ISBN9781783277308 Hardcover.

Reviewed by Victoria Anne Pearson

In 1992, the seminal article, An Agenda for Women’s History in Ireland, 1500-1900, featured in Irish Historical Studies. Here, Luddy, Mac Curtain and O’Dowd highlighted emergent work on Irish female religious orders but stressed, “there are many areas of convent life which still require further investigation.” McShane’s book is a comprehensive and thorough response to this lacuna in the histography. Indeed, in the thirty years that have passed since the agenda for women’s history was set, this is the book that not only historians of female religious but all those interested in Irish women and gender history have been waiting for.

Firstly, McShane’s survey of Catholicism in early modern Ireland, beginning with the impact of the dissolution of the monasteries, encompassing the violence of the Cromwellian conquest, the turbulence of Confederate Ireland and the disappointment of the Stuart restoration ending in the turmoil of the Williamite Wars, demonstrates that in regard to political, social, and religious histories of early modern Ireland, female voices were, largely, confined to footnotes or, at best, explained in relation to their male counterparts. In concentrating on Irish women in religious orders, who by the nature of their vocation, chose to live in all female religious communities, McShane counteracts this conventional narrative and emphasises the agency of these women to steer their own lives and to respond to the world around them. In this, her work comes into its own. The author tackles the conventionally implied, saintly, pious, passive nature of female religious. She dismisses this assessment by presenting members of the Poor Clare, Dominican and Benedictine orders as women emersed in the world around them where they were often coming to terms with the shocking realities of life in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland. It is evident that these women were active, dynamic agents in the response to the discrimination, recrimination, and exclusion of Irish Catholics in this period. The division of the book into three distinct sections: 1) suppression and survival, 2) migration and 3) reintegration, summarises the Irish Catholic Church’s response in this era. The trajectory of this strategy is well established in the academic discourse and popular histories. However, where McShane breaks new ground is that she argues, effectively, that female religious were not dominated by this strategy but actively and enthusiastically participated in it. Indeed, the survival of Catholicism, with a distinct identity, religious culture, and historical memory, was due, in no small part, to the lives these women led, and the religious work they undertook at home and abroad.

This is best demonstrated in the book’s exploration of female religious houses in Continental Europe and the expansive role Irish women played in these foundations. The discussion of their contribution to establishments in the Spanish Netherlands and the Iberian Peninsula, in particular, the Benedictine convent in Yprés and the Dominican monastery in Nossa Senhora do Bom Sucesso in Lisbon reveals that Irish women were immersed in these congregations. McShane argues, rightly so, these convents cannot be seen in monastic or scholastic isolation. They were important centres of Catholicism in the early modern world of post-Reformation Europe. These communities were also an integral and vital part in the extensive émigré network concerned with the triumphs, disasters, and intrigues of the wider Irish diaspora. The detailed study of Eleanor and Cecily Dillion’s life and work in the Poor Clares and Mary Jane Butler, the Benedictine Abbess in Yprés, is a reassessment of the lives and significance of women, who, it was assumed were shaped and subject to their families’ allegiances and status. Yet, McShane shows these women through personal sincerity and their own conviction, supported, and participated in catholic causes. In broadening the scope of the early modern Irish diaspora to include a female narrative, McShane builds on Nolan and Gregory’s recent volumes of elite women in Britain and Ireland to accentuate that when peering through the lens into the international milieu of female religious, it is necessary to widen the scope of the source material used to colour in the edges of complex lives and problematic circumstances. It is also essential that previous archival silences that masked these hidden voices would be reevaluated and integrated into the academic discourse. The purposes being not to provide an alternative view of recognised historical themes and trends but to show that Irish women were integral, critical and, at times, indispensable, to the survival and evolution of Irish Catholicism, in all its forms, throughout this period.

In this volume, McShane provides both a springboard and structure for future potential study of Irish women in religious orders. Her detailed footnotes, bibliography and range of archival source material invite future scholarship to access and reassess material not previously considered.  In doing so, it is hoped that the scope of study centred on Irish aristocratic women would be broadened to consider the impact of female religious motivations and inspirations on women from other sections of Irish society. Are there contributions to Irish religious life in this period from women outside those from leading Gaelic Irish and Old English families? Also, a reassessment of the collaboration between female religious and their male counterparts within the Catholic Church is necessary. Yet, that is to come. This book establishes, categorically, that the early modern Irish religious mind was rooted in a continental European perspective. It shows that Irish Catholicism was not on the periphery of experience, theology, or practice. These female lives bring an intense insight into how gender, conflict, and violence, impacted and moderated the spiritual and temporal expression of Catholicism in its devotional practice and identity. Crucially, in confronting the profound and immense effect of the Reformation on Ireland, and the movement to counteract it, this works determines that Irish women in religious orders were not the home front but were on the front line.

Victoria Anne Pearson is a PhD candidate in School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Ulster University. Her research focuses on the life and work of Francis Moylan, 1735-1815, the Catholic Bishop of Kerry and later Cork, with a particular focus on the evolution of Catholic identity and social thought in the eighteenth century and movements such as: Catholic Poor School Education and Catholic Emancipation.