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The Practice of Religious Controversy in Dublin, 1600-1641

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Declan Gaffney
Declan Gaffney*
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Dublin
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Extract

The name controversy, I confess, is the name of a disease; but necessary … to be known first, to make a readier way for the cure; and he that cares not which way disputes about religion go, brands himself with the palpable neglect of his faith and religion. Not as though all were equally interested in the study of controversies, but that everyone may be ready to give an answer to every man that asks him a reason of the hope that is in him.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 25: The Churches, Ireland and the Irish , 1989 , pp. 145 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1989

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References

1 Hoyle, Josua, ‘Preface to the reader’ in A Rejoynder to Malone’s Reply (Dublin, 1641)Google Scholar.

2 MacDowell, R. B. and Webb, D. A, Trinity College Dublin: an Academie History (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 12–13 Google Scholar.

3 Thus the post of professor of Theological Controversies carried with it a public lectureship on controversies at Christchurch Cathedral, Dublin. Cf. Stubbs, J. W., The History of the University of Dublin (Dublin, 1887), p. 49 Google Scholar and The Whole Works of’…James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, with a life of the Author…, by C. R. Ellington (Dublin, 1864) [hereafter UWW], i, p. 18. The standard modern biography of Ussher is R. Buick Knox, James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh (Cardiff, 1967).

4 Parr, Richard, The Life of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh (London, 1686), p. 387 Google Scholar.

5 CalSPI 1625-32, p. 618. The work in question is Gotteschalci, et praedestinationae controversie his toria (Dublin, 1931)in UWW 4. This statement needs co be considered in the concext of the royal Declaration against controversies of 1628, which was particularly concerned with dis couraging works on predestination. A few months later Laud, as bishop of London, secured the withdrawal of George Downhame’s Treatise of the certainty of perseverance (Dublin, 1631). See CalSPI 1625-32, p. 633; DNB and footnote 34 below.

6 De Christianorum Ecclesiarum … Continua Successione et Statu (London, 1613) in UWW 1. For two Catholic replies to this work by Irish authors see Richard Stanihurst, Brevis Praemunitio… (Paris, 1618) and the second edition of De Investigenda Verra Ecclesia (Antwerp, 1619) by Christopher Holywood (Sacrobosco). Cf. UWW 15, p. 148.

7 On FitzSimon, see the texts collected in Words of Comfort to Persecuted Catholics, written in exile 1607, ed, with a sketch of his life, by Edmund Hogan SJ (Dublin, 1881). For Paul Harris see Tanner Letters, ed. Charles MacNeill (Dublin, 1943), p. 89; Rev. Brady, John, ‘Father Paul Harris, who was he?’ in Repertorium Novum, 2 (1960), p. 376 Google Scholar; DNB.

8 Parr, Life of Ussher, p. 39.

9 Aspects de la Propagande Religieuse [Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 28,Geneva, 1957). p. xiv.

10 For the role of the King’s Printers’ patent in Ireland see Pollard, M., ‘Control of the press in H? Ireland through the King’s Printer’s patent 1600-1800’, Irish Booklore, 5, pp. 79–96 Google Scholar. I am grateful to Ms Pollard for making available to me some of her valuable unpublished work on the Dublin press in the early seventeenth century.

11 The Stationers’ Company already had an interest in Ireland before the acquisition of the patent, as they had contributed to the levies of contributions for the Londonderry plantation from 1613 to 1616. See Londonderry and the London companies, being a survey and other documents … by Sir Thomas Phillips (Belfast, 1928), pp. 135-7.

12 UWW 15, p. 135.

13 Pollard, ‘Control of the Press’, p. 80.

14 By no means all of the printing for the Irish market was done in Dublin. The second edition of An Answer to a Jesuit (1625) carries the imprint of the Dublin Society of Stationers, but is in fact a London printing, and in many copies is bound with the second edition of the Wanstead sermon, which carries a London imprint. The first edition of this sermon was also a London printing, but both these editions must have been distributed in Dublin as Paul Harris, writing from Dublin in 1627, referred to the sermon as having been ‘twice printed’: A Briefe Confutation (St Omer, 1627), p. 1. The fact that the Dublin press carried out some printing for the English market during the 1620s hardly makes matters any clearer (Pollard, ‘Control of the press’, p. 80; CalSPI 1625-32, p. 633), and in general the imprint of texts of this period cannot be taken as firmly establishing where they were to be sold. The justification for treating the above-mentioned texts in an Irish context lies, therefore, not in the fact that they were printed in Dublin (as most of them were), but in the expressed intentions of the authors and the reactions on the part of contemporaries.

15 Christopher Sibthorp, A Reply to a Popish Adversary (Dublin, 1625) and A Surreplication to a Popish Adversary (Dublin, 1627). Sibthorp’s copy of these two pamphlets, with corrections for the printer, and bound with the manuscript of a reply to Malone is in T.GD. library, shelfmark BBH.1 1.28.

16 Sibthorp, A Reply, p. 4.

17 A Catalogue of Early Dublin Printed Books 1601-1700, comp. by E. R. MacG Dix with an introduction by C. W. Dugan (Dublin, 1898), p. 6; cfAllison, A. F. and Rogers, D. M., A Catalogue of Catholic Books in English ¡1558-1640 (Bognor Regis, 1956)Google Scholar.

18 FitzSimon, Henry, A Reply to Mr Rider’s Rescript (Douai 1608), p. 22 Google Scholar.

19 Ibid p. 12.

20 Kearney, H. F., ‘Ecclesiastical Politics and the Counter-Reformation in Ireland, 1618-1648’, JEH 2 (1960), pp. 202–12 Google Scholar; W. D O’Connell, The Cahili propositions, 1629’, IER 5 series,62 (1943). PP. 118-23.

21 STC 12808 to 12812.

22 UWW 16, p. 9.

23 See below footnote 32.

24 Tanner Letters, p. 89. IS!

25 Ibid., pp. 89,114,106.

26 A True Relation of the Life and Death of William Bedell, ed. Thomas Wharton Jones, C Ser. NS 4 (1872), p. v.

27 National Library, Dublin MS 16250. Unfortunately, there is no trace of a reply to this work, nor indeed any evidence that it was ever circulated. a William Malone, Preface to A Reply to Mr James Ussher his answer (Douai, 1627).

29 The challenge is printed in the preliminaries to Ussher’s An Answere to a challenge issued by a Jesuit in Ireland (Dublin, 1624).

30 Ussher, An Answer to a…Jesuit, p. 2.

31 UWW 16, p. 9. Ussher was srill working on the answer in March 1622: Tanner Letters, pp. 61-2.

32 Synge and Puttock (and later Hoyle) all claim that the task of replying to Malone began as soon as his book appeared in Dublin and was completed within a few months.

33 Synge, Preface to A Rejoynder.

34 See above footnote 5. In March 1635 Ussher wrote to Samuel Ward: ‘Malone’s reply hath been long since answered touching that matter [i.e. “the power of the keys in ordine ad remissionem cutpae”] but the innovation which you write of beginneth to be as prevalent here as it is with you, which giveth no small stop (if not an absolute impediment) to the publication.’ [Tanner Letters, p. 115.) It is tempting to identify the innovation referred to with Laud’s attempt to impose episcopal licensing by imprimatur of printed works which had already been successful at Cambridge, where Ward was master of Sidney Sussex college. See Franklin B. Williams, Jr., The Laudian Imprimatur’, The Library, 5 series 15 (1960), which identifies Dublin books carrying an imprimatur.

35 Malone, A Reply, p. 3. For the reacrions to Malone’s work on the continent see Wadding Papers 1614-38, ed. B. Jennings OFM (Dublin, 1953), pp. 265-7, 274.

36 ‘Father Henry FitzSimon S.J.’, IER 8 (1873), P. 188. In offering to submit themselves to the judgement of the bearers of civil authority, Malone and FitzSimon were following the example set by the disputation on the Eucharist held at Fontainebleau in 1600 between Philippe du Plessis-Mornay and Jacques Davy du Perron, bishop of Evreux. At Fontainebleau Mornay was defending not only the Calvinist doctrine of the Eucharist, but his own reputation, having been accused of falsifying and misquoting patristic sources, and this enabled judges to be appointed, who found against Mornay (R. Patry, Philipe de Plessis-Momay (Paris, 1933), pp. 388-94). The example of the Fontainebleau disputation is appealed to by FitzSimon, A Reply to Mr Rider’s Rescript, p. 6.

37 Synge, A Rejoynder to the Reply published by the Jesuits under the Name of William Malone. The First Part, pp. 4-5.

38 Malone, A Reply to Mr James Ussher his Answer, p. 3.

39 Synge, A Rejoynder, p. 5.

40 James Ussher, A Briefe Declaration of ¡he University of the Church of Christ in a Sermon preached before the King at Wainsted (London, 1624).

41 Harris, A Briefe Confutation.

42 See The copies of certain letters… between Master J. Wadesworth and W. Bedell’ in Gilbert Burnet’s The life of William Bedell (London, 1685), especially pp. 358 sea. These letters were first published in 1624.

43 Burnet, Life of Bedell, pp. 156-65.

44 Tanner Letters, p. 89.

45 Burnet, Life of Bedell, p. 157.

46 Ibid., p. 122.

47 A true Relation of the life and death of… William Bedell, pp. 28-9.