholars, including Sean Connolly and Raymond Gillespie, have pushed beyond this denominationalising trend, to identify broader patterns of behaviour, in which communities are compared and contrasted with each other. Ó hAnnracháin's book pushes this kind of analysis in new ways, offering a breadth and depth of interpretation that distinguishes the Irish experience of religious mobility from that of other contexts in the period. Confessionalism and mobility in early modern Ireland is a major contribution to the study of Irish religion and to the many different kinds of contexts in which it developed.
