Renaissance humanism and ethnicity before race: The Irish and the English in the seventeenth century 9781526102645

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R enaissance  humanis m an d ethnicit y be fo re race The Irish and the English in the seventeenth century

Ian Campbell

Renaissance humanism and ethnicity before race 

Renaissance humanism and ethnicity before race 

The Irish and the English in the seventeenth century

Ian Campbell

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright © Ian Campbell 2013 The right of Ian Campbell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

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978 0 7190 8836 0

hardback

First published 2013 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents 

Acknowledgements Note on conventions Introduction: Defining race

page vii ix 1

1 Two problems in the history of Irish humanism and ethnicity 2 English humanism against Gaelic Irish society 3 Gaelic humanism against English Irish society 4 Humanists and genealogists on nobility and the human body 5 Irish doctors and theologians on heredity and the human soul 6 Irish Enlightenment, human societies, and human bodies Select bibliography Index

23 53 83 113 136 166 193 231

Acknowledgements  My first debt is the simplest: the Irish taxpayer, in the person of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, generously funded the research upon which this book is based, first with a PhD scholarship at Trinity College Dublin and then with a post-doctoral fellowship at University College Dublin in difficult national circumstances. Both universities also assisted with travel grants. I am very grateful for that support, and for the PhD supervision of Jane Ohlmeyer and mentorship of Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin. Both have been models of learning, sanity, and enthusiasm. My PhD thesis, elements of which are contained in this book, was examined by Thomas O’Connor and Micheál Ó Siochrú, and I am indebted to them both for their critical acumen and subsequent assistance with any number of tedious tasks.Tadhg, Benjamin Hazard, Brendan Kane, Eamon O’Flaherty, Jason Harris, Liam Arthur, and Nienke Tjoelker have all taken the time to read and remark on the whole (or parts) of the typescript: these comments were very valuable and the book is much the better for them. I am grateful to all those libraries and archives listed in the bibliography, but I must in particular thank the excellent staff of Early Printed Books in Trinity College Dublin for their efficiency and innumerable kindnesses.The recent retirement of Charles Benson marks the end of an era. Learned individuals have assisted me on a wide range of matters: I am indebted to Annabel Brett (for Punch), Mark Williams (also for Punch), Ciska Neyts (for Conway), and Stephen Hand (for Rothe). I have also benefited immeasureably from presenting research at, and generally being involved in, a range of institutions, seminars, and conferences. I have found the Centre for Neo-Latin Studies at University College Cork and the Mícheál Ó Cléirigh Institute at University College Dublin not only models for interdisciplinary research in the humanities, but especially welcoming and convivial: my thanks to Keith Sidwell, John McCafferty, and all my amiable

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colleagues in those places. I have presented some of the research contained in this book at Nobility in Early Modern Ireland (Galway, 2009); Republican Exchanges (Newcastle, 2009); the Centre for Seventeenth-Century Studies (Durham, 2010); the Forum for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Dublin, 2010); Social Order and Social Ordering (Aberdeen, 2011); the Insular Christianity Symposium (Dublin, 2011); English Republican Ideas and Networks (Potsdam, 2011); Tudor and Stuart Ireland (Dublin, 2011); and the New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Florida, 2012). I wish to thank all those who organised those splendid events. I am also grateful to Edward James and John McCafferty in University College Dublin for enabling me to teach modules based on my research in 2010 and 2012, which opened my eyes to new problems and perspectives. Some material in Chapter 3 was published in Irish Historical Studies in November 2012; I thank the editor, Robert Armstrong, for permission to print it here. Jennifer Browne, Noírín Ní Bheaglaoi, Joseph Flahive, Margaret Madden, and Mark Hutchinson very kindly helped with the proofs. None of the scholars mentioned above are responsible for the arguments and errors below. My friends in Dublin, London, Nairobi, and elsewhere know who they are, but I would like especially to mention Frances Narkiewicz and Patrick Walsh. I owe quite a different order of debt to my parents, Gordon Campbell and Pauline Seymour.

Note on conventions 

Historians often label sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Irish Catholics of medieval English descent Old English, in contrast to the New English (mainly Protestants) who arrived in Ireland over the course of the sixteenth century. However, as this book is mainly concerned with relationships among Irish Catholics, I have distinguished between English Irish (Burkes, Butlers, Fitzgeralds) and Gaelic Irish (O’Neills, O’Donnells, MacCarthys). For reasons of length, footnotes provide only source citations rather than minibibliographic essays. When citing a classical text I provide author, title, book and section number, Bekker number, or book and line number. I do not cite the individual edition, but refer the reader to the Loeb Classical Library published by Harvard University Press. When quoting from a classical text, I transcribe that text from a contemporary edition rather than a modern one. In particular, I quote Aristotle from well-known contemporary Latin translations in order to get closer to the understanding of the ordinary early modern undergraduate. Unattributed translations are my own. I change ‘u’ to ‘v’, ‘j’ to ‘i’, and expand contractions, but otherwise preserve original spelling and punctuation.

Introduction: Defining race 

This book is about the ways in which those living in seventeenthcentury Ireland used classical philosophy to understand the relationships between peoples. But before analysing what it meant to be a people in the seventeenth century, it is important to be clear on what race means in the twenty-first century. This is not a simple task. Even the most accomplished jurists struggle to define race. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the UN’s plenary Assembly in 1948, identified that crime as a series of acts committed with the intent of destroying ‘a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’.1 The term ‘genocide’ itself, coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, was intended to refer to the murder of a race or nation.2 The problem is that the ‘races’ described by eighteenth- nineteenth-, and twentiethcentury Europeans, are now understood to be mainly ideological constructs with only a limited basis in nature. While one can sort humans into genetic clusters associated with major geographic regions (such as Africa, Asia, and Europe), the genetic variation found within such large groups is far greater (eighty-five to ninety per cent) than that between them (ten to fifteen per cent).3 Prosecuting a crime defined in terms which many scientists now regard as unreal presents a considerable practical problem. 1 W. A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes (Cambridge, 2nd edn, 2009), pp. 655–71. 2 Ibid., pp. 28–34. 3 L. B. Jorde and S. P. Wooding, ‘Genetic variation, classification and “race”’, Nature Genetics, 36, no. 11s (2004), 28–33, at 28; Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 3–7.

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That the conceptualisation of race did indeed trouble the judges and lawyers charged with prosecuting genocide was evident in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 in which at least 800,000 Tutsi and pro-peace Hutu were murdered by the majority Hutu population.4 The difficulty for the prosecutors lay in the fact that the hard racial distinction between Tutsi and Hutu was itself an ideology: a set of assumptions, ideals, and goals; less coherent than a philosophy, more comprehensive than a programme, more explicit than a mentalité.5 While certainly there were some physiological and cultural differences between the tall, cattle-herding Tutsi, and shorter, peasant Hutu, those differences had been magnified by nineteenthand twentieth-century anthropologists, archaeologists, and missionaries who argued that the Tutsi, ‘Ethiopoid’ population of Rwanda had migrated there from the Horn of Africa, whereas the Hutus were a less intelligent ‘Bantu’ people of southern and central Africa. In reality, physiological differences were visible in some but not all Tutsis and Hutus, and mixed marriages were common. In addition, both groups spoke the same language, observed the same religions, and shared much common culture. Nevertheless, the European and Tutsi elites found this racialised pre-history a useful buttress to the colonial establishment, and its basic elements became a staple of political culture in both colonial and post-colonial Rwanda.6 The Belgian colonisers had established a system of identity cards and established racial identity on the basis of the number of cattle owned by a family. During the genocide, Tutsis were identified to their murderers as much by their identity cards as by their physical appearance.7 Lawyers and jurists dealing with the aftermath of the genocide have thus been forced to make a distinction between the objective reality of race and the subjective reality of race. If the perpetrator of genocide believes the group he or she persecutes is a race, then that race (or ethnic group) is a subjective reality.8 This was the approach adopted in 1999 by a Trial Chamber of the International Criminal 4 Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, 1959–1994: History of a Genocide (London, 1998), pp. 261–5. 5 Catherine Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860–1960 (New York, 1988); D. R. Kelley, The Beginning of Ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation (Cambridge, 1981), p. 4. 6 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, pp. 5–9, 36–9; Catherine Newbury and David Newbury, ‘Bringing the peasants back in: agrarian themes in the construction and corrosion of statist historiography in Rwanda’, American Historical Review, 105 (2000), 832–77. 7 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p. 249; Schabas, Genocide in International Law, p. 125. 8 Schabas, Genocide in International Law, p. 125.

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Tribunal for Rwanda. In its judgment, the chamber concluded that the Tutsis were an ‘ethnic group’ based on the existence of government-issued official identity cards describing them as such.9 Another chamber in 2001 grappled with the problem at greater length. In its judgment in the case of Prosecutor v. Bagilishema, the chamber argued that although ‘membership of the targeted group must be an objective feature of the society in question, there is also a subjective dimension’. The chamber admitted that the boundaries of a human group were often indistinct, and that it was often very hard to determine whether a person had been murdered because of membership of that group or for some other reason. Moreover, the perpetrators might ‘characterise the targeted group in ways that do not fully correspond to conceptions of the group shared generally, or by other segments of society’. It was in those circumstances, the chamber continued, that the perception of the perpetrator became key, that the subjective took precedence over the objective, in determining whether the crime of genocide had taken place.10 Lawyers remain uncomfortable with reliance on subjective criteria alone for practical evidential reasons: the subjective perception of the perpetrator alone is hard to prove without reference to objective criteria. In 2006, the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia strongly recommended reference to both subjective and objective criteria.11 The very conceptualisation of race thus remains a nagging problem in international legal systems, and in Western culture generally, into the twenty-first century. At this point it is useful to return to Raphael Lemkin. Lemkin, a Polish Jew who left his homeland in 1939, published a definition of genocide in 1944 considerably richer than that which eventually found its way into the UN convention.12 Genocide, Lemkin wrote, was a 9 Prosecutor v. Kayishema and Ruzindana (Case no. ICTR-95–1–T), Judgment, 21 May 1999, paragraphs 522–30. Documents related to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia are available at www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/refworld/ rwmain, accessed 7 December 2010. 10 Prosecutor v. Bagilishema (Case no. ICTR-95–1A-T), Judgment, 7 June 2001, paragraph 65; Schabas, Genocide in International Law, pp. 126–7. 11 Prosecutor v. Stakic´ (Case no. IT-97–24–A), Judgment, 22 March 2006, paragraph 25; Schabas, Genocide in International Law, p. 128. 12 John Cooper, Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention (Basingstoke, 2008); Samantha Power, ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide (New York, 2002), pp. 17–85.

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 Renaissance humanism  co-ordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objective of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.13

Clearly, these ‘national groups’ of which Lemkin wrote were more than simple biological races: groups of people united by a common ancestry and probably therefore a common appearance. The biological and physical aspect of genocide was only one part of the overall picture. Lemkin also took the attack on a national group’s culture very seriously. He assumed that humankind was divided into cultures, that the values of these cultures might in some respects be incommensurable, that each culture had its own organising spirit or genius, and that this spirit would be evident in all the artefacts of that culture, whether that artefact be fine art or a legal system.14 Lemkin clarified his approach at the end of his chapter on genocide: The world represents only so much culture and intellectual vigor as are created by its component national groups. Essentially the idea of a nation signifies constructive cooperation and original contributions, based upon genuine traditions, genuine culture, and a well-developed national psychology. The destruction of a nation, therefore, results in the loss of its future contributions to the world.15

In fact, as early as 1933 Lemkin had proposed to the Fifth International Conference for the Unification of Penal Law in Madrid that ‘vandalism’ be made a new international crime. By vandalism, Lemkin meant the crime of destruction of art and individual cultural artefacts in general. As humanity was enriched by all the cultures of which it was composed, so humanity as a whole had an interest in the preservation of the physical objects (paintings, 13 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, D. C., 1944), p. 79. 14 Lemkin, Axis Rule, pp. 84–5; Cooper, Raphael Lemkin, pp. 15, 91–3; D. J. Schaller, ‘Raphael Lemkin’s view of European colonial rule in Africa: between condemnation and admiration’, Journal of Genocide Research, 7 (2005), 531–8. 15 Lemkin, Axis Rule, p. 91.

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libraries, synagogues) which embodied those cultures. Alongside this new crime of vandalism, Lemkin wished also to establish ‘barbarity’ as an international crime, by which he meant murders, pogroms, and collective cruelties practised against any defenceless ‘racial, religious or social collectivity’.16 Lemkin’s struggles with definition illustrate the binary composition of European racial ideology. Race, since the early nineteenth century, has had a physical aspect and a cultural aspect. Racialism is the division of mankind into races; racism the ordering of those races into a hierarchy, generally with one’s own race at the top. The practices of physical racism are immediately familiar: charting different head shapes; measuring the different cranial capacities of different races; conducting intelligence tests designed statistically to confirm intellectual superiority and inferiority; the murder of members of one’s own race who suffer a physical or mental disability.17 Cultural racism not only generally acted as a reinforcement of physical racism, as in Nazi Germany; it could even be employed to justify racial domination by itself, as in Apartheid South Africa.18 After 1948, the Apartheid regime in South Africa was generally careful to avoid the physically racist language that the Nazis had stigmatised by their mass murder of Jews and others. The regime’s policy of separateness was instead justified by the concept of culture referred to above. South Africa was a country of several cultures, each (the regime insisted, at least in its more thoughtful moments) worthy of respect, each with its own system of values and characteristic forms of life, each destined to develop in its own way.19 Both of these two components of the modern ideology of race were developed in the eighteenth century, and so from this point on the term ethnicity will be used to mean ‘peoplehood’ in the loose sense, while race will be reserved for the post-eighteenth century ideology. Historians of such divergent fields of specialisation as 16 Lemkin, Axis Rule, pp. 91–2; Schabas, Genocide in International Law, pp. 28–34. 17 Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wipperman, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge, 1991); Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), pp. 76–142. 18 Adolf Hitler, Speeches and Proclamations 1932–1945, ed. Max Domarus (3 vols, London, 1990), vol. 1, pp. 909–15; Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, ed. Ralph Manheim and D. C. Watt (London, 1992), pp. 234–5, 263, 275. 19 Saul Dubow, ‘Afrikaner nationalism, apartheid and the conceptualization of “race”’, The Journal of African History, 33 (1992), 209–37; Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge, 1995).

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George Mosse, George Frederickson, Ivan Hannaford, Colin Kidd, Sara Eigen, and Mark Larrimore all agreed that the ways in which the European elite spoke about Jews and non-European peoples changed during the eighteenth century, and that ethnic discourse before the Enlightenment was not the same as after. Eigen and Larrimore identified 1780–1820 as the period of transition.20 Hannaford and others argued that the Swedish taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus was the first to tabulate humankind by physical characteristics in the same way as the rest of the animal kingdom. In the 1735 edition of his Systema Naturae (System of Nature) Linnaeus classified man as belonging to the primate genus, and further explained to his students at Uppsala that man shaded into ape and ape into man. By the tenth edition of the Systema in 1758, Linnaeus was dividing the species of homo sapiens into homo ferus, Europaeus, Americanus, Asiaticus, Afer, and monsters. Europaeus, or European, Linnaeus further described as ‘white, sanguine, muscular . . . most vigorous, an inventor . . . ruled by religious observance’; in contrast Afer, or African, was ‘black, phlegmatic . . . cunning, slothful, slovenly . . . ruled by caprice’.21 While Isaiah Berlin has pointed out that the modern concept of culture was foreshadowed in the work of other Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment philosophers and historians, such as GiambattistaVico, Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Johann Georg Hamann, and even Adam Ferguson, nevertheless Johann Gottfried Herder may be regarded as its true inventor. It was the Prussian Herder in his Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (This Too a Philosophy of History for the Development of Humanity) of 1774 who insisted that man was divided not into races but into cultures, each contributing in its own way to humanity’s 20 George Mosse, Towards the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (London, 1978); George Frederickson, Race: A Short History (Princeton, 2002), pp. 51–3, 59–61; Kidd, Forging of Races, pp. 79–83, 120; Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore, 1996), pp. 187–91; Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore, ‘Introduction: the German invention of race’, in Eigen and Larrimore (eds), The German Invention of Race (New York, 2006), pp. 1–7. 21 ‘albus, sanguineus, torosus . . . acutissimus, inventor . . . Regitur Ritibus’, ‘niger, phlegmaticus . . . Vafer, segnis, negligens . . . Regitur Arbitrio’, Carolus Linnaeus, Systema Naturae per Regna Tria Naturae, Secundum Classes, Ordines, Genera, Species, cum Characteribus, Differentiis, Synonymis, Locis (2 vols, Stockholm, 10th edn, 1758), vol. 1, pp. 20–4; Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), pp. 57, 87–9; Hannaford, Race, pp. 203–4.

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Fortgang or advance, although the everyday ideals of each culture were unlikely to be commensurable with each other. Herder held each culture to be animated by its own Geist, and this spirit or mind would be evident in all the works and ideals of that culture, from breadmaking to religious ritual. One culture could not be superior to another, he wrote; the idea was as absurd as the Enlightenment’s search for an ideal man or ideal society. Herder disliked the racialism and racism of scholars like his old teacher Immanuel Kant, opposed the slave trade, and thought Africans the equal of Europeans.22 Nevertheless, the European Jews were a special problem for Herder. He admired the ancient Hebrews very much; but their descendants in Europe were out of place, exiled from the environment in which they had developed and inevitably alienated from the society in which they lived. As he put it in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind) of 1784–91, the Jewish people were no more than a ‘parasitical plant on the trunks of other nations’.23 Although Linnaeus and his successors like Johann Friedrich Blumenbach belonged firmly to the European Enlightenment, and Herder and the German nationalists who took up and used his concepts (very often in ways Herder would have disliked) were certainly representatives of the Counter-Enlightenment, ideas of physically separate races and of culturally separate peoples very quickly became intertwined. European racialists after the eighteenth century thus defined certain peoples as races on the basis of both their common physical attributes and their common culture (though in individual ideologies one element, physical or cultural, might predominate), and racists sorted these races into a hierarchy with Europeans at the top. In other words, the modern ideology of race is a language and a set of concepts concerned both with human bodies and with human societies. Analyses of pre-modern ideologies of ethnic superiority which attempt to decide if such-and-such an ideology is more or less similar to modern racism must attend to contemporary understandings both of bodies and of societies. Historians’ common tendency to privilege the body over society in exploring the history of race is not analytically rewarding. For example, in the 22 Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London, 1976), pp. 147–50, 163, 181–2. 23 J. G. Herder, Reflections of the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, ed. F. E. Manuel (Chicago, 1968), p. 144; ‘eine parasitische Pflanze auf den Stämmen andrer Nationen’, J. G. Herder, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan et al. (33 vols, Berlin, 1877–1913; 3rd reprint, Hildesheim, 1994–95), vol. 13, p. 67.

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introduction to a valuable collection of essays, Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac and Joseph Ziegler, adopted a definition of racism which included the sorting of peoples into a hierarchy of groups on the basis of a presumed connection between physical and mental qualities, but excluded discrimination on a religious or social basis.24 But as Ziegler insists in his essay on physiognomics (the practice of deducing character from appearance) in that volume, medieval and early modern sciences that did posit connections between physical appearance and moral capacity were simply never employed to feed, for example, anti-African racisms of the sort constructed by Linnaeus.25 Moreover, the definition of racism adopted by EliavFeldon, Isaac and Ziegler excludes theories of civility and barbarism from consideration completely. The theory of human society in which civility and barbarism were central terms was woven into all European descriptions of themselves and of non-European societies; excluding this theory from the pre-history of race is quite wrongheaded. María Elena Martínez grappled with the same problem in her excellent work on limpieza de sangre (the Spanish practice of discriminating against Christians of Jewish ancestry) in New Spain. Martínez felt that defining race as an ideology concerned with the body alone was a mistake; this ignored the fact that racial discourse invoked ‘nature or biology more at one point, culture more at another’.26 For this reason, Martínez preferred to speak about different racisms each produced by specific social and historical circumstances, rather than positing one constant form of racism in Europe and America between the Middle Ages and the present, or allowing an invention of racism in the eighteenth century. However, had Martínez recognised that European ways of speaking about human societies changed profoundly between the seventeenth century and the eighteenth, and recognised that modern racial ideologies rest on modern ways of speaking about human societies, the concept of culture, and on ways of speaking about human bodies, her problem of definition would have been resolved. Adopting a two-fold characterisation of racial ideology also aids understanding of what Thomas McCarthy has labelled ‘neo-racism’, 24 Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Bejamin Isaac and Joseph Ziegler, ‘Introduction’, in Eliav-Feldon, Isaac and Ziegler (eds), The Origins of Racism in the West (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 1–31, at 10–12. 25 Joseph Ziegler, ‘Physiognomy, science, and proto-racism 1200–1500’, ibid., pp. 181–99. 26 María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, 2008), pp. 11, 58–60.

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which continues to function even though physical or biological racism has long been outlawed in Western society.27 In fact there is nothing new about this sort of racism. Saul Dubow has described the radical Afrikaners’ abandonment of physical racism in the wake of the Second World War and their justification of the Apartheid regime through frankly Herderian talk of cultures and their separate development.28 French historians tend to struggle not with a definition of race that is too narrow, but too broad: the French word racisme is commonly applied to any species of prejudice, including prejudice against young people (racisme anti-jeunes), regardless of their appearance or culture. So André Devyver’s encyclopaedic study of those early modern ideologies which prescribed an ethnic origin for the French nobility distinct from and superior to that of other Frenchmen paused only to borrow a term from Jean-Paul Sartre, social racism, before concluding that those noble ideologies were indeed racist.29 As Devyver noted, for Sartre racist theory, whether biological or social, was only a small and unimportant part of racist praxis; the intention of the actor was irrelevant.30 Non-Marxists will be reluctant to adopt these positions. The most accomplished historians of early modern Ireland have demonstrated keen interest in pre-modern or early modern ideologies of ethnic superiority; but not all of these historians have distinguished between those early modern ideologies and the modern ideology of race. Nicholas Canny has been at the forefront of this analytical effort, and has been careful to insist on the importance of the eighteenthcentury change in the discourse of peoples noted above: pre-eighteenth-century ethnic ideologies, even at the popular level, were quite different to post-eighteenth-century racial ideologies.31 This point has been recognised also by John Montaño.32 Jane Ohlmeyer has 27 Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 4–13. 28 Dubow, ‘Afrikaner nationalism’. 29 André Devyver, Le Sang épuré: les préjugés de race chez les gentilshommes français de l’Ancien Régime, 1560–1720 (Brussels, 1973), p. 23. 30 Ibid., p. 182; Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume I: Theory of Practical Ensembles, ed. Alan Sheridan-Smith, Jonathan Rée and Frederick Jameson (London, 2004), pp. 720–21. 31 Nicholas Canny, ‘The permissive frontier: social control in English settlements in Ireland and Virginia, 1550–1650’, in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny and P. E. H. Hair (eds), The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480–1650 (Liverpool, 1978), pp. 17–44, at 34–5. 32 John Patrick Montaño, The Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland (Cambridge, 2011), p. 306.

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demonstrated that the concepts of civility and barbarism were central to colonialist ideology within Britain and Ireland in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Montaño has reinforced Ohlmeyer’s arguments on the importance of certain models of agriculture to those categories. The life of towns and cities, and the manorial agriculture which fed them, were regarded by English colonists as civil; the pastoral agriculture of Irish and Scottish Gaeldom, barbarous.33 Nevertheless, both Ohlmeyer and Steven Ellis have described those categories of civility and barbarism in terms which assimilate them to later, posteighteenth-century, racial theory. So Ohlmeyer argued that English use of those categories, civil and barbarous, constituted an ideology of racial superiority; members of the Scottish and English elites regarded the Gaelic Irish, Highlanders, and Borderers as a lower form of humanity both in mind and in culture.34 Ellis has gone further, choosing to invoke nineteenth- and twentieth-century German racialist and racist ideology: the English regarded the Gaelic Irish as Untermenschen (sub-humans); sixteenth-century Ireland saw a Kulturkampf (war for civilisation) between English and Irish.35 However, Ellis’s wider argument was that the category of barbarian was one which the English elite applied to irrational Englishmen as well as irrational Irishmen, a point reinforced by Deborah Shugar.36 Nevertheless, it is Canny’s theorisation of ethnic relationships in early modern Ireland which remains the most comprehensive. During the 1970s, Canny argued that the chief ideological resource of sixteenth-century English colonists and adventurers were English translations of travel accounts of the East and of the New World, such as those by Richard Eden or Joannes Boemus. From this resource, as well as from a smaller quantity of Roman examples, the English constructed a category of barbarism into which the Irish were placed. Canny also held that the English worked out a rough theory of cultural evolution, which posited the Irish as a less developed people than themselves. When these English colonists then moved 33 Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘“Civilizinge of those Rude Partes”: colonization within Britain and Ireland, 1580s-1640s’, in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume 1: The Origins of Empire, British Overseas Expansion to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1998), pp.124–47; Montaño, Roots of English Colonialism, pp. 22–63. 34 Ohlmeyer, ‘“Civilizinge of those Rude Partes”’, p. 131. 35 S. G. Ellis, Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power: The Making of the British State (Oxford, 1995), pp. 60, 74. 36 Ibid., passim; Debora Shuger, ‘Irishmen, aristocrats, and other white barbarians’, Renaissance Quarterly, 50 (1997), 494–525.

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on to North America they abandoned their use of Roman examples, but took with them this theory of cultural evolution developed during their Irish experience. In a sort of ideological feed-back loop, these categories and theories were then applied both to Native Americans and to Africans in the New World.37 Then, in a 1974 O’Donnell Lecture, Canny introduced a counter-current to this colonial theory: the Renaissance humanism employed by the Irish elite of English descent from the mid-sixteenth century on. Canny characterised these English Irish humanists briefly as persons committed to active citizenship (rather than merely passive subjecthood) and the use of English law; their humanism was derived from the philosophy of Aristotle and taught in the grammar schools of Dublin, Kilkenny, and Waterford, at Oxford, and at the Inns of Court.38 The practical expression of this English Irish ethos was the policy of surrender and regrant, under which barbarous Irish tyrants recognised that becoming civil English noblemen was their only rational course of action. But from the 1540s to the 1560s, Canny argued, humanism in England changed while humanism in Ireland remained the same. During the mid-sixteenth century educated Englishmen acquired a fresh understanding of social change, an understanding based on their experience of societal changes in England, on the historical theory of Jean Bodin, and on accounts of extra-European societies. Englishmen now envisaged the transition from barbarism to civility as an evolutionary process, and had a more pessimistic appreciation of the difficulty of that process: they now believed they would have to use more violence to civilise Irish society.39 This new anti-Aristotelian tendency in English thought was reinforced by the influence of the French logician Petrus Ramus in the English universities.40 Canny’s monograph on the Elizabethan conquest reinforced these arguments: the English had acquired a concept of cultural or historical development, similar in many ways to Spanish ones, and employed this concept habitually in their analyses of Irish problems.41 And the poet Edmund Spenser, Canny 37 Nicholas Canny, ‘The ideology of English colonization: from Ireland to America’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 30 (1973), 575–98, at 595–8; Nicholas Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established, 1565–76 (Hassocks, 1976), pp. ix, 130–3. 38 Nicholas Canny, The Formation of the Old English Elite in Ireland (Dublin, 1975), pp. 13–14, 27. 39 Ibid., pp. 16–19, 21. 40 Ibid., pp. 27, 28, 29. 41 Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, pp. ix, 130–3.

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believed, was the key transmitter of this new, harsh humanist historicism, committed to conquest and plantation, into the seventeenth century.42 There were a number of problems with Canny’s thesis. First, Canny’s account of intellectual influences travelling first west to east and then east to west was received sceptically by historians of colonial North America. There was little evidence, they argued, that the English employed either Spanish or Irish precedents or models for their American colonies. The few elaborate English defences of colonial activity, such as Sir George Peckham’s A True Reporte of 1583, did not draw categories and concepts from England’s Irish experience, but from conventional legal theory and the Christian obligation to evangelise.43 Canny himself did not attempt to develop his original position on this point in later treatments of the topic.44 The second problem with Canny’s thesis lies in his characterisation of Renaissance humanism. Canny was right to argue that Aristotelian philosophy was a staple of almost all contemporary educational institutions, but he was wrong to argue that that Aristotelianism declined in England from the mid-sixteenth century. The English universities remained wedded to Aristotle until well after 1650, and English Ramism amounted to no more than some minor pedagogical reforms. The substance of the moral philosophy curriculum was still based on Aristotle and Cicero; indeed the theory of the origins of human society by Thomas Starkey that Canny quoted was not in fact new, but just a paraphrase of a passage in Cicero’s De Inventione.45 Moreover, Canny allowed an historical or cultural perspective to his Englishmen which in reality would only emerge slowly during the Counter-Enlightenment from the work of Giambattista Vico and J. G. Herder; in this he had been 42 Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 1–58. 43 Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 123–4; L. E. Pennington, ‘The Amerindian in English promotional literature, 1575–1625’, in Andrews, Canny and Hair (eds), Westward Enterprise, pp. 175–94. 44 Nicholas Canny, ‘The origins of empire: an introduction’, in Canny (ed.), Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume I, pp. 1–33; Canny, Making Ireland British, pp. 132, 206, 313, 316. 45 Canny, Formation of the Old English Elite, pp. 18–19; Cicero, De Inventione, 1. 2–3; Jill Kraye, ‘Moral philosophy’, in C. B. Schmitt et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 303–86; Laurence Brockliss, ‘Curricula’, in Hilde De Ridder-Symoens (ed.), A History of the University in Europe, Volume II: Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800) (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 578–89.

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misled by a body of scholarship which mistook Renaissance scholars’ use of sophisticated tools for dating texts for a true historical consciousness which saw the spirit of a people develop or advance through time.46 John Montaño also attempted to ascribe the culture concept to sixteenth-century Englishmen; but his valuable analysis of multiple treatises on the government of Ireland in fact evidenced theories of law and custom among English Irish and English, not any theory of culture.47 Ciaran Brady has argued vehemently that the principal focus of all the early Tudor treatises on the government of Ireland ‘lay not primarily with culture, society, and religion, but specifically and conventionally with the question of law, or rather of its absence’, a point confirmed by Montaño’s study.48 The idea that right and wrong could be different in different times or different places was a fundamentally un-Christian one which would only emerge after the Enlightenment revolution in the European understanding of human reason and human societies. Irish historians have left Canny’s brief reference to Aristotelianism and the institutions in which that philosophy was taught undeveloped, and indeed Canny himself never precisely defined what he meant by Renaissance humanism. In contrast, Brendan Bradshaw defined the phenomenon with pugnacious precision: Renaissance humanism was a common perception of the human condition, world view, and philosophy of life derived from the philosophy of Plato.49 Bradshaw portrayed the leaders of this movement as the sophisticated intellectuals of royal and noble courts, so that Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, for example, informed the historian both about More’s own vision of society and about the mentalité of humanists of his generation. And to be a true humanist, Bradshaw insisted, one had to subscribe to a very optimistic anthropology: 46 Canny, Formation of the Old English Elite, note 46; cf. Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, trans J. E. Anderson, foreword Isaiah Berlin (London, 1972); Ian Campbell, ‘Aristotelian ancient constitution and anti-Aristotelian sovereignty in Stuart Ireland’, Historical Journal, 53 (2010), 1–19. 47 Montaño, Roots of English Colonialism, pp. 72–4, 85, 87, 89, 107, 120, 141, 148, 188–9, 299, 312, 378. 48 Ciaran Brady, ‘From policy to power: the evolution of Tudor reform strategies in sixteenth-century Ireland’, in Brian Mac Cuarta (ed.), Reshaping Ireland 1550–1700: Colonization and its Consequences (Dublin, 2011), pp. 21– 42, at 27. 49 Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Transalpine humanism’, in J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (eds), The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 95–131.

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humanists were inspired by the Book of Genesis’s description of man in his original state of perfection, before Adam’s fall, to revolt against late medieval pessimism.50 Consequently Bradshaw was sceptical about the ability of Protestants, who emphasised the damage which the fall of man had wreaked on human capacities, to be humanists: ‘to speak of Protestant humanism is, strictly speaking, a contradiction in terms’.51 This identification of Renaissance humanism with Christian Platonism enlivened all of Bradshaw’s research into Irish humanism; he argued that humanist patriotism in turn acted as a catalyst for a new Irish nationalism in the second half of the sixteenth century. This approach raises numerous difficulties. Bradshaw’s definition of humanism was pugnacious because pitched directly against the authoritative work of Paul Oskar Kristeller. Kristeller had identified humanism as primarily an educational movement devoted to the cultivation of the humanities and also as a classical mode of discourse: put crudely, humanism was doing things in Latin and Greek.52 Bradshaw wished to use his own much broader definition of humanism in order to incorporate figures like Manus O’Donnell, mid-sixteenth-century lord of Donegal, into the European Renaissance; this demanded the reduction of humanism to no more than a social and philosophical mood.53 Moreover, taking the work of a radical intellectual like Sir Thomas More as a guide to the world view of his more conservative contemporaries is highly questionable. The scepticism with which More examined the institution of private property in Utopia was most certainly not normal among the elite.54 To understand the place of humanism in the lives of ordinary gentlemen and noblemen in early modern Ireland one must turn to the curricula of the grammar schools and universities. These prestigious institutions educated a remarkably high proportion of the European population: in England about one in fifty of the male 50 Ibid., pp. 104–5. 51 Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Sword, word and strategy in the Reformation in Ireland’, Historical Journal, 21 (1978), 475–502, at 497, n. 81. 52 P. O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought (2 vols, New York, 1961), vol. 1, pp. 8–11; C. S. Calenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians and Latin’s Legacy (Baltimore, 2004). 53 Brendan Bradshaw, ‘“Manus the magnificent”: O’Donnell as Renaissance prince’, in A. Cosgrove and D. McCartney (eds), Studies in Irish History Presented to R. Dudley Edwards (Dublin, 1979), pp. 15–37. 54 Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 19–48.

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year-group entered Oxford and Cambridge during the 1630s; in Spain about one in thirty of the male year-group went to university in the last quarter of the sixteenth century.55 The success of the early modern universities as agents of cultural transmission is now widely accepted; as Laurence Brockliss put it, ‘the professor formed the minds of the elite in the same way as the priest and the parson formed the minds of the poor’.56 Next, the ethics, politics, and general anthropology taught to the European elite in the grammar schools and universities was distinctly Ciceronian and Aristotelian; Plato was generally thought suitable only for the most advanced students.57 Finally, Bradshaw’s argument that there were no Protestant humanists founders both on the practice of Protestant scholarship in the humanities at all levels (the University of Leiden remained the foremost centre of classical studies throughout the seventeenth century), and on the theories of ethics and politics advanced inside and outside Protestant universities.58 It is senseless to deny the label of humanist to Archbishop James Ussher, who learned to write a particularly elegant Latin in Dublin in the 1580s and 1590s, and whose scholarly prowess deeply impressed his Catholic contemporaries despite his ferocious hostility to their faith. And Ussher, like the majority of Protestants, was convinced of the worth of classical learning and moral philosophy to Christian life.59 Two steps are necessary in order to resolve many (though not all) of the difficulties treated above. The first is to adopt Kristeller’s definition of Renaissance humanism: primarily doing things (reading, translating, speaking, writing) in Latin and Greek, and then (by cautious extension) doing things with classical concepts in the 55 Richard Tuck, ‘The institutional setting’, in Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (eds), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth Century Philosophy (2 vols, Cambridge, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 9–32, at 11; Lawrence Stone, ‘The educational revolution in England, 1560–1640’, Past & Present, 28 (1964), 41–80, at 57; R. L. Kagan, Students and Society in Early Modern Spain (Baltimore, 1974), pp. 360–2. 56 Brockliss, ‘Curricula’, p. 618. 57 Jill Kraye, ‘Melanchthon’s ethics commentaries and textbooks’, in Kraye, Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 1–12, at 9–10; Brockliss, ‘Curricula’, p. 579. 58 J. E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship (3 vols, Cambridge, 1908), vol. 2, pp. 300–32. 59 James Ussher, Eighteen Sermons Preached in Oxford 1640, ed. Joseph Crabb, William Ball and Thomas Lye (London, 1660), pp. 44–51, 59–60, 66, 68–70, 73–4, 77–83, 215; Alan Ford, James Ussher:Theology, History, and Politics in Early Modern Ireland and England (Oxford, 2007), pp. 33–40.

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vernacular. That process of using the classical languages must also be related to the institutions in which they were employed most intensely: the grammar schools and universities, and the Ciceronian and Aristotelian texts which they taught. Throughout this book the term ‘humanist’ will be stretched to its very limit. It will be used to refer not just to learned critics of Latin and Greek texts, but to anyone who received and then employed an education in the humanities. The second is to attend closely to the arguments of Anthony Pagden, David Armitage, and Andrew Fitzmaurice on ethnic discourse in the wider Atlantic world. Pagden’s classic investigation into the place of the Native American in the anthropology of the Spanish elite emphasised above all else the importance of Aristotle and Aristotelian philosophy to that discourse.60 Armitage, describing the early theory of British colonialism in North America, wrote that ‘the heritage of Roman moral thought, above all derived from the writings of Cicero, supplemented by Latinized versions of Aristotle, as well as by the Roman historians Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus, provided the intellectual framework for at least the first halfcentury of British colonial theory’.61 Fitzmaurice has reinforced this point with a detailed study of Ciceronian discourse in action among English colonists in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.62 This book will argue that in late sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Ireland too, Renaissance humanism provided the main resources for the elite’s discussions of the relationships between peoples. The moral philosophy taught in the grammar schools and universities, which was based on Aristotle’s and Cicero’s works of ethics, politics, and rhetoric, provided Irish and English, Protestant and Catholic, with a way of speaking about the differences between human societies. Other university sciences, such as medicine and theology, which depended heavily on Aristotelian language and concepts, dominated elite understanding of the relationships between human bodies.This reliance on Aristotelian resources when treating the relationships between peoples was typical of the European elite, and it will often be necessary in the course of this study to compare the reception of this classical and scholastic philosophy in Ireland with its reception internationally. It will also be 60 Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man:The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, 2nd edn, 1986). 61 David Armitage, ‘Literature and empire’, in Canny (ed.), Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume 1, pp. 99–123. 62 Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625 (Cambridge, 2003).

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argued that it is possible to perceive a gradual change in the discourse of peoples, both in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe, as elites turned away from the old Aristotelianism and embraced the Enlightenment.The death of Aristotelianism at the end of the seventeenth century was certainly connected to the birth of race at the beginning of the nineteenth century. What is the relationship between the problem of race, as treated in this book, and the problem of nationalism? Scholars of nationalism are conventionally divided into primordialists and modernists; Richard English has summarised their debates for the Irish scholar.63 To the primordialists, nationalism meant that the Frenchman of 1950 shared his national spirit with the Frenchman of 1350; the French nation had perhaps unfolded from its earlier essence but no more than that. For the modernists, nationalism was a new discourse of human society which arose in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. Before then, European societies could be mobilised by religious forces, or by elite or sometimes popular patriotisms in which the homeland was envisaged as an object of service. But nationalism, argued the modernists, was something new generated by the agricultural revolution, industrial revolution, capitalism, the French revolution, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the face of unprecedented societal change some parts of the European elite began to speak about and to the poor in new ways; the poor were now envisaged as the particular repository of the nation’s authentic spirit. Poor men and women themselves began to defend their own actions through this new discourse. This was political Romanticism, and its upshot was an unprecedented mobilisation of European societies in war and peace. Irish students of political Romanticism are indebted to the research of Clare O’Halloran into the Irish reception of protoRomanticism, and Joep Leerssen’s wider studies.64 Primordialists remained true to the Romantic political programme and saw continuity in the theory and practice of peoplehood in Europe; modernists critiqued political Romanticism and saw change. There are vanishingly few primordialists left within the academy, even though the position remains normal among popular nationalists. 63 Richard English, Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland (London, 2006), pp. 19–20, 483–586. 64 Clare O’Halloran, Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c. 1750–1800 (Cork, 2004), pp. 97–124; Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork, 1996).

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Even an anti-modernist scholar like Adrian Hastings has admitted that the crucial component of nationalist political theory, that every nation must have its own state to become truly itself, was the invention of the German proto-Romantics and Romantics.65 The finer points of these debates are not relevant here. It is enough to note that there is a fundamental congruence between the argument for the invention of nationalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and the argument for the invention of race in the same period. Both rested on Herder’s new theory of culture. Some nationalisms, most notably in Germany and South Africa, became racialised nationalisms. One of the difficulties which remains is related to the periodisation of Renaissance humanism in Ireland. Benignus Millet has noted that Latin learning and the Counter-Reformation began to flourish in Ireland at about the same time; that is to say one cannot speak of a strong, indigenous humanism before the 1570s when the first students of the Irish grammar schools began to enter public life. Steven Ellis too identified the later 1570s as the moment when the English government first became aware of the activities of expensively educated Irishmen hostile to Protestant Reformation.66 And while Cicero and to a lesser extent Aristotle would play an important role in the education of the elite all through the eighteenth century, profound changes in the systems of ethics and politics which Europeans had traditionally built on that Ciceronian foundation mean that one can no longer speak of Renaissance humanism in Western Europe after the 1680s. Where then does that leave those vernacular treatises on the government of Ireland which proliferate from the 1510s on, and depend so heavily on the distinction between civility and barbarism?67 As Montaño and Hiram Morgan have pointed out, and as several seventeenth-century Irish Catholics noted, the criticisms of Irish barbarism made by Gerald of Wales in the twelfth century were not very different to the same criticisms which Englishmen made in vernacular treatises throughout the sixteenth century; indeed Gerald’s understanding of the 65 Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 11–12, 113. 66 Benignus Millet, ‘Irish Literature in Latin, 1550–1700’, in T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin and F. J. Byrne (eds), A New History of Ireland, III: Early Modern Ireland 1534–1691 (Oxford, 1976), pp. 561–86; Steven Ellis, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors 1447–1603: English Expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule (London, 1998), pp. 239–40. 67 Ellis, Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power, pp. 46–77.

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origins of human societies was clearly grounded in medieval Ciceronianism.68 There was a substantial continuity in the most basic attitudes to law, political life, and barbarity between the twelfth century and the sixteenth, simply because Aristotle came to dominate the European universities from the thirteenth century and Cicero had always been central to education in Latin Christendom. This phenomenon has been neglected by Irish historians, but it is probably to the humanism of Cathedral schools and chanceries that the early sixteenth-century vernacular treatises on government should be assigned.69 Renaissance humanism must be distinguished from its medieval predecessor by its deeper penetration of society, and its more intense engagement with the classical texts; it is perceptible in Ireland first in the 1570s. This book will proceed in two parts. The first part will explain how Irish and English humanists spoke about human societies. The second part will review the resources available to those humanists who wished to speak about the differences between human bodies, in so far as those differences concerned the identity of peoples. A concluding chapter will lightly sketch the changes in those discourses which occurred in the late seventeenth century as Aristotelian humanism waned and Enlightenment waxed. Chapter 1 explains how Ireland’s inhabitants encountered humanist theories about human society in their universities, focusing especially on those concepts which made up the theory of reason, virtue, and law. Crucially, those terms ‘civil’ and ‘barbarous’ had precise, technical meanings, taught in the universities, which Irish historians have failed to analyse. This chapter also addresses the problem of how many peoples there were in seventeenth-century Ireland, as an influential argument has it that Gaelic Irish and English Irish were indistinguishable by this time. As this would mean that a large number of Irish humanists of all backgrounds were liars or fantasists, it is important to resolve the question. Chapter 2 analyses the Christian humanist critique of Gaelic Ireland, and especially the particularly learned version of that critique advanced by Richard Stanihurst in the late 1570s and early 1580s. The arguments of Stanihurt’s English and Latin histories of 68 Cicero, De Inventione, 1. 2–3; Montaño, Roots of English Colonialism, pp. 34–5; Hiram Morgan, ‘Giraldus Cambrensis and the Tudor Conquest of Ireland’, in Morgan (ed.), Political Ideology in Ireland, 1541–1641 (Dublin, 1999), pp. 22– 44. 69 R. W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe (2 vols, Oxford, 1995–2001).

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Ireland matter because they demonstrate how an expertly educated humanist understood the workings of human societies.They are also important because they epitomised a certain strand of political tradition within the Pale, the area of English rule around Dublin city which included the counties of Dublin, Meath, Louth, and Kildare. This tradition held that the barbarous Irish could be and should be educated in reason, virtue, and law (which was indistinguishable from an education in the English and Latin languages) and enter true political or civil life. Judging by the speech which his father delivered to the Irish parliament in 1571, the household in which Stanihurst grew up was committed to this tradition; and Stanihurst’s Latin history encapsulated it for seventeenth-century Irish Catholic writers as disparate in their outlooks as Philip O’Sullivan Beare and John Lynch.70 As a contrast to Stanihurst’s brand of Christian humanism, orthodox throughout Europe, this chapter will also treat the arguments which a small number of English colonists (including Edmund Spenser) made during the 1590s. These colonists rejected those conventional arguments on virtue and law, and advanced quite a different theory of human societies. Chapter 3 outlines a very different political tradition: a series of anti-English arguments made by a series of well-educated Gaelic Irish ideologues and politicians between the 1610s and 1660s. These Gaelic Irishmen not only argued that the Protestant Stuarts had lost the right to rule the Irish kingdom, and that only heretics could be truly barbarous, but they also argued that the English Irish were so tainted by their Englishness that they would have to be excluded from the projected Catholic re-conquest of Ireland. This tradition was marginal but significant; it was embodied in institutions such as St Anthony’s College at Leuven, the O’Neill and O’Donnell tercios in the Low Countries, the household of Giovanni Battista Rinuccini, papal nuncio to the Catholic Confederates, and probably also in the Confederation’s Ulster army, led by General Owen Roe O’Neill. One very extreme expression of this ideology even held not just that English Irishmen learned an inclination towards Protestantism as they grew up, through bad education, but that their inclination towards heresy was natural, acquired physically from their parents and present at birth. Chapter 4 begins the second part of the book, which asks how seventeenth century humanists understood the acquisition of those natural characteristics which marked both human societies and 70 Sir James Ware (ed.), The Historie of Ireland (Dublin, 1633), pp. 131–3.

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certain groups within those societies. It starts with an Irish instance of a very common phenomenon among Renaissance humanists: a debate on the nature of true nobility. For Richard O’Ferrall, fine ancestry was the primary component of nobility (and Irishmen of English descent were incapable of it), whereas for John Lynch true nobility lay in virtue. In the course of this debate, O’Ferrall and Lynch also alluded to or avoided the problem of human heredity. The second part of this chapter explores the writings on nobility of a figure who, at first glance, proceeded from premises very different to those of his humanist contemporaries: the Gaelic Irish genealogist Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh. However, it seems that the genealogist shared a certain understanding of the relationship between the physical appearance of individuals and groups and their inherent moral qualities with the papal nuncio Rinuccini, a man who had received the most rigorous education in Aristotelian humanism. Chapter 5 tackles the problem of the seventeenth-century theory of heredity head-on. The learned Irish physician Dermot O’Meara, who attended earls of Ormond and loudly proclaimed his adherence to the new chemical medicine of Paracelsus, nevertheless employed a fundamentally Aristotelian approach in his study of hereditary disease. O’Meara and his fellow physicians were in fact very cautious in their treatment of the problem of human heredity, and the reason for this was that it raised worrying questions about the origin and nature of the human soul. In fact, if the subject of heredity really belonged to any one early modern profession, it was to the divines. The human soul had to come from God, and it had to be immortal; but a strong theory of human heredity demanded that the soul, or parts of the soul, or subordinate souls, were inherited by the child from the parents, and that this soul be a material thing, and therefore probably mortal. Christian orthodoxy thus tended to block the development of a widely accepted theory of human heredity; and all this is as evident among Irish Thomist and Scotist theologians, as among their English Protestant counterparts. Finally, Chapter 6 explains how orthodox and indeed actively conservative members of the Irish and English elites began to turn away from Aristotelianism in the later seventeenth century. In particular conservative Catholics like John Lynch and Protestants like William King were driven by circumstances to find systems of law which operated independently of God: the mark of the new Enlightened understanding of human societies. But there was no simple and symmetrical development in the discourse of peoples

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from humanist Aristotelianism to Enlightenment in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Ireland. The outcome of the Williamite War of 1689–92 was the destruction of the old Catholic elite in Ireland; and the cautious, gentle separation of Christianity from science which was the mark of Enlightenment was never as congenial to Catholics as to Protestants. The result was that those lengthy, sophisticated humanist interventions in Irish political discourse by Irish Catholics which punctuated the seventeenth century had no equivalent in eighteenth-century Ireland; Ireland’s Enlightenment was predominantly Protestant. The Enlightenment saw the development of new ways of speaking not just about human societies, but also about human bodies. The victims of these ideological innovations in the Atlantic world were not primarily the Irish, but Africans. The African slave trade of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would heavily inflect European and American ideologies of ethnic domination ever after. In contrast, the ideologies of domination which mattered in Ascendancy Ireland were not racist, but sectarian. Nevertheless, the papers of that determined anti-Aristotelian, Sir William Petty, do preserve a chain of thought he began before the Royal College of Physicians at Dublin in 1676, on the characteristics of the souls and bodies of Europeans and Africans.

1

Two problems in the history of Irish humanism and ethnicity 

Shortly after the battle of Julianstown on 29 November 1641, the leaders of the Gaelic Irish who had risen in rebellion in Ulster met with representatives of their fellow Catholics from the English Pale at the hill of Crofty.1 Writing in the 1670s, Richard Bellings, himself a Pale Catholic, assigned one of the Gaelic Irish a short speech explaining his recourse to arms. This man, Rory O’More, complained that Irish Catholics were forced to choose either slavery in this world, because they were excluded from political life, or eternal damnation in the next, which would follow if they attained political office by renouncing their true church. Had Catholics depended on education alone they might not have recognised this exclusion from political life as servitude, he continued, because Protestants tried to prevent them from learning to speak Latin, but nature itself informed all men of the difference between liberty and slavery.2 O’More’s speech cuts to the heart of the first problem tackled in this chapter: the connection between learning Latin and learning a vocabulary with which to describe the relationships within and between human societies. Renaissance humanism, it will be argued, was precisely this process of using Latin and Greek to speak about the contemporary world, and, at a further remove, using classical concepts in one’s own vernacular. In particular, the European universities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries taught their students a theory of law, heavily inflected by Aristotle’s philosophy, which amounted to a complete theory of human society. Seventeenth-century Europeans used this theory of law to 1 Michael Perceval-Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 (Dublin, 1994), p. 245. 2 J. T. Gilbert (ed.), A Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland from 1641 to 1652 (3 vols, Dublin, 1879), vol. 1, p. 36.

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understand the world around them, rather than anything like a theory of culture. The second problem to be addressed arises from the circumstances in which O’More spoke: were all Irish Catholics one people by the mid-seventeenth century? This question, it will be argued, must be approached not only through the programmatic statements of Gaelic Irish and English Irish intellectuals, but through kinship structure and land law. Cicero, Aristotle, and the Irish Taking into account Ireland’s poverty, location on the European periphery, and a population which in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries did not exceed two million, a surprisingly dense educational infrastructure was woven into the lives of the country’s gentry and nobility. Private tutors inducted students in basic Latin grammar and literature in the most unlikely places; Franciscan friars were particularly active among the sons of the Gaelic gentry in remote parts of Ulster.3 Formal Catholic grammar schools educated the sons of the urban patriciates and country gentry in Kilkenny, Waterford, Limerick, Drogheda, Dundalk, and Galway.4 During the 1620s and 1630s, Galway supported at least two grammar schools, a Dominican school which did not charge fees and a Jesuit school which probably did, and the influx of students from as far away as the Pale prompted corporation regulation in 1628.5 The small Protestant population was theoretically served by Church of Ireland grammar schools in each diocese, but outside Dublin these diocesan schools appear to have functioned more intermittently than their Catholic rivals.6 Two Protestant schools existed in Dublin in the first half of the seventeenth century, one 3 Donal Cregan, ‘The social and cultural background of a CounterReformation episcopate, 1618–60’, in A. Cosgrove and D. McCartney (eds), Studies in Irish History Presented to R. Dudley Edwards (Dublin, 1979), pp. 85–117, at 105–7. 4 Benignus Millet, ‘Irish literature in Latin, 1550–1700’ in T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin and F. J. Byrne (eds), A New History of Ireland, III: Early Modern Ireland 1534–1691 (Oxford, 1976), pp. 561–86, at 563–4; Brian Mac Cuarta, Catholic Revival in the North of Ireland, 1603–41 (Dublin, 2007), pp. 217–8. 5 T. S. Flynn, The Irish Dominicans 1536–1641 (Dublin, 1993), pp. 151–4; Nollaig Ó Muraíle, ‘Aspects of the intellectual life of seventeenth century Galway’ in Gerard Moran and Raymond Gillespie (eds), Galway: History and Society (Dublin, 1996), pp. 149–210. 6 Alan Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590–1641 (Frankfurt am Main, 1987), pp. 101–2, 130–1, 168, 170–1, 289.

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maintained by the dean and chapter of St Patrick’s Cathedral, while the other municipal school was funded by Dublin Corporation.7 However, these schools were not attended by committed Protestants alone. The Protestant municipal school in Dublin had 122 students in 1622, but 43 did not attend church. Over the previous twelve years, 100 of its graduates had continued their education at Trinity College, but 160 had travelled overseas and several of these subsequently returned as priests.8 Leading Protestants in colonised areas often took matters into their own hands: Richard Boyle, earl of Cork, endowed schools at Youghal, Lismore, and Bandonbridge; Mathias Springham did the same at Derry; the Presbyterian James Hamilton,Viscount Clandeboye maintained another at Bangor.9 All these schools, whether they followed English or continental models, sought to make their students proficient in speaking, writing, and reading Latin, and in the final forms began teaching moral philosophy, almost certainly through Cicero’s book for beginners, De Officiis (On Duties).10 More advanced were the provisions which the Franciscans made for the teaching of humanities, philosophy, and theology to their own novices and perhaps also their patrons’ children in Dublin, Drogheda, Galway, Kilkenny, Kilconnell, Cavan, Cashel, Nenagh, Askeaton, Wexford, Quinn, Enniscorthy, and Multifarnham between the 1620s and 1640s.11 The Jesuits briefly offered something like a university curriculum in Back Lane in Dublin in the late 1620s.12 Rising to the upper levels of the Irish Catholic church was impossible without a thorough education in continental colleges and universities, and the Catholic episcopate of the 1640s (about 7 Colm Lennon, ‘Education and religious identity in early modern Ireland’, in John Coolahan, Richard Aldrich, and Frank Simon (eds), Faiths and Education: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Ghent, 1999), pp. 57–76, at 62, 67. 8 Ford, Protestant Reformation, p. 101. 9 T. C. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland 1649–1660 (Oxford, 1975), pp. 183–5; Ford, Protestant Reformation, p. 170. 10 T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (2 vols, Urbana, 1944), vol. 2, pp. 585–6; W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (Dublin, 1976), pp. 21–2; T. W. Moody, ‘The school-bills of Conn O’Neill’, Irish Historical Studies, 2 (1940), 189–204. 11 ‘Bill of the provincial chapter held in the convent of Limerick 15 August 1629’, in Cathaldus Giblin (ed.), Liber Lovaniensis: A Collection of Irish Franciscan Documents 1629–1717 (Dublin, 1956), pp. 4–8; ‘Bill of the middle chapter held in the convent of Kilconnell, 8 February 1645’, ibid., pp. 20–5. 12 George Little, ‘The Jesuit university of Dublin (c) 1627’, Dublin Historical Record, 13 (1952), 34–47.

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thirty-seven spiritual peers, with similarly well-educated households) had attended the colleges and universities of Leuven, Paris, Orleans, Salamanca, Lisbon, Evora, Santiago de Compostella, Avila, Toledo, Alcalá, Douai, Rouen, Bordeaux, Florence, Coimbra, Pontà-Mousson, and Prague.13 The rival Irish Protestant episcopate of 1641, twenty-five strong, had attended the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrew’s, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Trinity College Dublin.14 Of Ireland’s temporal peerage, 311 strong in the seventeenth century, sixty-five certainly received a university education at Trinity College Dublin, Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow, Douai, Leuven, Paris, Caen, Saumur, and Utrecht.15 A significant number of Ireland’s secular elite also attended the Inns of Court in London to study the common law, study difficult to complete without the basics of a classical education. About 400 Irishmen, mainly Catholics, attended the Inns between 1603 and 1649.16 The Confederate general assembly of the 1640s generally numbered between 300 and 400 delegates, with peers and commoners sitting together; perhaps a quarter of that total had attended the Inns.17 At all contemporary European universities students spent three or four years completing the B.A. course (possibly adding an M.A. at the more old-fashioned northern European institutions) before proceeding to higher degrees in medicine, law, or theology. So the young Florence Conry (or Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire), later Catholic archbishop of Tuam and an anti-Stuart firebrand, arriving at Salamanca in the early 1590s, tackled a three-year B.A. grounded in logic, natural philosophy, and moral philosophy, the course in the 13 Cregan, ‘Social and cultural background’, pp. 112–3. 14 Brendan Bradshaw, J. G. Simms, and C. J. Woods, ‘Bishops of the Church of Ireland from 1534’, in T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne (eds), A New History of Ireland, IX: Maps Genealogies, Lists (Oxford, 1984; repr. 2002), pp. 392–438; H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (60 vols, Oxford, 2004) [hereafter ODNB]. 15 Jane Ohlmeyer, Making Ireland English: The Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 2012), pp. 4–5, 436–42. 16 Donal Cregan, ‘The Confederate Catholics of Ireland: the personnel of the Confederation, 1642–9’, Irish Historical Studies, 29 (1995), 490–509; Bríd McGrath, ‘Ireland and the third university: attendance at the Inns of Court 1605–1649’, in David Edwards (ed.), Regions and Rulers in Ireland 1100–1650 (Dublin, 2004), pp. 217–236, at 219. 17 Micheál Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland, 1642–1649: A Constitutional and Political Analysis (Dublin, 1999), pp. 251–7; Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘Irish recusant lawyers during the reign of Charles I’, in Micheál Ó Siochrú (ed.), Kingdoms in Crisis: Ireland in the 1640s (Dublin, 2001), pp. 63–89.

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latter based on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics.18 The B.A. with which the Dublin humanist Richard Stanihurst left Oxford in 1568 was of the more old-fashioned four-year type; but the key texts from which moral philosophy were taught were the same. Oxford’s Edwardian statutes of 1549 specified that the Ethics and Politics should be read for the B.A., and the New Statutes and supplementary statutes of 1564–65 assigned three terms to moral philosophy during which lecturers were to read from and comment on the Ethics, Politics, or (unusually) Plato’s Republic.19 James Ussher, later Protestant archbishop of Armagh, defender of Stuart absolutism, and leading European chronographer, achieved his four-year B.A. at Trinity College Dublin by 1598 and his two-year M.A. by 1600; he probably tackled the Ethics during the B.A. and the Politics during the M.A.20 One of Ussher’s student notebooks contains a study scheme for the Ethics, starting in December with Book II and finishing the following September with Book X.21 Another contains notes on a complete course of Aristotelian ethics, starting with diagrams outlining the Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero’s De Officiis.22 David Rothe, later Catholic bishop of Ossory and an outstanding agent of Catholic Reformation, received his training in natural and moral philosophy from the Jesuit University of Douai in the 1590s; the Jesuits everywhere grounded moral philosophy firmly in Aristotelian texts.23 Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people devoted so much time, trouble, and money to humanist education partly because they felt it would help them understand and better manipulate the world 18 Francisco Javier Alejo Montes, La docencia en la Universidad de Salamanca en el siglo de oro (Salamanca, 2007), pp. 31–4, 51–3; Benjamin Hazard, Faith and Patronage: The Political Career of Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire c. 1560–1629 (Dublin, 2010), pp. 28–9. 19 ‘Statuta Regis Edwardi Sexti’, in Strickland Gibson (ed.), Statuta Antiqua Universitatis Oxoniensis (Oxford, 1931), pp. 341–60, at 344; ‘Nova Statuta’, ibid., pp. 378–91, at 378; ‘Lectiones et Mulctae’, ibid., pp. 389–91, at 390. 20 Alan Ford, James Ussher: Theology, History and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England (Oxford, 2007), p. 32; Elizabethanne Boran, ‘Libraries and learning: the early history of Trinity College, Dublin from 1592–1641’ (PhD thesis, University of Dublin, 1995), p. 188. 21 Trinity College Dublin [TCD] MS 782, fol. 16r. 22 TCD MS 778, fols 136–210r, MS 782, fol. 9v. 23 Pierre Delattre, Les Établissements des Jésuites en France depuis quatre siècles (5 vols, Enghien, 1940–55), vol. 2, under ‘Douai’; Adrien Demoustier et al. (eds), Ratio studiorum: Plan raisonné et institution de études dans la Compagnie de Jésus (Paris, 1997), pp. 124–31.

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in which they lived. One of the resources with which university graduates were provided was a theory of the laws, natural and positive, which governed relations within and between human societies. The English humanist Thomas Starkey explained this theory very simply to King Henry VIII in 1536. Even fallen humans, Starkey began, still possesed a ‘sparkul of dyvynyte’, a fragment of uncorrupted reason in the human mind that could distinguish right from wrong.24 This fragment of reason acted as a compass needle, pointing towards good and away from bad; in particular it stirred all people to live in ‘cyvyle ordur’, to defend themselves against aggression, and in some way to honour God their creator.25 These basic rules comprised the natural law. All Turks, Saracens, Jews, and Christians thus recognised, even if they did not obey, natural law. Civil or positive law, Starkey went on, did indeed vary over time and from place to place; but the natural law never varied, ‘hyt hengyth no thing of tyme nor place, but accordyng as ryght reson ys ever one, so ys this law, and never varyth aftur the fansy of man’.26 Although Starkey wrote that ‘Cyvyle ordynance’ was only a means to bring man to observe the law of nature, and the civil law which could not be resolved to the law of nature was void, he allowed that where the natural law was silent, the civil law might legitimately prescribe; so Christians married only one wife, but Turks, Moors and Saracens lawfully married several.27 The theories of law which the Irish and English elites were taught in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were generally more complex than Starkey’s simple summary. An example will illustrate both the kind of text book from which these theories were learned and the context into which they were received. No earlier than 1683 and probably not much later, an anonymous Munster gentleman, perhaps connected to the Walshes of County Kilkenny, compiled a manuscript book of history and philosophy.28 He filled most of his book with English-language pedigrees and genealogical histories of the noble houses of Fitzgerald and Butler, celebrating their ancient virtue. However, the compiler gave pride of place at 24 Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, ed. T. F. Mayer (London, 1989), p. 9. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., p. 11. 27 Ibid., pp. 11–12. 28 Royal Irish Academy [RIA], MS 3. B. 40; Samuel Hayman, ‘Unpublished Geraldine documents’, The Journal of the Historical and Archaeological Association of Ireland, 3rd series, 1 (1869), 356–416.

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the front of the volume to a neat transcription, over 100 pages long, of Charles François d’Abra de Raconis’s Latin Totius Philosophiae, hoc est Logicae, Moralis, Physicae, et Metaphysicae Capita, Claraque Compendia (Principles and Plain Summaries of All Philosophy, That is Logic, Moral Philosophy, Physics, and Metaphysics), a book wildly popular among French undergraduates.29 The substantial section on ethics in this transcription was dominated by an analysis of virtue, that human excellence which the compiler thought so prominent in the Fitzgeralds and Butlers. But three pages of manuscript dealt with law and justice, outlining the legal structures that underlay the relationships of those earls of Desmond and Ormond with each other, with the English crown, and with their Gaelic Irish neighbours.30 De Raconis’s treatment of the subject was brief; compared to his lengthy account of virtue it was no more than an aide-mémoire. Justice was that virtue by which each person was to be given his or her own ius or right. Ius was an ambiguous word which sometimes meant right and sometimes law; De Raconis here took ius to mean the object of the virtue of justice (the excellently just man aimed at the right). De Raconis then defined law in such a way as to include right: a lex or law was a certain just rule, ordaining what was right for the good of the whole commonwealth and each private individual. Developing that definition further, he wrote that law was the just ordinance of a superior holding public authority, with the intention of obliging subjects to do something or not do something. Eternal law and natural law were not subject to change; but God’s positive law and human positive law did change, as the abrogation of laws both in the Old Testament and by human legislators demonstrated. De Raconis had not thought it necessary to define the terms eternal, natural, and positive law more closely in his Totius Philosophiae, evidently considering them self-explanatory. De Raconis and his anonymous Irish copyist stood at the end of a Christian Aristotelian tradition which had been institutionalised in the European universities since the thirteenth century, and this tradition provided the technical basis for elite understanding of inter and intrasocietal relations throughout Europe. The tradition’s first component was Aristotle’s theory of politics, contained in his Nicomachean Ethics 29 The compiler cited the Paris 1651 edition. I have used Charles François Abra de Raconis, Totius Philosophiae, hoc est Logicae, Moralis, Physicae, et Metaphysicae Capita, Claraque Compendia (Paris, 1626). For printings, see under Abra De Raconis on www.scholasticon.fr, consulted 25 April 2012. 30 RIA, MS 3. B. 40, ‘Totius Philosophiae . . . Auctore C. F. D’Abra De Raconis . . .’, pp. 103–5.

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and Politics. Faced by opponents who argued first that right and wrong were merely local conventions based on opinion, and second that human society arose simply out of a need for material security,Aristotle insisted that because man was a rational animal he could only fulfil his nature by doing politics together with other humans; it was only by speaking and reasoning together that human beings could achieve eudaimonia: happiness or flourishing. This truly political life was far more rich and complex than the merely social life that gregarious animals like bees lived; it was not about achieving mere safety or material prosperity. The corollary of this argument was that those who did not live a political life were deficient in reason, the very quality that separated man from animal.Those deficient in reason who failed to live a political life included madmen, natural slaves, and barbarians. All this was complicated by Aristotle’s statement in Book X of the Ethics that the life of philosophical contemplation was even better than political life; but the point was that rational men were capable of both and barbarians were capable of neither.31 Undergraduates could engage with Aristotle without much mediation: his Ethics and Politics were taught in Latin translation in all the European universities. The second component upon which contemporary understandings of human diversity rested was natural law. During the thirteenth century Aristotle, a philosopher who had next to nothing to say about any God, was adapted to Christian purposes by university teachers like the Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas. Aristotle’s eudaimonia, whether the sort found in political life or philosophy, could not be man’s ultimate end for Christians. A Christian’s ultimate end was God. So Aquinas translated Aristotle’s eudaimonia into Latin as felicitas, which might be achieved through human effort in this life, whereas the more important beatitudo (blessedness) which the faithful might receive lay in God’s gift. Moreover, while Aquinas endorsed Aristotle’s definition of man as a rational animal, he regarded the key expression of that rationality as lying not in politics or philosophy but in loving God. So the dim-witted slave who loved God was as human for Aquinas as he was not for Aristotle. Aquinas thus both limited and hollowed out Aristotle’s eudaimonia.32 Political 31 For eudaimonia, see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1095a19, 1176b-1177a19. For contemplation, see Nicomachean Ethics, 1177a12–19, 1178b23. For societies and sub-rationals, see Politics, 1252a1–1260b20, 1253b14–1255b39, 1259b18–1260b8, 1285a16. 32 John Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory (Oxford, 1998), pp. 222–54; Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford, 1992), pp. 227–30; Jean Porter, The Recovery of Virtue: The Relevance of Aquinas for

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life for Aquinas was less about excelling in humanity than about securing justice and peace, which meant that law was central to Aquinas’s politics. The Dominican distinguished three levels of law. God’s eternal law directed all things to the ends which were good for them. Animals obeyed the eternal law by following the natural inclinations which God implanted in them to eat, breed, and defend themselves. Humans had natural inclinations too, but they added to these their ability to understand rationally that some things were good and some things bad. This rational participation in the more general eternal law was natural law, a law which all humans could perceive simply because they were human. Divine positive law could be reduced to the Ten Commandments or Decalogue, promulgated by God to help the Jewish people re-learn the natural law. Human positive law was made by kings or commonwealths for the common good; but any human positive law which contravened natural law was null.33 Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, in which these arguments were contained, was the basis for theological instruction in Catholic universities across Europe from the early sixteenth century, replacing Peter Lombard’s Sentences as the text from which lecturers read and commented.34 Not all Catholics agreed with Aquinas’s scheme in detail: the Jesuits found Aquinas’s notion of irrational animals participating in a law of any kind absurd, whereas the Franciscans, following their own thirteenth-century theologian John Duns Scotus, worried that this talk of an eternal law might imply that God was bound by a law, which was impossible.35 Thus in a highly successful theology course first printed at Rome in 1642, the Irish Scotist John Punch wrote that ‘Natural law consists in the agreement, or disagreement, which some actions have with natural Christian Ethics (Louisville, 1990), pp. 134–41; P. J. Cornish, ‘Marriage, slavery, and natural rights in the political thought of Aquinas’, The Review of Politics, 60 (1998), 545–61. 33 Annabel Brett, Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law (Princeton, 2011), pp. 72–3. For the eternal law, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae, qu. 91, a. 1; qu. 93, a. 1. For the natural law, see ibid., qu. 91, a. 2.; qu. 93, a. 5. For the Decalogue, see ibid., qu. 100, a. 1. For human positive law, see ibid., qu. 90, a. 2; qu. 96, a. 4. 34 Annabel Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 124–5. 35 Brett, Changes of State, pp. 73–4; Hannes Möhle, ‘Scotus’s theory of natural law’, in Thomas Williams (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 312–31.

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reason independently of the positive law of God, or the positive law of his creation.’36 The ius gentium or law of peoples was a minor category of law which generally hovered uneasily between the status of natural law and positive law made by states, and applied to things like the correct treatment of ambassadors; Punch thought it could be regarded as identical to natural law. He defined human positive law as a universal ordinance (not just an individual instruction) by the supreme magistrate of a commonwealth prescribing or prohibiting something to his subjects tending towards the common good.37 Nevertheless, all of these Catholics agreed that human souls were still rational enough, even after the fall, to perceive the natural law and try and construct positive laws in accord with it. De Raconis’s scheme of laws synthesised these various themes; his major philosophy textbook, the Summa Totius Philosophiae, provided the definitions missing from his short summary and identified his sources.38 De Raconis Christianised Aristotle by dividing beatitudo carefully in two between a natural beatitudo, under human control, and a supernatural beatitudo which was in God’s gift alone.39 This gave De Raconis the space he needed to adopt Aristotle’s definition of natural human flourishing: the action of the mind being rational and following the prescription of virtue (excellence) over the course of a life.40 Moral virtues, such as justice, were habits acquired slowly through careful education.41 He borrowed his concept of right from Scotus and his first definition of law from Aquinas; his own second definition of law carried a Scotist inflection.42 De Raconis wrote of the eternal law, God’s plan for the universe, only that it never changed. He defined natural law as the natural light of the human intellect, or reason, commanding some things and prohibiting others; this natural law was also the same in all times and for all peoples.43 Both eternal law and natural law ordained what was 36 ‘Lex naturalis consistit in convenientia, aut disconvenientia, quam habent actiones aliquae ad naturam rationalem independenter a lege positiva Dei, aut creaturae’, John Punch, Theologiae Cursus Integer ad Mentem Scoti (Lyons, 1671), p. 290. 37 Ibid., pp. 292, 295. 38 Charles François Abra de Raconis, Summa Totius Philosophiae: Id Est, Logica, Ethica, Physica, Metaphysica et Horum Omnium Compendium (Cologne, 1629), 2nd part, pp. 83–4. 39 Ibid., p. 19. 40 Ibid., p. 19; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1098a–1098b. 41 Abra De Raconis, Summa Totius Philosophiae, 2nd part, p. 75. 42 Ibid., p. 86. 43 Ibid., p. 85.

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simply good, and the good did not change from time to time or place to place.44 Positive law was simply the command of God or of a human ruler. And regarding human laws, De Raconis was quite clear that only those laws which were just, which commanded the right for the commonwealth and its individual members, were truly laws: ‘an unjust law is not worthy of the name of law’.45 Moreover, De Raconis’s tight treatment of law emerged out of his account of the virtue of justice, of what it meant to be excellently just: there was thus every reason why a country gentlemen who conceived of political life as the rise and fall of great families striving for honour by means of virtue, in an Ireland where the legitimacy of Gaelic and English laws was constantly in question, and kingdoms and commonwealths were made and broken, would find De Raconis’s treatment a compelling one. Other examples of ethics textbooks which embedded a brief account of law in a wider treatment of the virtue of justice could easily be multiplied, and these textbooks often crossed confessional boundaries: the Jesuit Francesco Pavone’s Summa Ethicae of 1617 was warmly recommended to Oxford undergraduates in the 1650s and re-printed at Oxford in 1668, and it contained just such an analysis of justice and law.46 Some writers on Irish society inclined more towards Aristotle’s eudaimonic politics; others more towards some variety of natural law theory. Richard Stanihurst’s critique of Gaelic society, which will be treated in Chapter 2 below, dealt mainly with the Gaelic failure to achieve true virtue, human excellence; Philip O’Sullivan Beare’s defence of Gaelic Ireland, explored in Chapter 3, made substantial use of natural law. Rory O’More’s harsh contrast between liberty and slavery rested on a eudaimonic understanding of political life: the man who did not participate in the government of his commonwealth, ruling and being ruled in turn, did not lead a fully human life. Those English writers who portrayed the Gaelic Irish as solitary, barbarous, sub-human woodsmen also inclined more to the Greek Aristotle than the Christian one. One way or another, this bank of concepts was the main resource for elite discussion of the relationships between human societies. 44 Ibid., p. 87. 45 ‘iniustaque lex nequaquam nomine legis digna est’, ibid., p. 86. 46 Franciscus Pavonius, Summa Ethicae, sive Introductio in Aristotelis, et Theologorum Doctrinem Moralem (Lyons, 1620), pp. 150–4; Mordechai Feingold, ‘The humanities’, in Nicolas Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford: Volume IV, Seventeenth-Century Oxford (Oxford, 1997), pp. 211–357, at 242, 321.

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Seventeenth-century Catholic intellectuals drew extensively on this Aristotelian language in their analyses of Irish society, and especially when defending the Irish against the allegation that they were unpolitical or barbaric. John Lynch defined the barbarian succinctly in 1662: ‘barbarians are those who are averse to right reason and the common custom of humanity’.47 Lynch drew his definition from Aquinas’s commentaries on St Paul’s letters to the Romans and the Corinthians via an intermediate source: Antonio Possevino’s compendium of Jesuit learning, the Bibliotheca Selecta of 1593.48 Developing St Paul’s remark in 1 Corinthians 14:11 that people who did not share a language were barbarians to each other, Aquinas had divided the category of barbarian in two. A barbarian was either simply a foreigner (which was what St Paul meant), or an irrational person who lived outside all law and was cut off from the human race (as Aristotle explained in Book I of the Politics).49 Aquinas wrote in his commentary on Aristotle’s Politics that the former was a barbarus ad aliquem, a relative barbarian, whereas the latter was a barbarus simpliciter, an absolute barbarian.50 Possevino cited Aquinas’s commentaries in his Bibliotheca, but actually employed a three-fold division between barbarians like the Chinese and Japanese who diverged from natural law only a little; barbarians like the Peruvians and Mexica who diverged more because they did not have written language; and barbarians like the cannibals of the Caribbean who lived lives most distant from right and law. While Possevino admitted that the latter did look very like the sub-rational, sub-human natural slaves of the Politics, he insisted that even they could be evangelised.51 Writing in the 1610s in defence of the Catholic Irish, Bishop David Rothe used Aquinas’s two-fold division of the category of 47 ‘Barbaros esse qui a recta ratione, et hominum communi consuetudine abhorrent’, John Lynch (Gratianus Lucius), Cambrensis Eversus, ed. Matthew Kelly (3 vols, Dublin, 1848–52), vol. 2, pp. 200–1. 48 Anonio Possevino, Bibliotheca Selecta qua Agitur de Ratione Studiorum in Historia, in Disciplinis, in Salute Omnium Procuranda (2 vols, Rome, 1593), vol. 1, p. 575. 49 Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Romans, cap. 1, lectio 5; Aquinas, Opera Omnia (Venice, 1593–4, 17 toms in 14 vols), tom. 16, fol. 5; Aquinas, Commentary on 1 Corinthians 14, lectio 2; Aquinas, Opera Omnia, tom. 16, fol. 83v (Possevino wrote 1 Corinthians 19). 50 Aquinas, Opera Omnia, vol. 5, fols 2–2v; Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, trans. R. J. Regan (Indianapolis, 2007), pp. 11–12. 51 Possevino, Bibliotheca Selecta, vol. 1, pp. 575–6.

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barbarian just as the Dominican had intended. Rothe quoted St Paul on the relative nature of barbarism, and then wrote: Therefore our theologians, acutely cutting to the quick, observe that to be a barbarian is relative, and no man is an absolute barbarian; that is to say, because there is no man who does not communicate with some other in their language; on the contrary, the true meaning of this word and idea ought to be understood not so much from the language as from the manner of life.52

The Greek word logos meant rational speech; Aristotelians took reason and speech to be synonymous. So Rothe argued that if one had a language, as all men did, one must also possess reason, and thus there could be no absolute barbarians or natural slaves.This was why Possevino regarded the lack of a written language among the Mexica and Peruvians as a grave deficiency; it indicated that their reason was flawed. These distinctions between rational men who were capable of political life, and barbarians, were common currency among the European elite. Rothe’s Christian Aristotelian defence of the Irish was similar to the defence of the Native Americans offered by Bartolomé de Las Casas, Dominican bishop of Chiapas, before an investigative committee at Valladolid in the winter of 1550 and 1551. In the course of a five-day speech at Valladolid, the bishop introduced a four-fold typology of the barbarian.53 The first type was the man who, overcome by cruelty, was alienated from his reason, and ran amok committing atrocities. This was a sort of temporary barbarity into which even Spaniards might fall.54 Las Casas’s second type of barbarian was the barbarian ad aliquem, or relative barbarian, more or less borrowed from Aquinas’s commentary on the Politics. Thus Las Casas cited 1 Corinthians 14 again, and wrote that just as the Greeks considered the Romans barbarians, so the Romans thought that of the Greeks. But Las Casas also pursued Aquinas’s mention of the eighth-century English 52 ‘Argute igitur nostri Theologi, omnia ad vivum resecantes, observant, quod esse barbarum est relativum, ac nullum hominem esse absolute barbarum; videlicet, quia est, qui non cum aliquibus in idiomate communicet: vera autem huius nominis & notionis ratio, non tam a lingua, quam a vitae instituto debet accipi’, David Rothe, The Analecta of David Rothe, Bishop of Ossory, ed. P. F. Moran (Dublin, 1884), p. 84. 53 Bartolomé de Las Casas, Obras Completas 9: Apologia, ed. Angel Losada (Madrid, 1988). 54 Las Casas, Apologia, pp. 81–5, 122–3.

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theologian Bede here, writing that those people who were illiterate and so could not express what they thought, were also relative barbarians. Thus Bede had given letters to the English, that they might not be considered barbarians. Aquinas would not have agreed; he meant those who lacked letters to be included in his category of barbarian simpliciter, absolute barbarian, because it implied a flaw in their reason, though certainly one which could be remedied.55 Las Casas’s third category of barbarian was the barbarian simpliciter: Aquinas had written these were men who due either to low natural talent or bad environment were savage, ferocious and stupid, lacking reason, political life, and a commonwealth. These barbarians simpliciter did not marry, trade, buy, sell, or make contracts, and lived alone in mountains or forests. These were indeed the natural slaves of whom Aristotle wrote. But Las Casas insisted that this was a most rare variety of man, an error of nature or monster; a continent full of such creatures would mean that God’s intentions had been lacking in effect, which was impossible.56 And certainly it was easy to prove empirically that the Indians did not lack reason to this extent.57 The fourth and last category of barbarian was simply the pagan who had not yet been evangelised.58 Thus, the barbarian simpliciter was almost nonexistent. Las Casas summed up by stating that the first, second and fourth types of barbarian were all in fact varieties of the barbarian ad aliquem (or secundum quid as he put it): people such as the Native Americans who practised certain wild customs and most importantly lacked the true faith. While such people should be subject to evangelisation and education, their way of life could certainly not justify invasion and conquest.59 Was Rothe participating in this Spanish discourse when he argued that barbarism was only relative and that the theologians were agreed that there were no absolute barbarians? Las Casas’s Argumentum Apologiae in which the four-fold typology of the barbarian was contained was not printed until the twentieth century, and was not circulated widely in manuscript. A version of the typology, listing just the first three types of barbarian, was published in Spanish in 1552 in the pamphlet Aquí se Contiene una Disputa o 55 56 57 58 59

Ibid., pp. 86–9. Ibid., pp. 89–103. Ibid., pp. 105–17. Ibid., pp. 119–23. Ibid., pp. 122–5.

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Controversia.60 Parts of this pamphlet were bundled up with the translations of Las Casas’s denunciation of Spanish atrocities in the New World, the Brévissima Relación, into Latin, French, Italian, and other languages.61 But it is much more likely that Rothe simply remembered reading Aquinas’s commentary on the Politics, with its distinction between barbarus simpliciter and ad aliquem, when a student at Douai, and was aware also that the argument that the Americans were absolute barbarians or natural slaves had been defeated by the Dominicans. Ireland’s Protestants did not have the same incentive to dismantle the category of barbarian as their Catholic contemporaries; but they certainly based their analyses of human societies on reason, nature, and law. It is true that Martin Luther considered all study of pagan ethical texts more than a waste of time, because they encouraged the thought that there might be a kind of human excellence outside of God’s unearned gift; but most European Protestants were only indirectly Lutherans. During the early 1520s the consequences of untamed evangelical Protestantism in the form of Anabaptism and the German Peasants’ War convinced Luther’s colleague Philip Melanchthon that Protestants needed a way of relating human law to divine law in order to ensure basic civic peace. Melanchthon held hard to the Lutheran position that original sin had damaged our internal, spiritual capacities, but then argued that in external, ethical matters we could apply our natural reason to the difference between right and wrong.62 On this distinction between the internal and external, a system of natural law could be built that was taught in one form or another in all the Protestant universities of Europe. Melanchthon’s restoration of Ciceronian and Aristotelian moral philosophy to Protestant school and university curricula strongly influenced both early Calvinism and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, father of the Church of England. When Queen Elizabeth I wanted to be able to keep up theologically with her bishops, it was Melanchthon’s textbook of Protestant theology, the Loci Communes, which she 60 Bartolomé de Las Casas, ‘Aqui se contiene una disputa o controversia . . . 1552’, in Obra indigenista, ed. José Alcina Franch (Madrid, 1985), pp. 163–280, at 194–5. 61 Benjamin Keen ‘Introduction: approaches to Las Casas, 1535–1970’, in Keen and Juan Friede (eds), Bartolomé de Las Casas in History: Toward an Understanding of the Man and his Work (DeKalb, 1971), pp. 3–63. 62 Philip Melanchthon, Philosophiae Moralis Epitomes Libri Duo . . . Enarratio Aliquot Librorum Ethicorum Aristotelis (Strasbourg, 1546), pp. 1–4.

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memorised.63 However, although Calvin agreed with Melanchthon that all humans could perceive the natural law, some Calvinists were less enthusiastic about the doctrine.64 The formidable English Calvinist William Ames thought the distinction which Melanchthon and other Protestant Aristotelians made between theology governing inward matters and ethics governing outward ones absurd: God had moderated man’s fallen state by allowing him to perceive right and wrong, but no unaided human being could develop this perception of right and wrong into virtuous civil action. Ames wrote that virtues useful to government such as courage or justice could not be acquired naturally through education and practice; they were God’s gifts. Ames followed St Augustine in concluding that Aristotle’s ethics were a worthless pagan fantasy.65 But it was mainly the Protestant Aristotelians who controlled education. The two leading minds of the Irish Protestant church in the early seventeenth century, Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh, and Bishop John Bramhall of Derry, rested their understanding of human societies on natural law as firmly as any Catholic.66 Ussher was well known for adhering to a severely Augustinian theology of salvation in which man could contribute nothing to the achievement of eternal life; but nevertheless he wrote in 1624 that even a man who knew nothing of God: may live the life of a naturall and a morall man, and so exercise the freedome of his Will, not only in natural and civill, but also in morall actions, so farre as concerneth externall conformitie unto those motions of good and evill that remaine in his minde: (in respect whereof the verie Gentiles themselves which have not the Law, are said to doe by nature the things contayned in the Law:) he may have such fruite, as not only common honestie and civilitie, but common giftes of Gods spirit likewise will yeelde, and in regard thereof hee may 63 Jill Kraye, ‘Melanchthon’s ethics commentaries and textbooks’, in Kraye, Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 1–12, at 4–6; Philip Melanchthon, Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine: Loci Communes 1555, ed. C. L. Manschreck (New York, 1965), pp. vii-xxiv, 83–129. 64 S. J. Grabill, Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics (Grand Rapids, 2006), pp. 70–4. 65 William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (London, 1642), pp. 72–3, 226–7; cf. Paul Cefalu, Moral Identity in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 4–5, 6, 36–7. 66 Jack Cunningham, James Ussher and John Bramhall: The Theology and Politics of Two Irish Ecclesiastics of the Seventeenth Century (Aldershot, 2007).

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obtaine of God temporall rewards appertayning to this transitorie life, and a lesser measure of punishment in the world to com.67

In an endorsement of absolute monarchy written in 1640, but not printed until 1661, Ussher argued that God had instituted monarchy directly when he instructed Cain to rule Abel, but that the foundation of civil society would have followed anyway from ‘the very light of nature’, or reason. Later he cited Cicero’s De Republica (On the Commonwealth) and De Legibus (On the Laws) to argue that natural law was the law recognised by every human conscience, and that: To this moral law of God, whether by nature thus written in the hearts of men, or more fully delivered in Gods own written Word, or by just consequence deduced from the grounds of either of them, the greatest Monarch upon earth owes as much obedience as the lowest and meanest of all his Subjects . . .68

Ussher thus alluded to Calvinist doubts on the subject, while firmly endorsing the importance of natural law within and across human societies. Bramhall, whose theology of salvation was less Augustinian than Ussher’s, defended this orthodox Protestant understanding of natural law against the Machiavellian ‘Observator’, Henry Parker, and also against Thomas Hobbes.69 Hobbes, whom contemporaries regarded with some justification as an atheist, wished to employ Protestant hostility to the power of human reason in soteriological matters to attack the power of reason in political matters.70 Writing in 1658, Bramhall insisted again and again that Hobbes was dishonestly collapsing the operation of reason in ‘naturall or civill actions’ into its operation in ‘supernatural actions’, a different issue entirely.71 Bramhall referred to both Melanchthon and Calvin’s safeguarding of human reason and natural law, and accused Hobbes of making beasts of men: ‘swine that run by a determinate instinct of nature to 67 James Ussher, An Answer to a Challenge made by a Jesuite in Ireland (Dublin, 1624), p. 466. Quotation is from Romans 2:14. 68 James Ussher, The Power Communicated by God to the Prince, and the Obedience Required of the Subject (London, 1661), pp. 11, 51–2. Ussher quoted Romans 2:14–15. 69 John Bramhall, The Serpent Salve, or, a Remedie for the Biting of an Aspe ([London?], 1643); John Bramhall, Castigations of Mr. Hobbes his last Animadversions, in the Case Concerning Liberty and Universal Necessity (London, 1658); Henry Parker, Observations upon Some of his Majesties Late Answers and Expresses ([London], [1642]). 70 Bramhall, Castigations, p. 268. 71 Ibid., pp. 5, 28, 30, 69.

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succour their fellows of the same Herd in distresse, do not desire a civicall crown, like him who saved the life of a Citizen’.72 Pigs had only instinct or natural inclination, and so were incapable of moral actions; humans, because rational, were capable of good and evil.73 Both for Protestants and Catholics, reason marked the difference not only between the civil human and the barbarian or natural slave, but between humans and animals. Those Catholic and Protestant lawyers educated at the Inns of Court were no more insulated from the language and concepts of natural law than the inhabitants of the royal court or universities. The common lawyers often praised English common law as the best law in the world, a praise taken up by Sir Nicholas Walsh, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons in 1585, and by Patrick Darcy in the Argument which he composed and circulated at the Irish parliament in 1641 and saw printed in 1643.74 Both Irishmen cited Sir John Fortescue’s De Laudibus Legum Angliae, a fifteenth-century dialogue in which a prince was schooled in English law. Fortescue’s lord chancellor explained to his prince that all law was either natural law, customary law (like English common law), or statute law. All human beings perceived themselves as subject to the same natural law, and the laws of England, being in accord with natural law, were thus neither better nor worse than those of other peoples. Fortescue quoted a remark of Aristotle’s on natural right from Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics which he believed supported this position. But the fact that English customary law was so very ancient, Fortescue went on, proved it must be the best law for Englishmen. Had experience proved the law unsuitable (incongruent with natural law or otherwise inequitable) wise men would have changed it; but that had never proved necessary. So English kings should continue to nourish English customary or common law, and not replace it with the civil law used in France.75 Fortescue’s nuanced argument was transformed by later lawyers into the patriotic boast that the common law was, as Darcy put it, ‘the best human law’, the most just 72 Ibid., pp. 103–4, 203, 282. I have adjusted the punctuation of the quotation. 73 Ibid. p. 203. 74 Ciaran Brady, ‘The road to the View: on the decline of reform thought in Tudor Ireland’, in Patricia Coughlin (ed.), Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Cork, 1989), pp. 25–45, at 30–1; Patrick Darcy, ‘An argument’, ed. C. E. J. Caldicott, Camden Miscellany, 31 (1992), 191–320, at 271. 75 Sir John Fortescue, A Learned Commendation of the Politique Lawes of England, trans. Robert Mulcaster (London, 1599), pp. 36–9, 42–78, 129–30.

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or most congruent with natural law.76 Sir Richard Bolton introduced his 1638 manual for Irish justices of the peace with a brisk summary of this tradition: It is plaine and apparent that the common Lawes of England receiving principally their grounds from the Lawes of God and nature (which law of nature, as it pertaineth to man, is also called the law of reason) and being for their antiquity those whereby the Realme of England was governed many hundred yeares before the Norman Conquest; the Equity and Excellency whereof is such, as that there is no humane Law, within the circuite of the whole world, by infinite degrees, so apt and profitable, for the honourable, peaceable, and prosperous governement of the Kingdomes of England and Ireland . . .77

It would thus be quite wrong to imagine that Catholic lawyers educated in London and churchmen educated in France, Spain, or Italy had been taught fundamentally different ways of speaking about human society. John Lynch, who had attended a series of Jesuit and Oratorian colleges in northern France, acted as chaplain to the Galway lawyer Sir Richard Blake during the 1630s and 1640s. Writing in the 1660s, Lynch vigorously defended the English common law against the criticisms of Gaelic Irish radicals that it was a heretics’ pseudo-law. Using language that Walsh, Darcy, and Blake would have endorsed, Lynch praised the antiquity of the laws established by the Saint-King Edward the Confessor and reaffirmed in Magna Carta, especially commended trial by jury, noted the seven years of study necessary to master its fine complexities, and celebrated the constancy of Irish lawyers in the Catholic faith.78 One Irish Catholic people? Stanihurst, Rothe, Lynch and many other Irish humanists were deeply concerned both with the relationship between the Irish and the outside world, and with ethnic relationships within Ireland. One tradition, of which Richard Stanihurst was the most accomplished 76 Darcy, ‘An argument’, p. 270; see also pp. 280, 301, 306, 307; J. W. Tubbs, The Common Law Mind: Medieval and Early Modern Conceptions (Baltimore, 2000), pp. 46–52, 71–2. 77 Sir Richard Bolton, A Justice of the Peace for Ireland (Dublin, 1638), p. 1. 78 John Lynch (Eudoxius Alithinologus), Supplementum Alithinologiae ([St Malo], 1667), pp. 51–5; Janelle Greenberg, The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution: St Edward’s ‘Laws’ in Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 2–5, 36–78.

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spokesman, saw a real difference between Irishmen of English descent and those of Gaelic descent; the other tradition, in which Rothe and Lynch were prominent, denied the distinction and insisted that all Irish Catholics were now one people. A number of scholars now contend that there was no real ethnic division between Gaelic Irish and English Irish by the early seventeenth century, some going so far as to write that by the late fifteenth century the distinction was meaningless.79 This argument is mistaken: disputes among late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Irish intellectuals about the nature of Irishness and Englishness did have a substantial basis in Irish life, and were not merely the collaborative fantasies of scholastics insulated from reality by their elaborate educations. There was indeed a patriotic tradition among English Irish intellectuals during the seventeenth century which claimed that all Irishmen were now one people; but even these programmatic statements were ambiguous. Geoffrey Keating became well known throughout the island after 1635 as the author of a vernacular history of Ireland, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn.80 In his history, Keating defended the nobility and piety of the Gaelic Irish kingdoms before the twelfth-century invasion, arguing that the Gaelic learned and political traditions deserved the respect of his own English Irish contemporaries. In the course of an elegy composed about the same time for two young Butler noblemen, killed fighting the earl of Ormond, Keating described the arrival of the sean ghaill (old foreigners) in Ireland, and then explained that since they had intermarried with the Irish and shared a religion with them, they should be known as fionn ghaill (fair foreigners) rather than dubh ghaill (dark foreigners).81 Keating was clear that more united Gaelic Irishmen and English Irishmen than divided them.82 Like Keating, David Rothe saw religious orthodoxy as more important than any difference between English manorialism and Gaelic pastoralism.83 However, Rothe’s single-minded adherence to 79 Breandán Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghéar: Na Stíobhartaigh agus an tAos Léinn 1603–1788 (Dublin, 1996), pp. 80, 84; Cregan, ‘Confederate Catholics of Ireland’, pp. 490–512; Kenneth Nicholls, ‘Anglo-French Ireland and after’, Peritia, 1 (1982), pp. 370–403. 80 Geoffrey Keating, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn: the History of Ireland, ed. David Comyn and P. S. Dinneen (4 vols, London, 1902–14). 81 Geoffrey Keating, Dánta, Amhráin is Caointe Shreathrúin Céitinn, ed. E. Mac Goilla Eáin (Dublin, 1900), p. 63. 82 Bernadette Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating: History, Myth and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2nd edn, 2004), pp. 109–12. 83 Rothe, Analecta, ed. Moran, pp. 42–3.

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the identity of true religion with true civility was quite different to Keating’s delight in Gaelic learning. Just as all ‘civility and political society’ was brought west by Rome, Rothe wrote, so true religion was also Roman: For formerly when the Roman empire flourished, colonies were planted through all its provinces, even in Britain, and the natives were called together into the society of a political life; whatever nations the Romans subjugated they tempered with their laws, and refined with their manners: that was also the purpose of the Roman Church in the beginning; that whoever should give themselves over to her discipline with the right faith should imbibe also right manners and civil intercourse: certainly thus she makes chains of gold, which she also knows how to inlay with silver; and when she pours the heavenly doctrine of faith into men’s breasts, humanity is adopted, barbarism ejected, wildness laid aside, and generally all good things accompany her.84

Although Rothe also wrote cautiously that he did not agree with those who thought all Ireland’s virtue and honourableness should be traced back to English government, he clearly saw the relationship of English and Irish in Ireland as belonging to a far grander drama than Keating, with his delicate invocation of fionn ghaill and dubh ghaill and highly peculiar if not unorthodox remark that Ireland should be understood as ‘a kingdom apart by herself, like a little world’.85 It is hard to believe that Rothe would have been distressed to see the world of Gaelic learning reformed out of existence. Perhaps the English Irish intellectual most committed to the identity of English Irish with Gaelic Irish was John Lynch. In 1662, Lynch defended the humanity of the ancient and medieval Gaeil by comparing their simple virtue to that of the Romans of the old Republic ‘who raised ploughmen to the dictatorship’.86 In 1664 and 84 ‘urbanitate & civilis commercii’, ibid., pp. 98–9; ‘Ut enim olim florente Imperio Romano, per omnes provincias, etiam in Britanniam traductis coloniis, & convocatis in civilis vitae societatem indigenis, quascunque devicerant nationes legibus illi suis temperârunt, & moribus excolverunt: Ita etiam Ecclesiae Romanae illud imprimis institutum fuit, ut cum recta fide rectos etiam mores & urbanam conversationem imbiberent, quicunque se in eius disciplinam contraderent: vtique illa murenulas sic conficit aureas, ut pariter sciat easdem argento vermiculare; & cum coelestem doctrinam fidei pectoribus transfundit, humanitas adsciscitur, barbaries ejicitur, exuitur feritas, & plerumque omnia bona pariter cum ea veniunt’, ibid., p. 99. 85 Ibid., p. 95; ‘ríoghacht ar leith léi féin, amhail domhan mbeag’, Keating, Foras Feasa, vol. 1, pp. 38–9. 86 ‘Qui ab aratro deducti dictaturae admovebantur’, Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, ed. Kelly, vol. 2, pp. 222–3.

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1667, he claimed that Richard O’Ferrall’s attempt to exclude Irishmen of English descent from preferment in the Irish church was wrongheaded not least because Irishmen of all sorts had long since been united by friendship and intermarriage.87 As Ostrogoths who burned Italy were now considered Italians, Lynch continued, as Franks were now considered French, and Goths were called Spanish, so too in Ireland conquerors and conquered had become one people, and all now simply knew each other as Hiberni, Irishmen.88 But even Lynch, angered by O’Ferrall’s allegations of heretical barbarism among the English Irish, could not restrain himself from quoting Polydore Vergil’s description of the Gaelic Irish as wild, uncivilised, stupid, and hostile woodsmen, John Barclay’s account of the rustic manners of the Irish who lived outside the towns, and Archbishop Peter Lombard’s argument that the twelfth-century English invasion had gifted the Irish more civil customs than they had ever possessed before, as well as Lombard’s remark on the preeminent incivility of Ulstermen.89 Thus, the arguments of these intellectuals for the unity of Gaelic Irish and English Irish must be understood as a fragile and contested political programme. By the very fact that they were arguments, they did not comprise a mentalité, a cultural unconscious, or a set of unarticulated common assumptions.90 Scholars who have attended to literature in the Irish language, especially the high-register verse composed by the Gaelic learned classes, as well as those historians who have examined evidence of intermarriage between Gaelic Irish and English Irish elites and their common employment of Gaelic legal instruments, have emphasised a high degree of social and cultural homogeneity through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.91 But these conclusions must be qualified in various ways. First, even that large body of verse, composed by English Irish poets, dedicated to or commissioned by 87 John Lynch (Eudoxius Alithinologus), Alithinologia sive Veridica Responsio ad Investam Mendaciis ([St Malo], 1664), p. 8; Lynch, Supplementum, passim. 88 Lynch, Alithinologia, pp. 9, 64–5. 89 Lynch, Supplementum, pp. 14–15. 90 David Swartz, Culture & Power: the Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Chicago, 1997), pp. 225–8, 231–2. 91 Katherine Simms, ‘Bards and barons: the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and the native culture’, in Robert Bartlett and A. Mackay (eds), Medieval Frontier Societies (Oxford, 1989), pp. 177–97; Michelle O Riordan, The Gaelic Mind and the Collapse of the Gaelic World (Cork, 1990), pp. 14, 81–90, 224–8, 272– 3; Marc Caball, Poets and Politics: Continuity and Reaction in Irish Poetry 1559–1625 (Cork, 1998), pp. 12, 45–50, 122–3, 141–2.

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English Irish patrons, which clearly demonstrated the participation of a large proportion of the English Irish gentry and nobility outside the Dublin Pale in the codes and practices of the Gaelic intellectuals, provides no simple picture of cultural togetherness. Take, for example, Tadhg Óg Ó hUiginn’s verse exhortation to Edmund ‘na Féasoige’ Burke, lord of Lower Connacht from 1440 to 1458. Ó hUiginn urged Burke to enforce the law of the English kings on the gaill (foreigners, persons of English descent) of Ireland, as each gall now behaved as though he were an earl to himself. This would be all the more easy to achieve, the poet continued, as Éamonn himself had Gaelic blood.92 It is far from easy to deduce from such remarks what a poet like Ó hUiginn thought the proper order of Ireland’s societies should be. Second, while there is no doubt that it was common for the younger sons and cadet branches of the noble houses of Kildare and Ormond to marry into the Gaelic nobility in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (while the earls of Desmond themselves often took Gaelic Irish wives), nevertheless it is clear that this pattern changed considerably into the seventeenth century. In the wake of the destruction of independent Gaelic lordship during the Nine Years War, the untitled Gaelic nobility tended to decline into an alienated gentry, while Irishmen who could claim titles of English nobility were keen to secure their position by securing useful marriages in England. So it is true that the English Irish confederate general Thomas Preston married the daughter of Sir Phelim O’Neill in 1642, and that many sons-in-law and grandsons of Hugh O’Neill, second earl of Tyrone, were to be found even among the various branches of the Butlers; but those Prestons and Butlers had as many English connections as Gaelic Irish ones.93 And in any case, the patriciates of Ireland’s cities and towns seem rarely to have intermarried with the Gaelic elite.94 Third, there is no doubt that there were strong structural reasons for English Irish elites in Munster and Connacht to embrace Gaelic Irish criminal law from the fourteenth century to the sixteenth: the English common law was a legal system particularly committed to centralised royal power 92 Lambert McKenna (ed.), Aithdioghluim Dána (2 vols, Dublin, 1939–40), vol. 1, pp. 152–7, vol. 2, pp. 90–3. 93 Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘“Making Ireland English”: the early seventeenth-century Irish peerage’, in Brian Mac Cuarta (ed.), Reshaping Ireland 1550–1700: Colonization and its Consequences (Dublin, 2011), pp. 131–46; Cregan, ‘Confederate Catholics’, p. 492. 94 Colm Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland: The Incomplete Conquest (Dublin, 1994), pp. 25–27.

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and hostile to autonomous lordship, which made it next to useless when the alternatives which faced English Irish lords and gentry in frontier areas in the aftermath of the Bruce invasion and Black Death were either autonomous lordship or destruction. Brehon law, an elaborate legal tradition of arbitration, compromise, and facesaving based on fines and compensation, could be much more useful in a land of many aggressive independent lords and multiple frontier zones than the hyper-royalism of the common law.95 Nevertheless, historians of sixteenth-century Ireland are quite familiar with the complaints of gentry communities, especially those on the fringes of the English Pale, who saw Gaelic exactions as temporary expedients at best (if not inherently tyrannous) and royal justice as the ideal.96 Again, it is hard to see clear evidence of irreversible acculturation here. In all these discussions of ethnic allegiance, however, the role of land law in structuring Irish communities has been neglected; and landholding above all else determined wealth and power in early modern Ireland. In principle, English and Irish landholding was entirely different. In Gaelic Ireland land was not owned by individuals but by the elite families as corporations. Membership of this fine (sept or legal kindred) was determined by descent from a single male ancestor and individual members of the clan had the right to the use of the land in question for their own lifetimes only; ownership remained vested ultimately in the fine.97 For example, on 10 June 1589 the Court of Chancery of Ireland decreed in favour of the plaintiff Cosney McDonell O Moloye who was to recover the lands at Derrydolney in Ballyboy barony, King’s County, from the defendants Cahir McFirr O Moloye and others.98 Cosney McDonell had taken his case to chancery because although the common law courts operated on principles which were antipathetic to Gaelic land law and custom, the Court of Chancery decided cases on the basis of equity or natural law and could thus adjudicate even if the custom 95 Nicholls, ‘Anglo-French Ireland’; Nicholls, ‘The development of lordship in county Cork 1300–1600’, in Patrick O’Flanagan and C. G. Buttimer (eds), Cork: History & Society (Dublin, 1993), pp. 157–211. 96 C. A. Empey and Katherine Simms, ‘The ordinances of the White Earl and the problem of coign in the later middle ages’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 75, section C (1975), 161–87. 97 Liam Ó Buachalla, ‘Some researches in ancient Irish law’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, 52 (1947), 41–54, 135–48; ibid., 53 (1948), 1–12, 75–81. 98 Kenneth Nicholls, ‘Some documents on Irish law and custom in the sixteenth century’, Analecta Hibernica, 26 (1970), 103–29.

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or unwritten positive law in question was purely Irish. Cosney’s first submission to the court explained that the fine in question considered themselves the sons and grandsons of Fargananim O Moloye. Fargananim had thirteen sons (perhaps by different women) Cahir McFirr, Donnell McFirr, Teige McFirr, Lychagh McFirr, John McFirr, Kealagh McFirr, Art McFirr, Conn McFirr, Theobalde McFirr (by then deceased without issue), Neyle McFirr (also deceased without issue), Breane McFirr (who had three adult sons), Hugh McFirr and finally Keane McFirr. Cosney explained that his father was Fargananim’s second son Donnell who had died seized of the lands of Derrydolney. Derrydolney should have descended to him, Cosney argued, but on his father’s death, and while he was still a minor, the rest of the kin-group pounced and made a ‘pretended partition’ of the sept’s lands overall which resulted in Cosney losing Derrydolney and being assigned poorer lands elsewhere, all of which, Cosney alleged, caused him a loss of two hundred pounds sterling. Lychagh McFirr replied on behalf of the rest of the fine. First, he insisted that Cosney’s father Donnell had held Derrydolney only at the pleasure of the eldest son Cahir. Then, in order to show that the other sons had acted in good faith, he explained that Cosney was not even Donnell’s legitimate heir as English law would understand it. Cosney’s parents had not been married when he was born, but Donnell had ‘named’ him as his son (according to Gaelic custom) and the rest of the family had accepted this. Once he had been named as a grandson of Fargananim, impartial friends were chosen by mutual consent who divided the lands at issue to the satisfaction of all concerned, including Cosney, who declared himself content with the arrangement on oath ‘being then a tall man of stature and of full age’. For whatever reason, as we have seen, Lychagh’s defence was unsuccessful and Cosney regained control of Derrydolney (though the nature of his tenure was unspecified).99 But this case illustrates the crucial characteristic of Gaelic landownership: the common ownership of land by the kin-group, and the transfer of the right to the profits of the land from one end of the kin-group to another, rather than a simple descent from father to son. The practices of this comparatively unimportant family seem very largely the same as those of the O’Sullivans in the 1580s and the O’Callaghans in the 1590s, and can be taken as characteristic of Gaelic landholding generally.100 99 Nicholls, ‘Some documents’, pp. 111–13. 100 Ó Buachalla, ‘Some researches in ancient Irish law’, 53 (1948), p. 79.

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The land law of the English lordship or kingdom of Ireland was identical to that of the kingdom of England. The king owned all the land, and all individuals held it as the king’s direct or indirect tenants. On the death of an English Irish gentleman or nobleman who held his land from the king by knight service or common soccage (forms of tenure which made the tenant liable to different sets of conditions and payments) that land would descend by primogeniture to his eldest son or failing that be divided among his daughters.101 But in Ireland, as in other feudal frontier societies, a female succession could be disastrous, and so legal arrangements were most often made to ensure the land passed to the nearest male heir. In the same spirit, rather than sending younger sons away from the lordship to make theirs careers in the church, it was common in Ireland to keep them and their valuable military expertise nearby by giving them a portion of the family inheritance. In this way, a numerous and belligerent English Irish family could start to look very like a Gaelic kindred, particularly if they maintained an Irish-speaking court of poets, brehons, and genealogists. But the vital question is whether English Irish families actually began to pass the rights to the profit of land about within a wider Irish-style kindred.102 Some extraordinary sources from the 1650s indicate that the English Irish family rarely developed into a Gaelic Irish kindred, and that even at that late date significant differences still existed between Gaelic Ireland and English Ireland. In the wake of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland between 1649 and 1652, the new government undertook the mass expropriation of the Catholic elite (Gaelic Irish and English Irish) which was necessary in order to repay the costs of that conquest.Thus the regime was faced with the unprecedented task of mapping, measuring, and counting the entire country, a project undertaken by the remarkable Sir William Petty, one of the founders of the modern science of statistics.103 Petty’s cartographic Down Survey of Ireland, composed between 1654 and 1659, along with the earlier inquisitorial Civil Survey, provided his superiors with a remarkably accurate picture of the state of landownership and 101 A. J. Otway-Ruthven, A History of Medieval Ireland (London, 1968), pp. 102–25; Ohlmeyer, Making Ireland English, pp. 98–100. 102 E. Barry, ‘Barrymore (continued)’, Journal of the Cork Historical & Archaelogical Society, 5 (1899), 209–24, at 221; Nicholls, ‘Some documents’, p. 106; David Edwards, The Ormond Lordship in County Kilkenny, 1515–1642 (Dublin, 2003), pp. 65–8. 103 Ted McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford, 2009).

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settlement in Ireland. Not all of these detailed surveys and records survive; but by correlating the information from the Down Survey, which recorded the distribution, shape, and size of property units, with information from the Civil Survey, which recorded the nature of the landownership and the names of the landowners, William Smyth has been able to paint a vivid picture of the relationship of ethnicity to landownership throughout County Tipperary. The topography of Tipperary divided naturally into three parts.The southern part was characterised by land of high agricultural quality.104 Then there was a middle part of less dense settlement and a mixture of good land, hill, and bog. The northern and least settled part was composed of lowland, bogland, hills, and woods. The first part, south and east Tipperary, was distinguished by individual English Irish landowners, a manorial pattern of landownership, and many market towns well connected to Waterford port.These people practised arableintensive agriculture, ate bread, and made hay.105 Daily life on a manor in south Tipperary was not very different to that on an English or French manor. For example, the barony of Middlethird County Tipperary in July 1654 contained the somewhat run-down manor of Drangan, the lord of which in 1640 had been James, Baron of Dunboyne (whose family had in the past intermarried with the O’Briens and MacCarthy Reaghs), with a corn mill useless most of the summer for want of water, but nevertheless with a court leet and court baron, which his freeholders were obliged to attend, and all the other usual ‘immunities and priviledges belonging to a manor’.106 Similarly, in February 1654 the Court of Survey found that in 1640 Thomas Butler, Baron of Cahir (whose ancestor Theobald had commissioned a family duanaire) held the manor of Cahir in the barony of Iffay and Offay, with its court leet, court baron, market every Thursday in town, two fairs a 104 W. J. Smyth, ‘Making the documents of conquest speak: the transformation of property, society and settlement in seventeenth-century counties Tipperary and Kilkenny’, in M. Silverman and P. H. Gulliver (eds), Approaching the Past: Historical Anthropology Through Irish Case Studies (New York, 1992), pp. 236–90, at 261–3. 105 Ibid., pp. 261–3. 106 R. C. Simington, The Civil Survey A.D. 1654–1656 County of Tipperary (2 vols, Dublin, 1931–34), vol. 1, p. 160; David Beresford, ‘Butler, Edmund (c. 1431–1499), 8th lord of Dunboyne and seneschal of Tipperary’, in James McGuire and James Quinn (eds), Dictionary of Irish Biography (9 vols, Cambridge, 2009) [hereafter DIB], vol. 2, pp. 105–6; David Beresford, ‘Butler, James (a. 1488–1538), 10th lord of Dunboyne’, in DIB, vol. 2, p. 129; T. B. Butler ‘The barony of Dunboyne’, Irish Genealogist, 2 (1943–55), 66–81, 107–21, 130–6, 162–4.

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year, and two corn mills.107 Extrapolating from the better-documented manors in Kilkenny, these Tipperary manors would have been little communities governed by old and involved English customary laws related to the rights attached to the status of burgess and cottier, the duties of different classes of tenant at the mills, the obligation to carry out repairs to the manorial buildings, and the usual labour services of hay-making, ploughing, and reaping.108 The poorest and northernmost part of Tipperary was strikingly Gaelic in surnames, in the extent of pastoral agriculture, and in land units shared by varying numbers of kin in complex partnership arrangements.109 In particular, the combination of kindred-based landownership and pastoral agriculture evidently encouraged a much more dispersed pattern of settlement than among the manors and villages of south Tipperary.110 For example, the Court of Survey found in July 1654 that in 1640 the whole parish of Killea, 1,227 plantation acres, was held by fourteen O Maghers,‘being all Descended out of the house of O Magher whose title they clayme (vizt) by fee from their Ancestors,That the meares can by noe way be sett forth distinctly onely by the outer lyne or bounds of the whole laid downe’.111 But Gaelic kindreds could hold land by mixing English and Irish practices: in September 1654, the wealthy MacEgan brehon family of Lower Ormond held several thousand acres as individuals, but nevertheless still held the 650 plantation acres of family hearthland, Ballymacegan in the parish of Lorrha, in joint, mixed ownership among the three senior members: Flan, Constance, and John.112 The middle part of mixed 107 Simington, Civil Survey, vol. 1, pp. 350–1; James Carney (ed.), Poems on the Butlers of Ormond, Cahir, and Dunboyne (A.D. 1400–1650) (Dublin, 1945), pp. ix–x, xiii–xv, xvii. 108 C. A. Empey, ‘County Kilkenny in the Anglo-Norman period’, in William Nolan and Kevin Whelan (eds), Kilkenny: History and Society (Dublin, 1990), pp. 75–95, at 94–5; C. A. Empey, ‘Medieval Knocktopher: a study in manorial settlement’, Old Kilkenny Review (1982), pp. 329–42 and (1983), 441–52; W. J. Smyth, ‘Territorial, social and settlement hierarchies in seventeenth century Kilkenny’, in Nolan and Whelan (eds), Kilkenny, pp. 127–60, at 130–2. 109 Smyth, ‘Making the documents’, pp. 261–3. 110 William Smyth ‘Property, patronage and population: reconstructing the human geography of mid-seventeenth century County Tipperary’, in William Nolan and T. G. McGrath (eds), Tipperary: History and Society (Dublin, 1985), pp. 104–38, at 122. 111 Simington, Civil Survey, vol. 1, pp. 5–6. 112 Simington, Civil Survey, vol. 2, p. 318; W. J. Smyth, Map-Making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c. 1530–1750 (Dublin, 2006), p. 322.

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quality land in Tipperary was characterised by hybrid English and Gaelic landownership practices, and mixed pastoral and arable agriculture. Analogues for the three parts of Tipperary can be found throughout the rest of Ireland. South Tipperary was very similar to other lands of the Ormond lordship and the Pale around Dublin; a landscape of English towns, villages, manors, and farms.113 The strikingly Gaelic and economically marginal northern part of Tipperary was similar to much of County Waterford, south Kerry, and the midlands on either side of the Shannon river. Even lower Gaelic populations marked much of King’s County, north Roscommon, south Sligo, and south Donegal.114 Similar patterns are very likely in the rest of Connacht and northwest Clare for which records do not survive. Tipperary’s middle band of settlement seems characteristic also of Meath, the old lordship of the Desmond Fitzgeralds (north Kerry and west Limerick), southern Clare, some baronies in south and north Kilkenny, much of Leix, and all the baronies bordering the dominant core of settlement along the Barrow and the Liffey.115 Above all else, Smyth’s crucial finding was this: those with an English Irish surname were very likely to hold their land as individuals; a Gaelic Irish surname meant that one was likely to share land with a number of kin in a complex partnership arrangement.116 Thus while there were areas in which hybrid practices were prevalent, this did not mean that Englishness and Irishness were of no importance: where one stood between these poles of Englishness and Irishness mattered a great deal to the life structures of gentlemen, peasants, and herdsmen. Even as late as the 1650s, the difference between English Ireland and Gaelic Ireland was not a chimera; it was a real difference. Conclusion The first problem tackled by this chapter can be resolved more easily than the second. Envisaging Renaissance humanism as an educational and discursive practice grounded in a limited group of Ciceronian and Aristotelian texts yields immediate results: the education which Ireland’s early modern elites received from their tutors, and in their grammar schools and universities, directly 113 114 115 116

Smyth, Map-Making, pp. 206–7. Ibid., p. 208. Ibid., p. 209. Ibid., pp. 203, 207.

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informed their understanding of the relationships between peoples. This form of humanism remained grounded in those institutions until at least the 1650s, and only changed very slowly thereafter.117 Chapter 2 below will examine the employment of this Ciceronian and Aristotelian humanism by English and English Irish critics of Gaelic Ireland. Chapter 3 will explain the counter-arguments constructed by a number of Gaelic Irish intellectuals, which rested especially on the relationship between natural law and history. The problem of relations between Gaelic Irish and English Irish is more complex. On the one hand, the landscape of English Ireland and of Gaelic Ireland was very different in the 1650s, and had been different since the Middle Ages; different in agricultural practice; different in settlement pattern; different in the political structures through which rich and poor lived their lives. On the other hand, one can point to many instances of elite English Irish families attempting to include themselves in the political ideologies of the Gaelic intellectuals, and also to nationally significant alliances of English Irish and Gaelic Irish noblemen against Tudor rule.118 Nevertheless, the failure of those alliances, which never included the townsmen of English descent, and the subsequent thickening of the Stuart state in Ireland, caused many English Irish noblemen to fall back on their Englishness as a political resource. This tendency was especially evident in marriage strategies. This meant that during the early seventeenth century the relationship between Irishmen of English and of Gaelic descent was intimate but fragile; it was a relationship from which trust could easily drain. Chapter 3 below will describe a Gaelic Irish political tradition which regarded English Irish perfidy as axiomatic.

117 Laurence Brockliss, ‘Philosophy teaching in France, 1600–1740’, History of Universities, 1 (1981), pp. 131–68. 118 Steven Ellis, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors 1447–1603: English Expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule (London, 2nd edn, 1998), pp. 148–9, 312–16, 340–2.

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Degeneration, for Elizabethans and Jacobeans, meant leaving the civil or political life of Englishmen and taking up the barbarous or unpolitical life of Gaelic Irishmen. Richard Stanihurst wrote a description of the process in the late 1570s while living in the London household of Gerald Fitzgerald, eleventh earl of Kildare, as tutor to the earl’s heir Garret.1 The instance which Stanihurst chose took place when Gerald’s half-brother, ‘Silken’ Thomas Fitzgerald, lord Offaly and tenth earl of Kildare, rebelled, surrendering the sword of state before the Irish council at St Mary’s Abbey on 11 June 1534. Thomas sat at the council table, in Stanihurst’s telling, and then, as his bodyguard swept into the room, delivered a short speech typical of any hot-headed baron in revolt. Despite our service to our prince, Thomas said, we are forced to defend ourselves in arms; we will show ourselves not churls but gentlemen; I return the sword of state and trust to my own sword; I hope all Ireland and England will combine against the king’s cruelty and tyranny.2 Then, Stanihurst went on, Thomas made to surrender the sword of state to the lord chancellor, George Cromer, archbishop of Armagh. Cromer stopped 1 Richard Stanihurst, ‘A treatise contayning a playne and perfect description of Irelande’ and ‘The thirde booke of the historie of Ireland, comprising the raigne of Henry VIII’, in R. Holinshed (ed.), The First Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande and Irelande (2 vols, London, 1577), vol. 1, fols 1–29, pp. 76–115. I will cite Liam Miller and Eileen Power (eds), Holinshed’s Irish Chronicle (Dublin, 1979). 2 Miller and Power (eds), Holinshed’s Irish Chronicle, pp. 262–3.

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the younger man and asked permission to speak, which Thomas granted. The real Cromer was an Oxford M.A., and Stanihurst reconstructed a plausible specimen of deliberative oratory for the archbishop, urging the young nobleman to ascertain his father’s wellbeing (the putative cause of the rebellion) before taking further action, and warning of the danger which such rebellion posed to family and commonwealth. The structure could have come straight from the Rhetorica ad Herennium, a beginner’s manual in rhetoric attributed to Cicero and a staple of the grammar schools.3 But, in Stanihurst’s account, some men in that council chamber did not speak English, so the lord chancellor’s words could have no effect on them, and one of those ignorant of English belonged to an order antipathetic to mainstream European rhetorical and ethical tradition. Stanihurst explained that Thomas’s bodyguard, observing the chancellor’s impassioned speech, but not knowing the language, speculated among themselves on the subject; some guessing that it was a sermon, others that Cromer was reciting heroic verse in praise of Thomas. Then Stanihurst moved to a more sinister presence: And thus as every Idiot shot his foolishe bolt at the wise Counsalour his discourse, who in effect did nought else but drop precious stones before Hogges, one Bard de Nelan, an Irishe rithmour, and a rotten sheepe able to infect an whole flocke, was chatting of Irish verses, as though his tongue had runne on patterns, in commendation of the Lorde Thomas, investing him with the tytle of silken Thomas, bycause his horsemens jacks were gorgeously embrodered with silke: and in the ende he tolde him that he lingred there overlong.4

This poet was the wicked counterpart of Lord Chancellor Cromer. As Cromer used good and civil English language, heavily inflected by classical ethics and rhetoric, to draw Thomas towards the path of virtue, so the bard Nelan used an uncivil language, Irish, to lure Thomas towards vice. Stirred by the vain praise and wicked counsel of the bard, Thomas ‘rendred up the sword, and flung away like a bedlam, beeing garded wyth hys brutish drove of brainsicke Rebelles.’5 Thomas rejected English politics and embraced Irish barbarism, and Stanihurst thought that language marked the difference. Chapter 1 argued that the eudaimonic politics contained in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics which understood humans 3 [Cicero], Rhetorica ad Herennium, 3. 2–3, 24. 4 Miller and Power (eds), Holinshed’s Irish Chronicle, p. 265. 5 Ibid., pp. 265–6.

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to be speaking, reasoning animals was very widely taught to Irish undergraduates in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This chapter will demonstrate how Stanihurst employed a Ciceronian version of this eudaimonic politics to construct a comprehensive critique of Gaelic society. Neither Romantic nationalists, nor scholars who employ the concept of culture to analyse human societies, regard language as ethically or politically neutral; since the end of the eighteenth century Europeans have often seen language as the keystone of an individual culture, the chief expression of that culture’s animating spirit.6 For Aristotelians like Stanihurst language was no less important, but for a different reason. Rational speech or logos was that capacity by which humans surpassed the animals, it was the essence of humanity. Just as some individuals were more rational than others, so some societies had better languages than others, as Latin or English, Stanihurst argued, were better than Irish. Richard Stanihurst was perhaps the most accomplished and successful Irish scholar of the sixteenth century.7 Born in 1547 in Dublin at the heart of English Ireland as the son of the speaker of the Irish parliament, he received the ideal humanist education. After preliminaries at home he was sent to Peter White’s impressive grammar school in Kilkenny for about six years; Stanihurst then graduated B.A. from University College, Oxford in 1568, and headed to the Inns of Court in London where he acquired further gentlemanly polish before setting out on a continental tour. The product of his studies in Oxford, an elegant and practical Latin commentary on Porphyry’s Aristotelian logic, was printed in 1570.8 Attached to Kildare’s household in London, Stanihurst contributed extensively to the Irish portion of Raphael Holinshed’s English Chronicles printed in 1577.9 Moving to the Low Countries in the early 1580s, Stanihurst studied at the University of Leiden, and 6 Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), pp. 130–45. 7 Colm Lennon, ‘Stanihurst, Richard (1547–1618)’, in ODNB, vol. 52, pp. 158–62; Colm Lennon, Richard Stanihurst the Dubliner, 1547–1618 (Dublin, 1981); Vincent Carey, ‘A “dubious loyalty”: Richard Stanihurst, the “wizard” earl of Kildare, and English-Irish identity’, in V. P. Carey and U. LotzHeumann (eds), Taking Sides? Colonial and Confessional Mentalities in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2003), pp. 61–77. 8 Richard Stanihurst, Harmonia seu Catena Dialectica in Porphyrianos Institutiones (London, 1570). 9 Miller and Power (eds), Holinshed’s Irish Chronicle.

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published English translations of Virgil, an ambitious Latin history of Ireland, and an important life of St Patrick.10 Already a Spanish pensioner, Stanihurst’s apparently self-taught medical expertise saw him summoned to Madrid by King Philip II in 1591, and he spent three years at court, engaged in medicine, alchemy, and diplomacy. From this period dates a Spanish manuscript defending alchemy and attacking magic.11 In the later 1590s, Stanihurst returned to the Spanish Netherlands, again as a Spanish pensioner, and between that time and his death in 1618 wrote six political, theological, and devotional works, most of which were printed.12 Stanihurst’s patriotism was that of a Palesman; it was strongly inflected by his Englishness, his loyalty to the house of Kildare, and his Catholicism. The second book of Stanihurst’s De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis Libri Quattuor (Four Books On the History of Ireland) began with a defence of history-writing which made his patriotism very clear: I have described in these books the wars and glorious victories of our ancestors who migrated from Britain to Ireland. And it is not difficult to supply a reason for this decision of mine. First, it has been witnessed and confirmed by our native monuments of antiquity that nothing in the whole memory of times and ages touching Ireland is more memorable than that she was stormed by British men, subdued by their arms, conquered by their battles, distinguished by their triumphs and victories. Next, the knowledge of that history pertains especially to us, who have our home in the English province, and have been born of British stock . . . For to be ignorant of that which touched your fatherland before your birth, is forever to be a foreigner in your own fatherland.13 10 Richard Stanihurst, The First Four Books of Virgil’s Aeneis Translated into English Heroical Verse (Leiden, 1582); Stanihurst, De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis Libri Quattuor (Antwerp, 1584); Stanihurst, De Vita S. Patritii Libri Duo (Antwerp, 1587). 11 María Tausiet Carlés, ‘El toque de alquimia: un método casi infalible dedicado a Felipe II por Richard Stanyhurst’, in Francisco Javier Campos and Fernández de Sevilla (eds), La ciencia en el Monasterio del Escorial (Madrid, 1993), pp. 525–58. 12 Lennon, Richard Stanihurst, p. 174. 13 ‘Maiorum nostrorum, qui ex Britannia in Hiberniam demigrarunt, bella, et gloriosas victorias, his libris complexus sum. Atque huius voluntatis meae, non est difficile rationem subiicere. Primum domesticis antiquitatis monumentis testatum consignatumque est, nihil in omni memoria aetatum et temporum magis memorabile, Hibernia contigisse, quam eam Britannicis viribus reseratam, armis oppressam, praeliis subactam, triumphis et tropaeis notatam fuisse. Deinde illa historiae cognitio, ad nos, qui in Anglica provincia

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Both Stanihurst’s De Rebus and the earlier English-language history he published in Holinshed’s Chronicle portrayed the Fitzgeralds as the heroic founders and defenders of the English Pale; so much so that the English Privy Council judged the first version of the Chronicle much too sympathetic to the Fitzgeralds and hostile to the Butler earls of Ormond. Stanihurst was summoned to explain himself in person, and the Chronicle was reprinted with the offending passages removed.14 Stanihurst’s own increasingly radical Catholicism does not seem much to have weakened his Englishness. In 1570 Stanihurst had entertained his Oxford friend, Edmund Campion, later to suffer execution while on the Jesuit mission in England, in Dublin; and after the death of his second wife in 1602, Stanihurst entered the priesthood and took up a chaplaincy at the court of the archdukes at Brussels. Certainly by the later 1580s, the Dubliner was committed to securing a Catholic succession to the Irish and English kingdoms, with the support of Spanish arms if necessary. Crucially, Stanihurst did not seem to think it either practical or desirable for Ireland to be re-Catholicised by itself, but only in a wider reformation of the islands of Britain and Ireland, enabled by Spanish arms.15 This reluctance to endorse independent political action in Ireland was due in large part to the scepticism with which Stanihurst regarded the claims to civility of the Gaelic Irish. In all his political works he argued that the Gaelic Irish lived lives more barbarous than civil, and even in his later life of St Patrick he still labelled Gaelic Irish rulers tyrants.16 Stanihurst made this clear early in his ‘Description of Irelande’ which preceded the history of Ireland in Holinshed’s Chronicle. First, the Dubliner addressed the sceptics: presumably Irishmen of English descent like the Nugents of Delvin proud of their skill in the Irish language.17 Surely, he wrote, the language one spoke was irrelevant

14 15

16 17

sedem habemus, atque ex Britannica stirpe generati sumus, in primis pertinet . . . Ignorare enim, quid priusquam in lucem sis editus, in patria contigerit, id est perpetuo in patria esse peregrinum’, Stanihurst, De Rebus, pp. 57–8. Miller and Power (eds), Holinshed’s Irish Chronicle, pp. xvi–xvii. A. J. Loomie, ‘Richard Stanihurst in Spain: two unknown letters of August 1593’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 28 (1969), 145–55; Colm Lennon, ‘Richard Stanihurst (1547–1618) and Old English identity’, Irish Historical Studies, 21 (1978), 121–43; Colm Lennon, ‘Richard Stanihurst’s “Spanish Catholicism”: ideology and diplomacy’, in Erique García Hernán (ed.), Irlanda y la monarquia hispanica: Kinsale 1601–2001 (Madrid, 2002), pp. 75–88. Stanihurst, De Vita S. Patritii, pp. 23, 42. Gerard Murphy (ed.), ‘Poems of exile by Uilliam Nuinseann mac Barúin Dealbhna’, Éigse: A Journal of Irish Studies, 6 (1948), 8–15.

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to political allegiance? Would it really benefit the ‘wealepublicke’ or commonwealth to banish the Irish language from the Pale?18 Stanihurst denied the former and affirmed the latter. He explained that a country could only be said to be conquered if the people of that country took on the ‘law, apparayle, and language’ of the conquerors.19 Language and dress could not be regarded as separate from political life: right reason should animate everything. Stanihurst developed the point further by introducing a classical analogy. As Irish was to the English of Ireland, so Greek was to the Romans of the old republic: ‘He was accompted no gallant among the Romaines, that coulde not prattle and chatte Greeke’. So it was that Cicero’s father, perceiving: hys countreymen to become changelings . . . & to suck with the Greeke the conditions of the Grecians, as to be in wordes talkative, in behaviour light, in condicions quaint, in maners haute, in promises unstedfast, in othes rash, in bargaines wavering (which were reckened for Greekish properties in those dayes) the olde gentleman not so much respecting the neateness of the language, as the naughty fruite it brought wyth it, sayde, that his countreymen, the Romaynes, resembled the bonde slaves of Siria. For the more parfit they were in the Greeke, the woorse they were in theyr maners and lyfe.20

Stanihurst noted his source in the margin as Book II of Cicero’s De Oratore. A little later the Dubliner twisted the knife by alleging that there was no Irish word for knave, just as Cicero had alleged there was no Greek word for ineptus (inappropriate or foolish), and again Stanihurst cited De Oratore.21 For Cicero as for Stanihurst, language was inherently political, and Stanihurst chose to cite a work by Cicero which tackled the relationship between language and politics-head on. Throughout his mature works on oratory, law, ethics, and politics, Cicero reinterpreted the Greek philosophical tradition in order to make it more congenial to Roman life, whether rehabilitating worldly honour from Greek scepticism, or smothering Greek discussion of property redistribution.22 In De Oratore, Cicero’s particular purpose was to defend rhetoric against Plato’s criticism that it was merely a knack, practised by charlatans, for appealing to the emotions of the mob, 18 19 20 21 22

Miller and Power (eds), Holinshed’s Irish Chronicle, p. 15. Ibid. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., pp. 18–19. Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 57–68.

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and not a properly rational art.23 Cicero allowed that rhetoric in the form of rules for the classification of arguments and the structure of speeches was indeed fairly trivial; but he insisted that real eloquence or oratory was central to the best sort of human life. Because logos, reason and speech, was what made man different to animals, it was proper to excel both in eloquence and wisdom, and it was foolish to try and separate the two: For the one point in which we have our greatest advantage over the beasts is that we converse one with another, and can reproduce our thought in word. Who therefore would not rightly admire this faculty, and deem it his duty to exert himself to the utmost in this field, that by so doing he may surpass humans themselves in that particular respect wherein chiefly humans excel animals? To come, however, at length to the highest achievements of eloquence, what other power could have been strong enough either to gather scattered humans into one place, or to lead them out of their wild and rustic life into a humane, cultivated, and civil one, or, after the establishment of societies, to give shape to laws, courts, and rights?24

Rational speech was thus the very essence not just of human life, but the essence of the highest form of human life: political life. It was only in political life that a man could truly flourish, using all his capacities to the utmost, and the chief human capacity was rational speech. Furthermore, Cicero insisted that Aristotle was on his side in this debate, similarly committed to placing rational speech at the heart of human life, and similarly convinced of the importance of 23 Michael Gagarin, ‘Rational argument in early Athenian oratory’, in Jonathan Powell (ed.), Logos: Rational Argument in Classical Rhetoric (London, 2007), pp. 9–18, at 10. 24 ‘Hoc enim uno praestamus vel maxime feris, quod colloquimur inter nos, & quod exprimere dicendo sensa possumus. Quamobrem quis hoc non iure miretur, summeque in eo laborandum esse arbitretur, ut quo uno homines maxime bestiis praestent, in hoc hominibus ipsis antecellat? Ut vero iam ad illa summa veniamus: quae vis alia potuit aut dispersos homines unum in locum congregare, aut a fera agrestique vita ad hunc humanum cultum civilemque deducere, aut iam constitutis civitatibus leges, iudicia, iura describere?’, Cicero, De Oratore ad Quintum fratem Dialogi Tres. Iacobi Lodoici Strebaei, Leodegarij a Quercu, & cuiusdam Incerti Authoris Commentariis, itemque Scholiis Philippi Melanchthonis quam Eruditissimis Illustrati (Paris, 1562), p. 18; Cicero, De Oratore Books I–II, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), pp. 24–7 (translation altered); Cicero, De Oratore, 1. 32–3.

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teaching oratory and philosophy as one.25 At Trinity College Dublin in the late 1590s, the young James Ussher began one of his student orations by paraphrasing Cicero: Reason and eloquence (as Cicero says) are the two principal bonds of human society: which by speaking, communicating, disputing, and declaring, reconcile humans with each other and join them in some natural society. Therefore, as I judge reason the highest distinction of man, so I judge eloquence the most brilliant light of reason.26

Arguments like these on the relationship between reason, language, and political life were commonplace among European undergraduates; and Cicero was a statutory authority on rhetoric at Oxford.27 Stanihurst’s English history attributed the decline in the Pale in large part to the use of the Irish language: ‘the pale was in never more florishing estate then when it was wholly English, and never in woorse plight then since it hath enfraunchysed the Irishe’.28 The Irish language, Stanihurst continued, burrowed into the jaws of the English like ringworm.29 This was a language so limited in vocabulary that it borrowed the simplest of words from English, such as coat, gown, doublet, hat, drinking cup.30 Stanihurst insisted that even among the Irish themselves the language was gravely flawed, as most people spoke it in a different, simpler, form than that used among the poets and antiquaries, and so could not be said to be the language of the whole political community.31 It could barely be said to be the language even of the Gaelic elite, as it was divided into four dialects as the country was divided into four provinces.32 Irish was far inferior to English as a language in which to live. 25 Cicero, De Oratore, 3. 141. 26 ‘Societatis humanae (Cicerone teste) duo sunt praecipua vinculas ratio et oratio: quae dicendo, communicando, disceptando, judicando, conciliant inter se homines conjunguntque naturali quadam societate. Ex quibus, ut Rationem summum Hominis decus; sic ipsius Rationis illustrissimum lumen Orationem statuo’, Trinity College Dublin [TCD], MS 790, fols 3r–4v; Cicero, De Officiis, 1. 50. 27 ‘Statuta Regis Edwardi Sexti’, in Strickland Gibson (ed.), Statuta Antiqua Universitatis Oxoniensis (Oxford, 1931), pp. 341–60, at 344; ‘Nova Statuta’, ibid., pp. 378–88, at 378; ‘Lectiones et Mulctae’, ibid., pp. 389–91. 28 Miller and Power (eds), Holinshed’s Irish Chronicle, p. 15. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., p. 18. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., pp. 19–20.

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Lacking a good language in which to do politics, the Gaelic Irish had consequently failed to establish a true political community, state, respublica, or commonwealth, in which human excellence or virtue could flourish. In his Latin history Stanihurst explained at length that quarrels among the Gaelic Irish nobility were settled by force, not by law; not in the courts, but by bloody cattle-raiding: ‘Undoubtedly these tyrants prefer to be accounted daylight robbers rather than nocturnal thieves. They praise the courage of the one; the other they claim to have fallen to half a man.’33 The fortitudo or courage which Stanihurst allowed the Gaelic Irish possessed was one of the traditional four cardinal virtues – described at length in Cicero’s De Officiis and every beginner’s book in moral philosophy. While the Irish nobility could perhaps be said to display fortitudo, they lacked prudentia (wisdom), iustitia (justice), and decorum (fittingness).34 These latter virtues normally came to the fore in the foundation and maintenance of real political institutions. What this meant was that Irish life was not ruled by virtue, law, rational political institutions or even good custom, but by fortune: Thus the alteration of inconstant fortune is clearly evident among this people who live from day to day. For he who today abounds in the most splendid cattle herds, may have lost everything at first light. And he who today lacks even a farthing, tomorrow is most abundantly enriched with a captured prey. And so their conditions reel to and fro according to the slippery and inconstant vicissitude of fortune.35

Fortune, traditionally conceived of as the opposite to human excellence or virtue, and force (not justice) ruled life in Gaelic Ireland.36 33 ‘Etenim malunt Tyranni isti inter praedatores apertos, quam latrones occultos numerari. Alterum in magna fortitudinis laude ponunt, alterum in homunculum tantum semissem cadere, adfirmant’, Stanihurst, De Rebus, p. 34; Lennon, Richard Stanihurst, p. 148. I have adapted Lennon’s elegant translation, here and throughout, to bring out Stanihurst’s technical vocabulary. 34 Cicero, De Officiis, 1. 18–151. 35 ‘Atque ita, in hoc hominum genere, de die, & in diem viventium, volubilis fortunae commutatio perspicue cernitur. Qui enim, hodierno die, omni re pecuaria amplissime abundat, postea fortassis luce, omnibus bonis expellitur. Et qui hodie ne libellam quidem habet, crastine die, praeda capta, cumulatissime ditatur. Atque ad hunc modum eorum status in lubrica, & variata fortunae vicissitudine vacillat’, Stanihurst, De Rebus, p. 35; Lennon, Richard Stanihurst, p. 148. 36 Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge, 2nd edn, 2001), pp. 1–21.

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The Gaelic Irish lived in a state which was effectively pre-political. For Cicero, the transition from pre-political to political life was the transition from force to law. In an account of the origins of human societies which emphasised the need for material security, the Roman insisted: ‘between this present life, refined through humanity, and that earlier savage one, there is no more difference, than between law and force’.37 It was precisely that establishment of political community which had not yet happened in Gaelic Ireland. When treating the papal bull Laudabiliter of 1155, by which Ireland was granted to King Henry II, Stanihurst wrote that the pope gave the king the authority to establish a respublica, commonwealth, or political community, in Ireland. The king could not have reformed an existing political community; none existed.38 For page after page, in both his English and Latin histories, Stanihurst argued that the life and learning of the Gaelic Irish failed to meet the standards of rational government. There was no central, justice-dispensing kingship in Gaelic Ireland, simply the rule of the cattle-raiding tyranni (tyrants) and their occasional grudging submission to the English crown; likewise there were no truly learned men whose normal role in kingdoms was to counsel the king. The problem of counsel, the application of prudentia to political life, was the great preoccupation of humanists in Tudor England, and it is unsurprising that Stanihurst should have reflected on counsel in Gaelic Ireland.39 In his English history, Stanihurst explained that both Gaelic Irish doctors and lawyers were trained in a similar, and similarly deficient, way: Without eyther preceptes or observation of congruitie, they speake Latin lyke a vulgar language, learned in their common schooles of leachecraft and lawe, whereat they begin children and hold on 16 or 20 years, connying by rote the Aphorismes of Hippocrates, and the civill institutes, with a fewe other paringes of those faculties.40

This passage is sometimes quoted as though Stanihurst were praising the Gaelic learned orders; the opposite was the case. These scholars’ 37 ‘Atque inter hanc vitam perpolitam humanitate et illam immanem, nihil tam interest, quam jus atque vis’, Cicero, Opera Omnia, ed. Janus Gulielmius and Janus Gruterus (4 toms in 2 vols, Hamburg, 1618–19), tom. 1, p. 356; Cicero, Pro Sestio, 42. 91–2. 38 Stanihurst, De Rebus, pp. 154–5. 39 Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 70–4; Natalie Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 33–50, 82–98. 40 Miller and Power (eds), Holinshed’s Irish Chronicle, p. 114.

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superficial knowledge and ungrammatical use of the Latin language developed into a superficial knowledge of both medicine and law, mistaking real learning based on deep understanding for the ability to gabble out catchphrases from the most basic textbooks. Stanihurst returned to this problem in his Latin history, where he distinguished more precisely between those Gaelic Irish lawyers who specialised in traditional Irish law, and those who were purportedly trained in international civil and canon law. The learning of the former amounted to little more than trickery: the knowledge of primitive customs wrapped up in ‘arcane ritual’ which much impressed the ‘ignorant common people’.41 While the brehons were fundamentally dishonest, Stanihurst emphasised that the civil and canon lawyers among the Gaelic Irish were wilfully incompetent: Certain half-taught lawyers also live and flourish among them, dedicated to the study of civil and canon laws since childhood. They do not bother to acquire a knowledge of the Latin language from the source of grammarians. They reject all that as a dubious business and as childish trifling. They blab whatever comes to mind first. Instead of weighing their words with the grammarian’s precision and paying attention to syllabic quantities, they use the inconstant standard of breathing in articulating their sentences.42

As Ussher wrote, eloquence and reason were inseparable; this perceived neglect of Latin eloquence by the Gaelic learned orders appalled Stanihurst and his peers. The same absence of reason, according to Stanihurst, characterised Gaelic music and medicine.43 Nevertheless, the condition of the Gaelic Irish, according to Stanihurst, was not a hopeless one. For all their flaws they were proper Christians. What they needed, like Cicero’s wild men, was a law-giver to go amongst them, and recall them to their innate 41 ‘abtrusa atque abdita mysteria’, ‘imperita plebecula’, Stanihurst, De Rebus, p. 37; Lennon, Richard Stanihurst, p. 149. 42 ‘Vivunt etiam, & vigent inter illos semidocti quidam legulei, a primis annis, civilis & pontificii iuris studio dediti. Latinae linguae intelligentiam, et grammaticorum fontibus non hauriunt. Totam illud, tamquam luteum negotium, ac pueriles tricas, aspernantur. Quodcumque in solum, ut dicitur, venerit, effutire solent. Verba grammaticorum arte non expendunt; syllabarum pondera non examinant; omnem periodum spiritus volubilitate, non artis iudicio determinant.’ Stanihurst, De Rebus, p. 37; Lennon, Richard Stanihurst, p. 149. 43 Stanihurst, De Rebus, pp. 38–9, 43–4; Lennon, Richard Stanihurst, pp. 150–1, 153–4.

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human reason, reducing them ‘from rudenesse to knowledge, from rebellion to obedience, from trechery to honesty, from savagenesse to civilitie, from idleness to labour, from wickednesse to godlynesse’.44 It was not just the Gaelic Irish who would need to be reformed in this way, admitted Stanihurst, but also those of English descent who had taken on Irish manners and customs: Againe the very English of birth, conversant with the savage sort of that people become degenerate, & as though they had tasted of Circes poysoned cup, are quite altered. Such a force hath education to make or marre.45

In Homer’s Odyssey, drinking from Circe’s magical cup made beasts of men; Cicero alluded to the sorceress when he described the corrupt politician Verres appearing momentarily human, before reverting to his wicked habits as though he had drunk from her cup.46 Stanihurst thus invoked the difference between man and beast, rational speech, while insisting education could save the barbarians of Ireland. Stanihurst’s understanding of political life as the best life for human beings, derived from the Ciceronian and Aristotelian curricula of grammar school and university, enlivened his entire treatment of Gaelic society. Students of human societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would seek to identify the particular spirit which animated the society under examination; a spirit which, in all true societies, would enliven the songs of the poor as well as the arts of the elite. Stanihurst and his fellow Christian Aristotelians looked for reason rather than spirit, and had to assume that God had endowed all men with the same reason. Stanihurst’s emphasis on the identity of reason and speech, and the value of enforcing one civil language in the commonwealth, was shared by the Act for the English Order, Habit, and Language of 1537, first printed in 1572.47 Rowland White, a Palesman like Stanihurst, but originally from Ulster and a Protestant, wrote in about 1569 that the Gaelic Irish 44 45 46 47

Miller and Power (eds), Holinshed’s Irish Chronicle, pp. 115–6. Ibid., p. 115. Homer, Odyssey, 10. 208 ff; Cicero, In Q. Caecilium Oratio, 17. 57. 28 Henry VIII, c. 16, in In this Volume Are Contained All the Statutes . . . Established in her Highnes Realme of Irelande (London, 1572), fols 67v–71r; 28 Henry VIII, c. 15, in Sir Richard Bolton, The Statutes of Ireland (Dublin, 1621), pp. 128–35; D. B. Quinn, ‘Government printing and the publication of the Irish statutes in the sixteenth century’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 49, section C (1943), 45–129, at 70, 79.

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lived under no law, but as they were nevertheless ‘men reasonable’, education and the English common law between them would drive out the rot of ‘unrule’ and bring them to civility and ‘the comon custome of humanytie’.48 The Protestant humanist and colonist, Sir William Herbert, writing in Latin in the early 1590s, also shared this analysis of Gaelic Irish failure and barbarity. Some Gaelic Irishmen saw their old customs as almost ‘essential’ to them, Herbert explained, but they were mistaken in this: ‘in truth, these habits and garb were common and customary among almost all barbarians and ancient peoples, who had still not become acquainted with a more comfortable and cultivated form of life’.49 Nevertheless, although the Irish had failed thus far to establish a commonwealth, they were certainly rational, and for that reason ‘no form of administration or state more distinguished or more excellent or more appropriate to Ireland can be devised that that which has brought and elevated England to the height of perfection and to exceptional happiness’.50 This was the felicitas which was the object of worldly government for Christian Aristotelians, and which had thus far eluded the unpolitical Irish. But the English common law, best of all positive laws, could be trusted to induce the Irish to leave their wilderness, enter the English city, and achieve true felicitas. Although Stanihurst was the most sophisticated of all critics of Gaelic Irish society, he shared the fundamentals of his critique with a wide range of other Protestant and Catholic humanists.51

48 Nicholas Canny, ‘Rowland White’s “Discors touching Ireland”, c. 1569’, Irish Historical Studies, 20 (1977), 439–63, at 447, 448, 449, 458. 49 ‘Nihilominus ex Hibernicis nonnulli illos mores vestitusque Hibernicorum proprios, et quasi essentiales, existimant, et cum Hiberniae incolumitate et prosperitate coniunctos, cum revera barbarorum fere omnium et priscorum, quibus adhuc commodior atque excultior vivendi ratio non innotuerat, communes erant et consueti’, Sir William Herbert, Croftus sive de Hibernia Liber, ed. Arthur Keaveney and J. A. Madden (Dublin, 1992), pp. 82–3. 50 ‘Nulla vero administrationis aut politiae forma illustrior aut praestantior aut Hiberniae accommodatior excogitari potest, quam ea qua Anglia ad summam perfectionem eximiamque felicitatem adducta est atque evecta’, Herbert, Croftus, pp. 70–1. 51 Ciaran Brady, ‘The Road to the View: on the decline of reform thought in Tudor Ireland’, in Patricia Coughlan (ed.), Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Cork, 1989), pp. 25–45.

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The threat of natural slavery While insisting that the Gaelic Irish were barbarians whose way of life needed to be reformed out of existence, Stanihurst also emphasised that they were indeed human.The humanity of the Gaelic Irish was questioned on a number of occasions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by English writers alluding to Aristotle’s conflation of barbarians and natural slaves in the first book of the Politics. Polydore Vergil, an Italian churchman and humanist who prospered at the court of King Henry VIII, had argued in his Anglica Historia of 1534 that the Gaelic Irish were ‘wild, uncivilized, stupid, and hostile’ and sylvestres, woodland dwellers, leading their lives ‘according to the manner of wild beasts’.52 Vergil drew much of the venom from his description of the Gaelic Irish when he allowed that even in their wildness ‘they practice the Christian religion chastely’, but this was still a potently negative account, deeply grounded in the mainstream political and ethical tradition.53 Cicero, as we have seen, believed human beings excelled all other animals in so far as they possessed rational speech; Aristotle made the same argument in more technical language. He wrote in the Politics: ‘For, as we say, nature makes nothing in vain. Moreover, speech is given to man alone of all the animals.’54 Possession of logos, rational speech, meant that of all the animals, man ‘alone has perception of good and evil, just and unjust, and other similar matters’.55 The man who flourished was therefore the man who lived a political life, striving to excel the best of his fellows, because only by living a 52 ‘Ii Sylvestres vocitantur, quod ferme ferarum ritu vitam degant, quanquam in ea feritate Christianam religionem caste colunt.’; ‘Alterum genus ferum, incultum, stultum, asperum, qui a neglectiore cultu rusticisque moribus Sylvestres appellantur’, Eric Haywood, ‘Humanism’s priorities and empire’s prerogatives: Polydore Vergil’s description of Ireland’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 109, section C (2009), 195–237, at 230–1, 234–5. For the first edition, see Polydore Vergil, Anglicae Historiae Libri XXVI (Basle, 1534), pp. 218, 587. 53 ‘quanquam in ea feritate Christianam religionem caste colunt’, Haywood, ‘Humanism’s priorities’, 230–1. 54 Aristotle, Politics, 1253a10; ‘Nihil enim frustra facit natura, ut dicimus. Homini autem soli ex animantibus sermo tributus est’, Aristotle, Operum . . . Philosophorum Omnium Longe Principis Nova Editio, Graece & Latine, ed. Isaac Casaubon (2 vols in 1, Lyons, 1590), vol. 2, p. 178. 55 Aristotle, Politics, 1253a10; ‘Hoc enim praeter caeteris animanteis hominis est proprium, ut solus boni & mali, iusti & inusti, & aliorum similium sensum habeat’, Aristotle, Operum, vol. 2, p. 178.

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political life could he fulfil his nature. All this required the intensely social life of cities, not the isolation of woods and mountains. For Ciceronians and Aristotelians, a man who lived in isolation was barely human at all. Solitary life and general stupidity went hand in hand. In the Politics, Aristotle wrote: man is a civil animal by nature; and he who by the incitement of his own nature, not by misfortune, takes no part in the city, is either less or more than human: like he, against whom this abuse was cast by Homer, ‘for whom there is neither tribe, nor law, nor hearth nor household gods’. For no-one can be such a man, unless he is at the same time solitary and a lover of war.56

Thomas Aquinas had developed this point by explaining that men were unsocial either because they were wicked, or saints like Anthony the Hermit.57 Stanihurst’s Oxford contemporary John Case, an accomplished Protestant Aristotelian philosopher, divided the category of unsocial men in three: men who had been driven from civil life by bad luck; wicked men who were nourished on the slaughter of their fellows, like vultures among birds or wolves among sheep; and men who lived alone to pursue holiness or wisdom.58 Very few people could pretend to Aquinas’s or Case’s categories of sainthood or wisdom. Moreover, as mentioned in Chapter 1, Aristotle tended to conflate the categories of solitary and irrational sub-human, slave, and barbarian. He remarked in the Nicomachean Ethics that ‘among the number of the foolish, are those nations of far-distant barbarians, who are naturally stupid and thoughtless in perception’.59 Moreover, 56 Aristotle, Politics, 1253 a 1–10; Homer, Iliad, 9. 63; ‘Ex his igitur perspicuum est, civitatem in iis rebus, quae natura constant, esse numerandum: & hominem, civile animal esse natura: & eum qui naturae impulsu, non fortunae culpa, civitatis sit expers, aut esse improbum, aut homine meliorem: ut is, in quem ab Homero hoc maledictum coniectum est, cui neque curia, nec lex est, neque Vesta, Laresque. Non enim potest quisquam talis esse, quin vno eodemque tempore sit & belli cupidus, utpote qui nullum iugum ferre velit, quemadmodum contingit in quibusdam volatilibus’, Aristotle, Operum, vol. 2, p. 178. 57 Thomas Aquinas, Opera Omnia, cum . . . commentariis partim Thomae de Vio Cajetani, et partim Francisci Ferrariensis (17 toms in 14 vols, Venice, 1593–4), tom. 5, pp. 3–4; Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, trans. R. J. Regan (Indianapolis, 2007), p. 16. 58 John Case, Sphaera Civitatis (Oxford, 1588), p. 22. 59 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1149a10–13. ‘Et ex amentium numero, ii, qui natura stulti & inconsiderati sunt, sensuque longinquorum barbarorum nationes’, Aristotle, Operum, vol. 2, p. 178.

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early in the first book of the Politics, Aristotle, arguing that political rule among citizens was different to rule over women and slaves, lumped the barbarian in with the intellectually inferior natural slave. At the end of Book I of the Politics, Aristotle finally defined the natural slave, responding to those who claimed that slavery was merely a creation of human custom and not natural: Therefore, those who are lower or weaker than other humans, as much as the soul excels the body or human excels beast . . . they are slaves by nature . . . For he is a slave by nature, who can be the property of another, and therefore is of another: and who participates in reason to the extent of perceiving it, but not having it.60

Aristotle himself thus argued for a radical inequality of reason in human beings; some were made to live political lives, ruling and being ruled in turn; whereas others were better suited to lives of physical labour and obedience. Madmen, natural slaves, and barbarians were identical insofar as they lacked reason. The most notorious application of Aristotle’s natural slave theory in sixteenth-century political discourse was Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s Latin dialogue, Democrates Secundus, sive de Justis Causis Belli apud Indos, composed about 1544 but not printed until the 1890s.61 Sepúlveda, an accomplished humanist and himself a commentator on Aristotle, wrote in the Democrates that for the jurists slavery was merely a civil condition according to the law of peoples; a later manuscript expanded on this, explaining that it was an accidental condition unrelated to one’s innate qualities. However, the Spaniard continued, philosophers applied the name of slave to those who suffered a tarditas insita, innate weakness of mind, and practised inhuman and barbarous customs.62 As it was a general principle in nature that the higher part should rule the lower, so: 60 Aristotle, Politics, 1254b16; ‘Quicumque . . . tanto caeteris hominibus sunt inferiores ac deteriores, quanto animus corpori, & homo ferae praestat . . . hi sunt serui natura . . . Natura enim servus est is, qui alterius esse potest: ideoque & alterius est: & qui eo usque rationis est particeps, quo ad eam sentiat quidem ille, sed non habeat’, Aristotle, Operum, vol. 2, p. 180. 61 Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Demócrates segundo, o de las justas causas de la guerra contra los indios, ed. Angel Losada (Madrid, 2nd edn, 1984). See also, Sepúlveda, Apologia . . . pro Libro de Iustis Belli Causis (Rome, 1550), reprinted in Sepúlveda, Opera (4 vols, Madrid, 1780), vol. 4, pp. 329–57. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, 2nd edn, 1986), pp. 46–7, 109–110. 62 Sepúlveda, Demócrates segundo, p. 20.

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Those who are strong in wisdom and talent, but not however in the powers of the body, these are masters by nature, whereas those who are slow and stupid, but suited in body to the performance of necessary work, are slaves by nature, which we declare not only to be just, but also to be useful, in order that they may serve their masters by nature. We see that this is also sanctioned by divine law, for it is written in the book of Proverbs, ‘He who is stupid, let him serve the wise’, and they teach that such as are barbarous and inhuman peoples, shrinking from civil life and from the gentler manners and virtues, for whom it is convenient and just by nature to be subjected to the command of more humane peoples or princes, excelling them in virtue, in order that, by their virtue, laws and wisdom, discarding wildness, they should be brought to more human life, gentler manners, and a cultivated virtue.63

Sepúlveda went on directly to quote the Politics, where Aristotle wrote that hunting ought to be practised not only against animals, but also against those men ‘who although born to obey, refuse command, for such a war is just by nature’.64 Sepúlveda’s overall argument was thus that the Spanish war against the Native Americans was a category of just war hitherto neglected: the war against those who by nature ought to obey, yet refuse the command of their betters.65 No English author seems to have applied the natural slave argument to the Gaelic Irish with anything like Sepúlveda’s clarity and sophistication; but Englishmen did apply these arguments both to their own peasantry and to the Native Americans. In 1588, John Case wrote in his Sphaera Civitatis (The Sphere of the City), a textbook based on the Politics, that some people were indeed natural slaves, that natural slaves within the civitas, city or state, should be 63 ‘Nam qui prudentia valent, et ingenio, non autem corporis viribus, hos esse natura dominos, contra tardos, et hebetes, sed corpore validos ad obeunda necessaria munera, servos esse natura, quibus non modo iustum esse declarant, sed etiam utile, ut serviant natura dominis. Quod lege quoque divina sancitum esse videmus, scriptum est enim in libro Prouerbiorum, “Qui stultus est, serviet sapienti”, et tales esse docent barbaras, et inhumanas gentes a vita civili et a mitioribus moribus ac virtutibus abhorrentes, quibus commodum esset, ac natura iustum, ut humaniorum, ac virtute praestantium principium, aut gentium imperio subjicerentur, ut horum virtute, legibus, atque prudentia, deposita feritate, in vitam humaniorem, mitiores mores, virtutum cultum redigerentur’, Sepúlveda, Demócrates segundo, p. 22. 64 ‘qui cum sint ad parendum nati, imperium recusant, est enim huiusmodi bellum natura iustum’, Sepúlveda, Demócrates segundo, p. 22; Aristotle, Politics, 1256b15. 65 Sepúlveda, Demócrates segundo, pp. 13–19.

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dealt with by severe laws, that these natural slaves and barbarians within the civitas should work as agricultural labourers, and that it was entirely just to make war against natural slaves, barbarians, and infidels who dwelled outside the civitas.66 The arguments of the Salamanca Dominicans to the effect that Native Americans were capable of owning both themselves and their property, and that Europeans should respect their lawful commonwealths, left Case unmoved. Case insisted that a war against barbarians was made just by their barbarism itself. This was proved, he continued, by the example of nature, which taught men to hunt wild animals; barbarians were like wild animals who would decline to conform to imperium, empire, unless forced. It was also proved by the natural empire which humans had over natural slaves, and ‘barbarians and infidels are slaves by nature’; and it was proved by the good of peace to which nature directed the civitas, a good to which barbarians would not be dragged unless by arms.67 Case noted the objection that as it was unlawful to make war against infidels for no other reason than their paganism, so it was unlawful to make war against barbarians simply because of their barbarism. But he dismissed it in a few lines: even if the Spanish and Portuguese had shown themselves too severe in the Indies, he wrote, nevertheless it was proper to compel barbarians to accept empire and civil life.68 Nevertheless, Case did not mention the Irish in the Sphaera. Ireland did appear in his textbook on the Nicomachean Ethics, the Speculum Moralium (Mirror of Morals) of 1585. Case’s dedication to Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, claimed that the ferocity of the Irish could only be ameliorated by a university; science, not war, improved morals.69 This might indicate that Case did not consider the Irish natural slaves. Nevertheless, thanks to Polydore Vergil’s widely read account, many English and European authors did associate the barbarism of the Gaelic Irish with a bestial irrationality. The Anglica Historia was completed in manuscript by 1513, then printed in 1534, 1546, 1555, 1556, 1557, and 1570 at Basel, 1556 at Ghent, 1603 at Douai, 1649 and 1651 at Lyons. It was incorporated into a remarkable range of geographical literature by Tommaso Porcacchi, Giovanni Lorenzo d’Anania, Paulo Giovio, Sebastian Münster, and even Giovanni 66 67 68 69

Case, Sphaera Civitatis, pp. 31–2, 37–9, 43, 63–4, 162–9, 643–7. ‘barbari & infideles sunt servi a natura’, ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 64. John Case, Speculum Moralium Questionum in Universam Ethicen Aristotelis (Oxford, 1585), sig. G3.

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Botero’s famous Relationi Universali (World Reports), first printed in 1591.70 William Camden’s massive historical and geographical compendium, the Britannia, adopted the term sylvestres and offered a much longer account of unmitigated Irish barbarity.71 The Britannia was printed seven times between 1586 and 1610 in Latin, and once in English; it became a staple of scholarly libraries across Europe. For example, Johannes Antonius Maginus’s Geographiae Universiae, printed at Venice in 1596, relied on Camden for its account of the Irish, dividing the population between Anglo-Hibernici (English Irish), who were gentle townsmen, and Sylvestres Hibernici (woodland Irish), barbarians who were convinced that neither force, nor pillage, nor murder were displeasing to God.72 Allegations of irrational Irish sub-humanity were also made by a clerk of the English privy council, William Thomas, writing in 1552, and the colonist Andrew Trollope, writing in 1585; the former labelled the Gaelic Irish unreasonable beasts who lived without knowledge of God, the latter wrote that they were ‘not christyane, cyvell, or humane creatures, but heathen, or rather savage and brute bestes’, more barbarous than any other infidels in the world.73 Seventeenth-century English writers continued to allege Gaelic irrationality, and added further refinements to the theory. In 1610, the soldier and polemicist Barnaby Riche insisted that no savages were more barbarous than the Irish, that they followed custom rather than reason, but allowed that the problem lay in their education rather than their ‘naturall inclination’.74 Two years later, however, he made the alarming suggestion that God had denied the Irish the grace which would allow them to embrace the 70 Haywood, ‘Humanism’s priorities’, pp. 199–200; Jason Harris, ‘Ireland in Europe: Paulo Giovio’s Descriptio (1548)’, Irish Historical Studies, 35 (2007), 265–88. 71 William Camden, Britannia, sive Florentissimorum Regnorum Angliae, Scotiae, Hiberniae . . . Chorographica Descriptio (London, 1607), pp. 734–5, 775–6, 767–8, 770, 773, 774, 788–93. 72 Joannes Antonius Maginus, Geographiae Universae tum Veteris tum Novae Absolutissimum Opus (2 vols, Venice, 1596), vol. 1, fols 36r–36v. 73 William Thomas, The Pilgrim: A Dialogue on the Life and Actions of King Henry the Eighth, ed. J. A. Froude (London, 1861), pp. 66–8; National Archives, London, SP 63/85/39, Andrew Trollope to Walsingham, 12 September 1585, fols 96–102r, at 97v; cf. Nicholas Canny, ‘Identity formation in Ireland: the emergence of the Anglo-Irish’, in Canny and Anthony Pagden (eds), Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Princeton, 1987), pp. 159–212, at 168. 74 Barnaby Riche, A New Description of Ireland (London, 1610), pp. 14, 18, 50.

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Gospel.75 The Latin poet John Barclay, courtier and agent for King James I, wrote bluntly in his radical Icon Animorum (Mirror of Minds) of 1614 that the Native Americans were incapable of European civility; in contrast, the civil life of the Irish townsmen meant that Irish barbarians were barbarous only by their own will, and not by some influence of the environment.76 In 1646, the Parliamentarian Sir John Temple again insisted that the Gaelic Irish had never achieved any valid political life through their own efforts, and wrote that the Irish carried the ‘malignant impressions of irreligion and barbarisme’ on their hearts, though he could not say whether this was ‘by infusion from their ancestors, or naturall generation’.77 Natural law was traditionally spoken of as impressed or written on men’s hearts; Temple inverted this, but left unanswered the question of whether it was the result of heredity or environmental influence.78 A Parliamentarian tract attributed to John Milton, which referred to the Irish as ‘indocible and averse from all Civility and amendment’, preferring their ‘absurd and savage Customs before the most convincing evidence of reason’, shared Temple’s point of view.79 Richard Stanihurst was aware that these arguments were widespread; he was not the only one who took care to refute them. His Protestant contemporary, Rowland White, noted too that some thought the barbarism of the Irish was so deeply rooted in them that their condition could never be altered.80 Stanihurst’s response was unambiguous: The vigorous and widely held belief pervades many minds, that these [Gaelic] Irishmen, to whom we now turn out attention, have cast away all humanity, wander scattered through the thickest woods, and, in short, unbridled live a horrible and uncultivated life, savage and 75 Barnaby Riche, A True and Kinde Excuse (London, 1612), fols 7v, 13v. 76 John Barclay, Icon Animorum (London, 1614), pp. 42–3, 95; John Barclay, The Mirror of Minds, trans. Thomas May (London, 1633), pp. 45, 103. 77 Sir John Temple, The Irish Rebellion (London, 1646), pp. 2–3, 4–5, 9–10; cf. [Roger Boyle, earl of Orrery], The Irish Colours Displayed (London, 1662), p. 4. 78 Romans, 2:14–15. 79 [John Milton?] Articles of Peace, Made and Concluded with the Irish Rebels, and Papists, by James Earle of Ormond . . . Upon All which Are Added Observations (London, 1649), p. 47; Willy Maley, ‘How Milton and some contemporaries read Spenser’s View’, in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield and Willey Maley (eds), Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 191–208. 80 Canny, ‘Rowland White’s “Discors touching Ireland”, c. 1569’, p. 448.

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bestial. But those who defame the Irish with these insults support falsehood against truth. For although the Irish do not approach in any way the polish or refinement of the English province, they have not altered their life from all humanity, casting humanity off as is alleged. 81

Stanihurst went on to defend the Gaelic Irish by comparing them not to the city-dwelling Romans of the republic or empire, but to the proto-Romans in Publius Vergilius Maro’s Aeneid. Dwelling in the countryside, and having no cities of their own, the Irish were ruled by a nobility who lived like the heroes of the Aeneid, greedy of praise, fearful of dishonour, hospitable, and warlike.82 When describing the elaborate feasting practised by the Irish nobility, their customs of reclining on couches of straw and entertainment by poets, bards, and harpers, Stanihurst pointed out that the same customs were evident in the entertainment of the hero Aeneas by Queen Dido.83 Polydore Vergil had described the petty monarchs of Gaelic Ireland as reguli or kinglets, a term both soundly classical and unambiguously derogatory.84 Stanihurst instead called them tyranni or tyrants.85 While tyrannus had the common meaning of a ruler who exercised his authority oppressively without proper concern for justice or law, this was also the term used in the Aeneid for a primitive monarch and was applied both to the heroic Trojan prince Aeneas himself, and also to King Latinus, ruler of what would become Rome.86 Stanihurst thus hinted at a respect for the primitive virtue of the Irish, while at the same time communicating the imperfection of that virtue. In a similar vein, Stanihurst praised the hardiness of the typical Gaelic Irish outlaw, who took ‘hunger 81 ‘Vehemens quaedam, & pervagata opinio per animos multorum pervadere solet, Hibernicos istos, ad quos iam orationem convertimus, omnem humanitatem abiicere, fusos per densissimas silvas ac dispersos vagari, denique ferina quadam immanitate effraenatos vitam horridam incultamque vivere. Sed qui illos his conviciis infamant, a mendacio contra verum perspicue stant. Quamquam enim ab Anglicae provinciae urbanitate, & lautitia utcumque abhorrent; non tamen omni ab humanitate, sicut fertur exuti, vitam traducunt’, Stanihurst, De Rebus, p. 31; see also pp. 33, 51–2. Lennon, Richard Stanihurst, p. 145; Miller and Power (eds), Holinshed’s Irish chronicle, p. 112. 82 Miller and Power (eds), Holinshed’s Irish chronicle, p. 113. 83 Ibid., pp. 113–14. 84 Haywood, ‘Humanism’s priorities’, p. 213. 85 Stanihurst, De Rebus, pp. 31–2. 86 Virgil, Aeneid, 7. 263–6, 341–5; Augustine, De Civitate Dei, 5. 19.

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for a sauce, cress for food, the ground for a bed, and the forest for a tent’.87 Chapter 1 described David Rothe’s claim, made in the 1610s and derived from Aquinas and the Dominican tradition, that theoretically there were two types of barbarian: absolute and relative. However, Rothe insisted that absolute barbarians did not exist in reality, and that all different human societies were barbarous to each other. The Gaelic Irish were thus merely relative barbarians. Stanihurst would certainly have agreed that the Gaelic Irish were not the kind of absolute barbarians, foreign to the human race, described by Polydore Vergil; nevertheless he considered their barbarity more than merely relative. Stanihurst saw the differences which marked Gaelic society out from other European societies not just as differences, but as failures. A considerable number of English political writers and polemicists followed Polydore Vergil’s lead, insisting on the barbarous, inhuman irrationality of the Irish. Even relatively conservative Protestant intellectuals like John Case thought that war on barbarians was rendered just by their barbarity alone. But all of these different positions, from Polydore Vergil writing in the early sixteenth century to Sir John Temple writing in the 1640s, remained within the Ciceronian and Aristotelian traditions of the grammar schools and universities; all employed the international language of civility and barbarism. Indeed the Galway humanist, John Lynch, wrote in 1662 that he could see no difference between the allegations of Irish barbarism constantly repeated in histories, geographies, and works on the manners and customs of peoples in his own times and those contained in Gerald of Wales’s twelfth-century works on Ireland.88 During the 1590s, under pressure from dynastic uncertainty, war, and rebellion, some English writers sought unorthodox alternatives to those traditional ways of speaking about human society. English Machiavellians and natural law The English colonist and poet Edmund Spenser advocated an antiAristotelian programme of government for Ireland, which discarded 87 ‘qui famem pro condimento, nasturtium pro cibo, humum pro cubili, arbustum pro tabernaculo habet’, Stanihurst, De Rebus, pp. 51–2; Lennon, Richard Stanihurst, pp. 159–60. 88 John Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, ed. Matthew Kelly (3 vols, Dublin, 1848–52), vol. 1, pp. 106–7, vol. 2, pp. 198–201.

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conventional natural law theory. In 1596, Spenser completed his A View of the Present State of Ireland, which enjoyed a lively circulation in manuscript (21 contemporary copies survive) until it was finally printed by Sir James Ware from James Ussher’s copy in 1633.89 There is a very large scholarly literature on the View which cannot be addressed here; but the argument which follows is broadly in agreement with the work of Ciaran Brady, Nicholas Canny, and David Edwards, while offering the first explanation of the technical term Spenser borrowed from Aristotelian ethics, ius politicum.90 Of all Elizabethan and Jacobean treatises on the government of Ireland, none recommended mass killing with more enthusiasm than Spenser’s View. Spenser’s solution to the problem of governing Ireland was to destroy the Gaelic Irish elite: this destruction would require a continuous, two-year military campaign, in which the main weapon would be starvation and during which no submissions or surrenders would be accepted after the first twenty days.91 Spenser did not expect many of the Gaelic elite to survive this campaign: he thought it should be possible to settle those left alive from the whole island on forfeited lands in County Wicklow alone.92 And even after peace had been established, Ireland would be policed ever after by provost marshals empowered to hang troublemakers at a moment’s notice.93 David Edwards has established that this plan of action was no schoolroom exercise. Spenser had gained his own military experi89 Peter Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts Volume 1, 1450–1625, Part 2 Douglas-Wyatt (London, 1980), pp. 530–1; TCD, MS 589; cf. Edmund Spenser, Spenser’s Prose Works, ed. Rudolf Gottfried (Baltimore, 1949), pp. 506–24. 90 Nicholas Canny, ‘Edmund Spenser and the development of an Anglo-Irish identity’, Yearbook of English Studies, 13 (1983), 1–19; Brady, ‘The Road to the View’ ; David Edwards, ‘Ideology and experience: Spenser’s View and martial law in Ireland’, in Hiram Morgan, ed., Political Ideology in Ireland 1541–1641 (Dublin, 1999), pp. 127–57; cf. Annabel Patterson, ‘The egalitarian giant: representations of justice in history/literature’ in Patterson, Reading Between the Lines (London, 1993), pp. 80–116, at 103–4; Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Robe and sword in the conquest of Ireland’, in Claire Cross, David Loades and J. J. Scarisbrick (eds), Law and Government Under the Tudors (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 139–62, at 156. 91 Edmund Spenser, ‘A view of the present state of Ireland’ in Spenser, Spenser’s Prose Works, ed. Gottfried, pp. 39–231, at 158. This text is based on Huntingdon Library, Ellesmere MS 7041, collated with some other mss and Ware’s printed edition. 92 Spenser, ‘A view of the present state of Ireland’, pp. 177–8, 209, 216. 93 Ibid., p. 219.

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ence during the suppression of the Desmond rebellion of 1579–83, in which crown forces refused quarter even to women and children, and martial law was an indispensable tool. Spenser did well out of that war, accumulating an estate of 3,000 acres in Cork. But Spenser’s own safety in Cork, and the safety of his fellow colonists, depended on the use of martial law, not common law. By the late 1580s, Queen Elizabeth herself was beginning to worry that her honour as a Christian prince was being endangered by unjust use of martial law commissions. Finally, in 1591, Elizabeth had William Cecil, Lord Burghley, write to the Irish council re-establishing the primacy of common law. Spenser’s View was composed between 1586 and 1596 as a response to this royal retreat from martial law, and perhaps contributed to the reintroduction of martial law as a standard tool of government in 1596.94 Many of the same disgusted descriptions of Irish barbarism which are found in Stanihurst, Herbert, Camden, and others have their parallels too in Spenser’s tract; but it is remarkable that Spenser sometimes blurs the distinction between Irish barbarism and English civility, alleging for example that the Irish terms and practices of kin-cogish and coign (the former referring to the responsibility of the sept’s head for the actions of the whole sept, the latter to the extortions Gaelic lords exacted from their tenants) were in fact mixtures of English and Irish words and practices.95 The civility of the 600 surrendered and disarmed Spaniards massacred at Smerwick Bay by Spenser’s hero Arthur Grey, baron Grey de Wilton, was similarly irrelevant. The butchery was necessary, Spenser argued, due to the danger which they still posed, and also useful as an example to the Irish.96 Civility and barbarism were not categories of central importance to Spenser’s ethics of Irish conquest; what mattered instead was the danger posed by the Irish to the English, the sort of necessity which this danger established, and the question of whether there was one natural right which all Englishmen and Irishmen should make their object. The crux of Spenser’s argument appeared early. Irenaeus, the old Irish hand, explained to his English friend Eudoxius the dangerous, warlike nature of Irish society, and in particular of the danger of Irish institutions such as Brehon law.97 Eudoxius agreed with Irenaeus that Irish laws and customs were most unjust, but argued 94 95 96 97

Edwards, ‘Ideology and experience’, pp. 151–155. Spenser, ‘A view of the present state of Ireland’, pp. 78–81. Ibid., pp. 161–2. Ibid., pp. 47–50.

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that as English laws were self-evidently just (as any rational human would appreciate) the Irish in time would come to accept them; after all, the English had once also been barbarous and warlike, but were now civil.98 Stanihurst, White, and the other Christian Aristotelians had taken up the same position. Irenaeus allowed that the English common law was highly suitable for the kingdom for which it had been devised, but not at all suitable for the kingdom of Ireland. All laws, he said, should be adjusted to the ‘manners of your people, and abuses of your country’; and those laws should be judged just ‘in regard of the evills which they prevente, and the safetye of the Comon weale which they provide for’.99 According to true justice, Spenser’s Irenaeus continued, it was unjust to inflict punishment before a crime was committed, but in all kingdoms (and by this the poet meant England) it was a crime to imagine the death of the monarch, for the reason that the community would lose more by the death of the king than the death of the conspirators. Spenser argued, in other words, that in making laws one’s criterion should be necessity, not justice or natural right, and also insisted that this was already the practice among Englishmen. Spenser, in the person of Irenaeus, then applied a name to this principle of necessity: So that Ius Politicum, thoughe it be not of itself juste, yeat by applicacion, or rather necessitye is made just And this onelye respect makethe all lawes just.100

This ius politicum was the only Latin technical term employed in Spenser’s English-language tract, and it appeared consistently throughout the various manuscripts and in Ware’s printed edition.101 What did it mean? For Aristotelians, the ius or right was the object of the virtue of justice; that is to say, the excellently just person would always make the right his or her aim. Ius politicum or political right specifically was the right relevant between fellow citizens, which was different to the right relevant within a citizen’s household. This political right (sometimes rendered ius civile) was divided into a natural right valid everywhere, and a legal right varying from jurisdiction to jurisdic98 99 100 101

Ibid., pp. 53–4. Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 66; Sir James Ware, The Historie of Ireland (Dublin 1633), text of the View, pp. 15–16.

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tion.102 The complexity of this was due to Aristotle wanting to have an object of justice common to all the commonwealths and peoples of the world, while at the same time safeguarding the unequal treatment of citizens, slaves, and women within commonwealths. The Christian Aristotelians who developed Aquinas’s legacy tended to simplify by identifying natural right as that which was commanded by natural law.103 So the English Aristotelian John Case paraphrased the Ethics when he wrote that the ius politicum or ius civile was divided into natural right and legal right. The former was the same everywhere and among all peoples; the latter was the result of human or divine legislation among individual peoples or commonwealths. Then Case accommodated this natural right to natural law when he wrote that St Paul was speaking of natural right when he taught that those peoples who did not have the written law, nevertheless by nature did those things which were of the law, which showed that the law was written on their hearts.104 In another summary of Aristotle’s ethics first printed in 1617, recommended in Oxford during the 1650s, and indeed reprinted there in 1668, the Jesuit Francesco Pavone wrote that natural right in general was determined by natural law, and that ‘the right absolutely such as is between two citizens, is named by Aristotle (Ethics 5, chapter 6) ius politicum’.105 Pavone’s absolute right applied in a completely equal relationship; he distinguished it from the relative right that applied in unequal relationships between God and man or father and son. Both for the Protestant Case and Jesuit Pavone then, breaking right down into its components like this preserved the universal application of natural law, and also prevented it from disrupting the patriarchal order. Clearly this was not what Spenser was using the term to mean. Spenser kept the legal part of the ius politicum, but discarded the natural part. For Spenser, the ius politicum was not a subcomponent 102 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1134a25; ‘Sed sciendum est, ius id, quod querimus, & simpliciter ius esse, & ius ciuile’, Aristotle, Operum, vol. 2, p. 38. 103 Annabel Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 4–5, 115–6. 104 Romans, 2:14–15; Case, Speculum Moralium Questionum, pp. 221–5. 105 ‘Ius simpliciter quale est inter duos cives, ab Aristotle 5 eth. ch. 6. appellatur ius politicum’, Franciscus Pavonius, Summa Ethicae, sive Introductio in Aristotelis, et Theologorum Doctrinem Moralem (Lyons, 1620), p. 154; Mordechai Feingold, ‘The humanities’, in Nicolas Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford:Volume IV Seventeenth-Century Oxford (Oxford, 1997), pp. 211–357, at 242, 321.

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of a grand scheme of natural right and natural law, but rather a radically limited right that meant no more than the most safe and efficient course of action in dangerous circumstances.106 Necessity, as he explained, made any action just: any action which safeguarded the state was correct. The English poet used an old term for a new purpose, just as Niccolò Machiavelli used the word virtue not to mean excellent action in accordance with natural right but simply politically successful action.107 During the sixteenth century Machiavellianism was also known as the ‘new politics’, and then very often just as ‘politics’, which gave an extra charge to Spencer’s ius politicum.108 The term politicus was often used by Irishmen simply to mean a Machiavellian. Stanihurst himself, writing in 1592 to the humanist Justus Lipsius and using the word politicus, rushed to reassure his friend that he meant the word in its Aristotelian sense, rather than in the Machiavellian sense in which it could veil any public crime.109 David Rothe snarled that the New English colonists who meant to alter the form of the Irish commonwealth were not Academics, Peripetetics, or Stoics, but Politicorum schola: the school of the politiques.110 Chapter 1 above argued that it was normal for students of the English common law to understand not just that their law was derived from natural law, but that it was in closer accord with natural law than perhaps any other human positive law. There was no trace of natural law in Spenser’s clever tract. Not only that, but Spenser described William the Conqueror, not the Saint-King Edward the Confessor, as the founder of common law, and also wrote that all political traditions, whether English or Irish, were worthless, because all men lied. Spenser thus wrecked the delicate balance most common lawyers favoured between seeing their law as founded by a virtuous ancestor (rather than a conqueror), and yet also polished by the reason of wise judges in succeeding centuries: the poet’s position was that all human law was no more than the will of the 106 Cf. Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001), p. 23. 107 Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli (Oxford, 1981), pp. 35–8. 108 Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State: the Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics 1250–1600 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 5. 109 Colm Lennon, ‘The Richard Stanihurst – Justus Lipsius friendship: scholarship and religion under Spanish Habsburg patronage in the late sixteenth century’, in Jason Harris and Keith Sidwel, (eds), Making Ireland Roman: Irish Neo-Latin Writers and the Republic of Letters (Cork, 2009), pp. 48–58, at p. 52. 110 David Rothe, The Analecta of David Rothe, Bishop of Ossory, ed. P. F. Moran (Dublin, 1884), pp. 148–9.

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prince, good or bad in as far as it provided for or obstructed the safety of the people.111 English law no less than Irish law was made just by necessity alone. One can thus be reasonably sure what Spenser meant in that crucial first part of the View; however, none of his contemporaries considered his remarkable argument worthy of notice. Spenser’s Protestant contemporaries read him as ascribing absolute barbarism to the Irish, along with a ferocious military response, and no one paid attention to his remarks on law.112 When the respectable scholar Sir James Ware edited Spenser’s tract in 1633, he praised Spenser’s often subtle insights into Irish laws and customs, and seems to have softened Spenser’s remarks on the barbarity of the Gaelic Irish, and the even more dangerous English Irish. Ware also removed numerous mentions of individual Irish noble families. But he left Spenser’s attack on natural law untouched.113 Those Irish Catholics who tackled Spenser most often lumped him in with other English writers who ascribed an extreme barbarity to the Gaelic Irish, and quibbled with his antiquarian errors; they did not accuse him of Machiavellianism.114 Michael Kearney, a Catholic gentleman who served the Butlers of Dunboyne, completed an English translation of Geoffrey Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn in 1635. In his translator’s preface, he painted Spenser as an extreme representative of the tradition epitomised by the 1537 Act for the English Order, Habit, and Language, and borrowed counter-arguments freely from Rothe’s Analecta. Kearney quoted Ovid’s words on his exile to the Black Sea: ‘here I am a barbarian, for no-one understands me’, and argued that barbarism in general was merely a relative condition.115 Only heretics, Kearney added, following Rothe, were absolute barbarians. Indeed Kearney was so preoccupied by the Christian humanist programme that he gave more attention to the contradiction between English efforts to civilise Ireland and their obstruction 111 J. W. Tubbs, The Common Law Mind: Medieval and Early Modern Conceptions (Baltimore, 2000); Janelle Greenberg, The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution: St Edward’s ‘Laws’ in Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 2001). 112 Maley, ‘How Milton and some contemporaries read Spenser’s View’, pp. 191–208. 113 Ware, The Historie of Ireland, Preface to the View, sigs q3r–q4r, text of the View, pp. 15–16. 114 Geoffrey Keating, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn: the History of Ireland, ed. David Comyn and P. S. Dinneen (4 vols, London, 1902–14), vol. 1, pp. 2–5, 24–31. 115 ‘Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intellegor ulli’, Ovid, Tristia, 5. 10. 37.

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of Catholic education than to Spenser’s scheme of killing and transplantation.116 However, Philip O’Sullivan Beare, writing in Madrid in the 1610s, may have come closest to understanding the author’s meaning. O’Sullivan Beare labelled the View a politicus libellus (politique pamphlet) which had been both carefully written and carefully hidden. He certainly grasped that this was a programme for the total destruction of Irish society as it existed (magnates, cities, Catholic religion, patria), which did not discriminate between Irishmen of English or Gaelic ancestry. But O’Sullivan Beare interpreted the View as a fundamentally anti-Catholic work, erroneously attributing it, on the basis of information from a contact in England, to Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, whom the Irishman judged both most cunning and a great hater of Catholics.117 The general lack of contemporary interest aroused by the other Machiavellian text published on Ireland in the 1590s, Richard Beacon’s Solon his Follie, is instructive. In a work punctuated by long translations from and paraphrases of Machiavelli’s Discorsi, Beacon argued in 1594 that in order to bring permanent order to Ireland, political killings should be carried out without reference to law, that English governors should lie, that the plebs and nobility should be set against each other, and that the English commonwealth should pursue glory through aggressive wars. Beacon’s attacks on the common law, on the links between honesty, honour, and virtue, on the principles of nobility and social hierarchy, and on pacific Christian kingship, were underpinned by a radical rejection of natural right and natural law.118 And his book fell dead from the press: no contemporary, English or Irish, ever bothered responding. Some conventional Aristotelians, well read, intelligent, but entirely locked into their elaborate system, simply did not notice their opponents’ Machiavellianism. Writing in 1643, John Bramhall, Protestant bishop of Derry, castigated his Parliamentarian opponent, Henry Parker, for his misapplication of natural law theory. Bramhall took Parker’s constant invocation of the salus populi, safety of the 116 Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, MS 24. G. 16, 1668 copy of Michael Kearney’s 1635 translation of Geoffrey Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, fols 33v–36v; Bernadette Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating: History, Myth, and Religion in Seventeenth Century Ireland (Dublin, 2000), pp. 23–4. 117 Philip O’Sullivan Beare, Historiae Catholicae Iberniae Compendium. (Lisbon, 1621), fols 6v–7v. 118 Richard Beacon, Solon his Follie, or a Politique Discourse Touching the Reformation of Commonweales Conquered, Declined or Corrupted, ed. Clare Carroll and Vincent Carey (Binghamton, 1996).

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people, to refer to the natural law right of self-defence; but Parker referred only to the categories of material safety and danger, and was not interested in man’s ability to perceive a natural law pleasing to God.119 There is an obvious conclusion to be drawn from all this. Machiavellianism so was peripheral to English and Irish political discourse that contemporaries often failed to recognise it. Conclusion Nature, reason, speech, law: these were the foundations upon which Ciceronian and Aristotelian humanists like Richard Stanihurst built their interpretations of human societies. Stanihurst seems to have been generally optimistic about the human ability to set aside barbarous customs and achieve the true political life which God intended man to live; certainly he believed that the Gaelic Irish could leave their wilderness and enter the English city. Rowland White and Sir William Herbert thought the same, as, at times, did Barnaby Riche. William Camden was more pessimistic, and Andrew Trollope and Sir William Temple argued at different levels of sophistication that Gaelic Irish barbarism was absolute and permanent. Spenser’s contemporaries placed him closest to that latter pair; the poet himself sought a more radical solution. Temple and others saw an obstacle preventing the Gaelic Irish from leaving their barbarous state and becoming political, which they termed custom, habit, or natural inclination. The next chapter will isolate a distinctive Gaelic response to these criticisms, and examine habit and natural inclination in more detail.

119 John Bramhall, The Serpent Salve, or, a Remedie for the Biting of an Aspe ([London?], 1643), pp. 30–1, 46–7, 50, 62, 109–10, 138, 146; Henry Parker, Observations upon some of his Majesties Late Answers and Expresses ([London], [1642]).

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During the course of the seventeenth century a number of Gaelic Irish radicals distinguished Catholic and therefore truly civil Irishmen, from heretical and therefore truly barbarous Englishmen; some even insisted that all those of English descent carried a natural inclination towards heresy. This anti-English radical tradition proceeded in an historical mode and rested on relationships between law, custom, habituation, and religion. The natural law that rendered present actions just or unjust, had also applied to one’s ancestors in the distant past; right reason was constant across time just as it was constant from one society to another. This meant that the circumstances in which commonwealths and national churches were established centuries ago were directly relevant to contemporary political problems. Thus Richard Stanihurst clearly meant his remarks on the proper criteria for the selection of a prorex or viceroy in the twelfth century to be directly relevant to the selection of a lord deputy in the sixteenth century.1 This preoccupation with the rights and wrongs of the ancient foundations of commonwealths was common throughout the European elite: historians label it ‘ancient constitution’ discourse.2 Habituation, the establishment over time of durable moral characteristics in individuals or peoples, was closely related to these historical concerns, and (unlike history itself) had been richly theorised in the universities. The anti-English tradition was really a tradition within a tradition. Working in Florence in the early 1660s, the Capuchin friars Richard O’Ferrall and Robert O’Connell, authors of the 1 Richard Stanihurst, De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis, Libri Quattuor (Antwerp, 1584), pp. 137–43. 2 Ian Campbell, ‘Aristotelian ancient constitution and anti-Aristotelian sovereignty in Stuart Ireland’, Historical Journal, 53 (2010), 573–91.

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Commentarius Rinuccinianus, offered a list of political writers who thought the papal bull Laudabiliter, by which Ireland had allegedly been granted to King Henry II, void: Philip O’Sullivan Beare, Geoffrey Keating, Daniel O’Daly (Dominic of the Rosary), and John Lynch.3 All these writers thought the bull’s claim that the Gaelic Irish of the twelfth century were uneducated, vicious, and lawless untrue, and that the bull had been obtained dishonestly. The Commentarius also subscribed to this view, as did the notorious but unmentioned Conor O’Mahony.4 Keating, O’Daly, and Lynch argued that whatever the present grounds of Stuart monarchy in Ireland, it could not rest on Laudabiliter. O’Sullivan Beare, O’Mahony, and the Commentarius took this argument further and alleged that the kings of England had had no right to rule Ireland in the past and had not acquired one over the intervening centuries. England’s recent embrace of Protestantism, they argued, merely acted as a further spur to tyrannise the Irish. O’Sullivan Beare and the Commentarius went further still and insisted that Englishness and Protestantism could not be separated; they were synonymous. For this reason, these radicals wrote, Irishmen of English descent could not be trusted. This extreme anti-English ideology was not limited to O’Sullivan Beare and the two Capuchin friars; Archbishop Florence Conry of Tuam employed it, as did Giovanni Battista Rinuccini, papal nuncio to the Confederate Catholics of Ireland, and others. The anti-English tradition derived its power not just from Gaelic Irish alienation from English government in Ireland, but also from English Irish attempts to maintain a special relationship with that English government, bitterly recorded by O’Sullivan Beare and the Commentarius. As the English government’s interest in differentiating between different sorts of Irish Catholic declined after the 1640s, and as alternatives to Stuart monarchy came to seem 3 Richard O’Ferrall and Robert O’Connell, Commentarius Rinuccinianus, de Sedis Apostolicae Legatione ad Foederatos Hiberniae Catholicos per Annos 1645–9, ed. Stanislaus Kavanagh (6 vols, Dublin, 1932–49) [hereafter Com. Rin.], vol. 1, p. 5; Philip O’Sullivan Beare, Historiae Catholicae Iberniae Compendium. (Lisbon, 1621); Geoffrey Keating, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn: the History of Ireland, ed. David Comyn and P. S. Dinneen (4 vols, London, 1902–14) [circulated in manuscript from 1634–5]; Daniel O’Daly (Dominic of the Rosary), Initium, Incrementum et Excitus Familiae Geraldinorum Desmondiae (Lisbon, 1655); John Lynch (Gratianus Lucius), Cambrensis Eversus, seu Potius Historica Fides in Rebus Hibernicis Giraldo Cambrensis Abrogata (St Malo, 1662). 4 Conor O’Mahony (Constantius Marullus, C. M.), Disputatio Apologetica de Iure Regni Hiberniae pro Catholicis Hibernis adversus Haereticos Anglos (Frankfurt [Lisbon], 1645; repr. Dublin, 1826).

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more impractical, the tradition died away. The pro-Stuart political tradition, firmly secured by the accession of the Catholic James II in 1685, which Breandán Ó Buachalla and Éamonn Ó Ciardha have described in detail, became the primary ideology of Catholic resistance to Protestant government.5 Irish Catholics and Protestant monarchy Those Gaelic Irishmen who criticised English laws, customs, and souls did so in the context of an attack on Protestant monarchy in Ireland; for that reason it is important to clarify the range of learned Irish Catholic opinion on Protestantism, political life, and barbarism. Not only Irishmen of Gaelic descent saw Protestantism and barbarity as synonymous; it was a position adopted by David Rothe, bishop of Ossory and scion of the Kilkenny merchant-patriciate. Rothe inclined towards that Catholic revival of St Augustine’s theology later known as Jansenism. Like Augustine, Rothe insisted that true virtue was impossible without the true faith. For Rothe, Protestants could achieve no excellence of any kind and everything they did was a sin.6 The true faith was a prerequisite for ‘right customs and civil association’.7 And just as only the faithful could be truly civil, so only heretics could be absolutely barbarous. As a practical example of this extreme heretical barbarity, Rothe took the English garrison soldiers of the Nine Years War. He wrote that the irrational cruelty of these men made them beastlike, and as they were ‘unworthy of human society’ they ought to be banished to the forests.8 This was not the only position available to contemporary Catholic churchmen. The Jesuit-educated John Lynch, closely connected to the Galway confederates of the 1640s, was quite clear that Protestants were lawful citizens (cives) of the Irish commonwealth. Lynch also stated bluntly that those outside the church were capable of moral virtue, and compared the Protestant duke of 5 Breandán Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghéar: na Stíobhartaigh agus an tAos Léinn, 1603–1788 (Dublin, 1996); Ó Buachalla, The Crown of Ireland (Syracuse, 2006); Éamonn Ó Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685–1766 (Dublin, 2nd edn, 2004). 6 David Rothe, The Analecta of David Rothe, Bishop of Ossory, ed. P. F. Moran (Dublin, 1884), p. 82; Thomas O’Connor, Irish Jansenists 1600–70: Religion and Politics in Flanders, France, Ireland, and Rome (Dublin, 2008), pp. 104–5, 365. 7 ‘rectos . . . mores & urbanam conversationem’, Rothe, Analecta, p. 99. 8 ‘indigni humano consortio’, Rothe, Analecta, p. 86.

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Ormond to the pagan centurion Cornelius, whom Acts 10:2–4 described as a just, religious, and God-fearing man.9 Nevertheless, Rothe did not argue that the Tudor or Stuart monarchs had alienated the right to rule Ireland from themselves by their heresy alone, and this position was the one most often taken up by Catholics. Rothe insisted on his own loyalty to King James I, and maintained that position throughout an active political life.10 Even the Jesuit monarchomach, Conor O’Mahony, who called in 1645 for the Irish to dispense with the Stuarts, elect a king of their own, and make war on all Protestants in Ireland, never claimed that the heresy of the monarch alone justified resistance.The Irish should resist King Charles I, O’Mahony argued, because that king had promulgated positive laws which contravened natural law. Even for O’Mahony, Charles’s Protestantism was not enough by itself to invalidate his dominium (lordship or ownership) over the Irish kingdom.11 Political power was part of the natural order, not the supernatural one: dominium was independent of grace. The alternative was to argue that whenever one sinned, one lost control of one’s property or office. Because this would have meant chaos in Europe as magistrates flickered in and out of legitimacy, the position was condemned as heretical at the Council of Constance in 1414, and Catholics frequently ascribed the doctrine to Protestants in the sixteenth century.12 The king’s power came from the people, not from God, and in extreme circumstances the people might invoke their right of self-defence and revoke the grant. John Lynch, writing against O’Mahony and other radicals in the 1660s, agreed that the monarch’s power was granted by the people. Indeed Lynch held that this grant had taken place very recently, in the Irish parliament of 1613, in which (he claimed) all the orders of the Irish were represented. He did not believe that the Stuarts’ positive laws had so offended natural law as to invalidate their right to the kingdom.13 9 John Lynch (Eudoxius Alithinologus), Alithinologia sive Veridica Responsio ad Invectam Mendaciis ([St Malo], 1664), p. 18; John Lynch (Eudoxius Alithinologus), Supplementum Alithinologiae ([St Malo], 1667), pp. 58–9, 120–1. 10 Rothe, Analecta, dedication, p. 168. 11 I have used the reprint, C. M., Disputatio Apologetica (Dublin, 1826), pp. 68–73. 12 Annabel Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 68–76. 13 Lynch, Alithinologia, pp. 27–8; Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, vol. 3, pp. 32–143.

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The anti-English tradition Philip O’Sullivan Beare, Gaelic Irish nobleman, Spanish naval officer, and courtier, compiled a critique of English laws and customs over three decades, and was a central figure in the antiProtestant, anti-Stuart, and anti-English radical tradition in the seventeenth century. Younger son of a minor Gaelic noble family from west Cork, Philip had arrived in Spain at the age of 12 in 1602 as a refugee from the fighting in Munster. He proceeded to the University of Santiago de Compostella, obtaining the degrees of master of arts and bachelor of canon law while staying at a college expressly founded for the education of poor Irish noblemen. By the late 1610s Philip was closely associated with his cousin Domhnall O’Sullivan Beare, conde de Berehaven, and Florence Conry, archbishop of Tuam, in their efforts to procure another Spanish invasion of Ireland, in opposition to a group connected to David Kearney, archbishop of Cashel, and Jenico Preston, Viscount Gormanston, who, like David Rothe, favoured accommodation with the Stuart monarchy.14 In July 1618 Philip fought a duel with, or led an assassination attempt upon, the Palesman John Bathe, thought by Conry to be an English spy; Berehaven was killed in the incident.15 Philip O’Sullivan Beare’s Historiae Catholicae Iberniae Compendium (Abridgement of the Catholic History of Ireland) was completed in December 1618 in this atmosphere of émigré conspiracy; his report on Ireland’s various peoples supposed to have been submitted to the Council of State in Madrid dates to the same year.16 In January 1619, O’Sullivan Beare removed himself to Cadiz, where he took up a commission in the royal fleet, serving for at least three years both in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. He was back in Madrid in 1625, again submitting schemes for Spanish invasion of Ireland to the king, by then Philip IV. O’Sullivan Beare’s activities at this time were part 14 Benjamin Hazard, Faith and Patronage: The Political Career of Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire c. 1560–1629 (Dublin, 2010), pp. 77–126; Ciaran O’Scea, ‘In search of honour and a Catholic monarch: the assimilation and integration of an Irish minority in early modern Castile, 1601–1638’ (PhD thesis, European University Institute, 2007), pp. 147, 235, 250–66; Glyn Redworth, ‘Beyond faith & fatherland: “The appeal of the Catholics of Ireland”, c. 1623’, Archivium Hibernicum, 52 (1998), 3–23. 15 O’Scea, ‘In search of honour’, pp. 258–62; Hazard, Faith and Patronage, pp. 109–10. 16 O’Sullivan Beare, Compendium; Russell Library Maynooth, Salamanca Archive [hereafter RLM, SA], S.52.7/40, ‘Breve Relation de Irlanda y de los tres differentias de Irlandeses que ay en ella’.

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of a general deterioration in Anglo-Spanish relations, and the ascendancy of the Gaelic Irish party over the English Irish party at court.17 It was also in the mid-1620s and early 1630s that he composed extensive manuscript refutations of Ireland’s detractors: the Zoilomastix and Tenebriomastix. O’Sullivan Beare died in 1636.18 The Spanish who landed in Ireland in 1601 were dismayed at how little support they received from the Catholic gentry, nobility, and towns. O’Sullivan Beare’s Compendium tried to account for that lack of support and assured Spanish readers that future efforts would be received with greater enthusiasm.19 The Compendium’s argument was marked by numerous ambiguities: O’Sullivan Beare admitted that the Irish Catholics’ failure to unite under the leadership of Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, in a crusade against the heretical Queen Elizabeth I could not be blamed completely on one part of the Catholic community, and he took trouble to present the Catholic loyalist point of view.20 But this sympathy with the English Irish was not preserved in the subsequent anti-English tradition and was also absent from both O’Sullivan Beare’s later Zoilomastix and from the widely read manuscript report attributed to him. Three elements of O’Sullivan Beare’s argument were vital to the later tradition: his emphasis on the noble kinship of the Gaelic Irish and the Spanish; his account, based in simple natural law theory, of the illegitimacy of English government in Ireland; and finally his juxtaposition of Irish and Spanish orthodoxy with English heresy. These three elements became a recurring feature of Irish political discourse for the remainder of the century. O’Sullivan Beare’s defence of Irish civility in the Compendium shared with David Rothe the conviction that the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy was far more important than that between civility and barbarism; but O’Sullivan Beare founded his defence not on the categories of university philosophy, but on an account of the noble Iberian ancestry of the Irish. This might seem a foolishly transparent ideology; the worst kind of early modern ancient constitution. In fact, this Milesian ancestry was founded both on the Lebor Gabála Érenn (Book of the Taking of Ireland, or 17 Óscar Recio Morales, ‘Florence Conry’s memorandum for a military assault on Ulster, 1627’, Archivium Hibernicum, 56 (2002), 65–72. 18 Hiram Morgan, ‘O’Sullivan Beare, Philip (1590–1636)’, in DIB, vol. 7, pp. 986–88. 19 J. J. Silke, Kinsale:The Spanish Intervention in Ireland at the End of the Elizabethan Wars (Liverpool, 1970), pp. 118–9, 157. 20 O’Sullivan Beare, Compendium, fols 114v, 116v–117r, 262r.

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Book of Invasions) composed in the eleventh century but containing much older material, and also in the twelfth-century Topographia by Gerald of Wales. Even Richard Stanihurst had cautiously endorsed the Milesian ancestry; his De Rebus included a text of the Topographia which was the version known to O’Sullivan Beare.21 In O’Sullivan Beare’s account, ancient Spain was ruled by Brigus, whose son was Bellus. Bellus had two sons who appear in the ‘the most ancient records in the Irish language’ (that is, the Lebor Gabála).22 These were the older son Golus – who was known as Miles Hispanus, the Spanish soldier, which became corrupted as Milesius – and the younger Ithius. Ithius sailed to Ireland and was killed by the natives. His servants brought word back to Spain, and the sons of Milesius set off to avenge their uncle. The greatest of those that landed in Ireland was Iberus, the second son was Erimon, the youngest Eberginus; with them also was Iberus Fuscus, son of their brother Ierus, and Luthus son of their uncle Ithius; together they subjected the whole island. Eberginus gave himself over to study and a celibate life, O’Sullivan Beare continued, so the most ancient Irish nobility drew their origin from Ibernus Candidus, Erimone, Ibernus Fuscus, and Luthus. O’Sullivan Beare took his chronology from Gerald’s Topographia, with the Milesians crossing over from Spain to Ireland 1,800 years before the death of St Patrick and 2,949 years before the present (December 1618). O’Sullivan Beare further drew on Gerald for the fact that there had been 181 paramount Irish kings in the Spanish line, between the Milesians’ landfall and the advent of the English in the twelfth century.23 The ancient constitution or ideology of ancestry which O’Sullivan Beare laid out here was frequently employed by Irish petitioners to the Spanish monarchy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (including Florence Conry in 1605), and was apparently accepted by members of the Spanish administration as authentic.24 O’Sullivan Beare also differed from David Rothe in portraying English rule in Ireland as utterly unlawful. Despite invasion by Danish pagans, O’Sullivan Beare claimed, religion flourished in Ireland 21 R. A. Stewart MacAlister (ed.), Lebor Gabála Érenn: The Book of the Taking of Ireland (5 vols, Dublin, 1938–56); Stanihurst, De Rebus, pp. 16, 20, 219–64. 22 ‘Ibernicae linguae monumentis vetustissimis’, O’Sullivan Beare, Compendium, fol. 31v. 23 O’Sullivan Beare, Compendium, fols 2v, 31v–32r. 24 O’Scea, ‘In search of honour’, pp. 276–8; Hazard, Faith and Patronage, pp. 4, 13, 36, 51–2, 73, 140; Óscar Recio Morales, Ireland and the Spanish Empire, 1600–1825 (Dublin, 2009), pp. 11, 44–5, 81.

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between 418 (when St Patrick converted the island to Christianity) and the English invasion of 1168; but between 1168 and Henry VIII’s schism, the English threw the Irish commonwealth, both secular and ecclesiastical, into confusion, through war, rapine, and unjust government; from 1532, when the English finally split with Rome, they ‘entirely destroyed’ both the Irish ecclesiastical commonwealth, and such study of letters as pertained to divine and human law.25 The papal bull Laudabiliter which granted the lordship of the island to Henry II on the condition that he reform the church there was obtained under false pretences, O’Sullivan Beare continued; the Irish church did not require reform. And, he insisted, the English had failed to uphold the conditions of Laudabiliter even before their sixteenthcentury heresy.26 O’Sullivan Beare then argued that even the civil laws which the English imposed on Ireland were contrary to natural law. English law, he explained, denied the Old Irish a voice in the government of the country; they were treated as accidental to the commonwealth rather than essential; they were regarded by English law as foreigners in their own patria and required to seek what the Spanish called naturalisation and the English ‘denization’. This flatly contradicted both the law of nature and of peoples, and meant, O’Sullivan Beare concluded, that all those parliaments summoned by the English kings in Ireland which purported to speak for all their Irish subjects were unjust and unlawful.27 Thus the Kingship Act of 1541, which declared Henry VIII the first English king of Ireland, was void.28 This exclusion of the Old Irish from citizenship, he added, was of a piece with the stipulation of English law that killing Irishmen, even peaceful Irishmen paying tribute, was not murder.29 O’Sullivan Beare thus belonged to the Catholic mainstream noted above: English rule in Ireland was not illegitimate because the kings of England were Protestant; it was illegitimate because it was extremely unjust. 25 26 27 28 29

‘ab Anglis funditus deletur’, O’Sullivan Beare, Compendium, fols 57r–57v. Ibid., fols 61–62v Ibid., fols 63r–63v, 237r–7v, 257v–8r. Ibid., fols 69r–70r. Ibid., fol. 63r; Clare Carroll, ‘Custom and law in the philosophy of Suárez and the histories of O’Sullivan Beare, Céitinn, and Ó Cléirigh’, in Carroll, Circe’s Cup: Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Writing about Ireland (Cork, 2001), pp. 124–34; Hiram Morgan, ‘“Making Ireland Spanish”: The political writings of Philip O’Sullivan Beare’, in Jason Harris and Keith Sidwell (eds), Making Ireland Roman: Irish Neo-Latin Writers and the Republic of Letters (Cork, 2009), pp. 86–108.

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History demonstrated, O’Sullivan Beare wrote, that the English were habitual heretics: during their first five hundred and seventy five years as Christians alone, they had deserted the Catholic faith seven times.30 For this reason Irishmen of English descent were praiseworthy only in so far as they had abandoned their Englishness. O’Sullivan Beare labelled the English Irish Novi Iberni, New Irish, and divided them into two parts, one more noble than the other. The nobler part included the Burkes, Butlers, Fitzgeralds, and similar families who had adopted the Irish more principatus, custom of principality, and honoris nomina, name of honour. O’Sullivan Beare used these terms to refer to the practice by which the lord of the MacCarthys was known as MacCarthy; the first baron Desmond, he insisted, had taken the name MacThomas in the same way. Furthermore, O’Sullivan Beare claimed, these great families spoke Irish, used Irish laws and customs and preferred to trace their ancestry to the Old Irish, Spanish, Greeks, or Tuscans rather than to the English. These families, he wrote, were not merely Irish in residence, but Irish in substance.31 However, O’Sullivan Beare admitted that many of the second, less noble part of the New Irish in fact showed themselves more English than Irish in their use of English language and customs, even though they held steadfastly to the Catholic faith. Of these, the most English of all were the inhabitants of the English Pale: They are called the English nation, Anglo-Irish, or the colonists, who formerly settled Fine Gall, or the English Province, that is the part of Ireland closest to England, separated from the Irish, and have bound themselves to English customs and laws. Their language is Old English mixed with Irish words which by those Irish and English who speak skilfully and civilly is more easily smiled at than understood.32

O’Sullivan Beare repeated roughly the same description later when describing the processes involved in choosing sides in the Nine Years War. The Palesmen supported Queen Elizabeth with all their resources, he claimed, and were joined by the urban English Irish of 30 O’Sullivan Beare, Compendium, fols. 66v–68r. 31 Ibid., fols 34v–35r. 32 ‘illi, qui Finegaldam, vel Anglicam provinciam, id est particulam Ibernie proximam Angliae olim incolere ceperunt, ab Ibernis disiuncti, genus Anglicum, vel Anglo Iberni, & coloni nuncupantur, & Anglorum moribus, & legibus vixerunt. Quorum lingua est Anglica vetus Ibernis verbis mixta, quae ab Ibernis, & Anglis comiter, & scite loquentibus facilius subridetur, quam intelligitur’, O’Sullivan Beare, Compendium, fols 35r–35v.

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Leinster and Munster; people given more to trade and business than warfare.33 As for the great lords and princes of Ireland, he continued bitterly, the Newer Irish lords fought alongside the heretics ‘in the manner of pagans and heathens preferring the cause of that people from which they are sprung, to the Catholic religion, which they honour and revere’.34 O’Sullivan Beare’s Zoilomastix, a substantial manuscript treatise composed between 1625 and 1626 during a period of renewed warfare between England and Spain, interrogated the link between Englishness and heresy more closely.35 Book V of the Zoilomastix was dedicated to refuting the entire argument of Richard Stanihurst’s De Rebus; and it was in the course of this refutation that O’Sullivan Beare reconsidered his earlier use of the term Anglo-Ibernus. O’Sullivan Beare wrote that he had been wrong to employ this term in his Compendium, for what did English mean but heretic? ‘What can Anglo-Irish be understood to mean by foreigners other than Lutheran-Irish, or Calvinist Irish, or Puritan-Irish, or AtheistIrish?’36 Englishness and heresy were synonymous. This meant that Stanihurst’s charge that those English Irish who forgot their English civility and embraced Irish customs degenerated as if they had drunk from Circe’s cup, which turned Odysseus’s sailors into swine, was backwards: rather ‘the false, counterfeited, barbarous urbanity of the English, inhospitable, poisonous, illusionary to Christian piety, to worship of God, to the veneration of the saints, changes men skilled in knowledge of faith and divinity into heretical beasts’.37 David Rothe’s Analecta had conflated barbarism and heresy, insisting that there could be no true virtue outside the church; O’Sullivan Beare 33 Ibid., fols 113v–114r. 34 ‘Ethnicorum, & gentilium more praeponentes causam gentis, a qua sunt oriundi, Catholicae Religioni, quam colunt, atque venerantur’, ibid., fol. 114r. 35 Uppsala, University Library [hereafter UUL] MS. H. 248, ‘Philippi OSullevani Bearii Hiberni Vindiciae Hibernicae contra Giraldum Cambrensem et alios. vel Zoilomastigis liber primus 2, 3, 4, et 5. et contra Stanihurstum’; Philip O’Sullivan Beare, Selections from the Zoilomastix of Philip O’Sullivan Beare, ed. Thomas J. O’Donnell (Dublin, 1960), pp. xxi–xxii. 36 ‘Anglo-Ibernus quid aliud, quam Lutherano-Ibernus, vel CalvinianoIbernus, vel Puritano-Ibernus, vel Atheo-Ibernus etc. ab externis potest iudicare?’, O’Sullivan Beare, Selections from the Zoilomastix, p. 61. 37 ‘Ita Anglorum urbanitas falsa, fucata, barbara, christianae pietati, Dei cultui, Caelicolarum venerationi inhospita, venenata, praestigiosa, haeretica homines in belluas haereticas divinae fidei, divinae cognitionis expertes mutat’, ibid., p. 67.

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went further, insisting throughout the Zoilomastix that Englishness, heresy, and barbarism were identical. O’Sullivan Beare also touched on the question of whether heresy might be a natural quality of Englishness, heritable through ancestry. Stanihurst had begun his De Rebus with a satire of an ignorant, illeducated, drunken Irish priest who went to Rome and demanded a bishopric. Stanihurst had named his priest Cornelius to make it clear that he was Gaelic Irish, and claimed that these appalling aspirants to high office in the church were unfree peasants.38 This infuriated O’Sullivan Beare. He mentioned two Gaelic Irish, Franciscan bishops of that name: Cornelius O’Mulrian of Killaloe, and Cornelius O’Devany of Down and Connor. The former had acted as an agent for James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald on the continent in the 1570s; the latter had been martyred in 1612.39 O’Sullivan Beare wrote that there was no Irish priest not of honourable and free parentage; unless all the Irish should be called slaves. He allowed that some Irishmen of plebeian parentage were admitted to the priesthood, and that this was quite correct as Christ had ordered that poor men be admitted to the ecclesiastical order: Although these priests are sprung from plebeian blood, they are not sons of slaves, libertines, Jews, Mohammedans, pagans, or heretics; but of free, Catholic, honourable, honest parents of good character: and, just as noblemen ornament their nobility with learning, wisdom, piety, holiness, and with blood shed for the law of God; so these priests ennoble their plebeian blood with like qualities.40

O’Sullivan Beare thus implied that persons in fact descended from Jews, Muslims, or heretics might correctly be excluded from the ecclesiastical order. It was indeed the practice of many religious orders and orders of nobility, cathedral chapters, and other corpora38 Stanihurst, De Rebus, p. 6. 39 O’Sullivan Beare, Selections from the Zoilomastix, p. 55; Aidan Clarke and R. Dudley Edwards, ‘Pacification, plantation, and the Catholic question, 1603–23’, in T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne (eds), A New History of Ireland, III: Early Modern Ireland 1534–1691 (Oxford, 1976), pp. 187–242, at 209–12; J. J. Silke,‘The Irish abroad, 1534–1691’, ibid., pp. 586–633, at 596. 40 ‘Hi tamen plebeio sanguine sati sacerdotes non servorum, non libertinorum, non Judaeorum, non Mahometanorum, non Ethnicorum, non haereticorum; sed liberorum, ingenuorum, Catholicorum, honestorum, proborum parentium filii sunt: et, sicut nobiles generis sui nobilitatem eruditione, sapientia, pietate, sanctitate, effuso pro Dei lege sanguine decorant; ita paribus meritis plebeium sanguinem nobilitant’, O’Sullivan Beare, Selections from the Zoilomastix, p. 54.

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tions in Spain to exclude those of non-Christian or flawed Christian ancestry from membership under the convention known as limpieza de sangre, purity of blood. The limpieza statutes touched the lives of many Irishmen in seventeenth-century Spain, as they were required to prove their purity of blood before being accepted into orders of chivalry, and also religious orders.41 The second book of the Zoilomastix treated the inconstancy of the English in religion at length, and contained further remarks on the likeness of heretics to Jews and Muslims.42 But O’Sullivan Beare never went so far in the Zoilomastix as to argue outright that English ancestry and heretical ancestry were the same; that even if no heretics could be identified in one’s ancestry for three generations, English blood lent one a propensity for heresy; that a person with English ancestry should be treated as though they had heretical ancestors. The ‘Breve Relation de Irlanda y de los tres differentias de Irlandeses que ay en ella’, a short relacion or report on divisions among Irish Catholics at home and abroad, the composition of which has been dated by Hazard to between July 1618 and July 1619, was considerably more radical than either the Compendium or Zoilomastix.43 The authorship of this report is uncertain: Archbishop James Ussher noted on the English translation which came into his possession that O’Sullivan Beare had written the report and Conry then presented it to the Council of State in Madrid.44 But Conry had returned to Leuven in the spring of 1618, and the report noted his departure; also no record of such a document being submitted to the Council of State survives, although the Spanish text certainly circulated in Madrid and Salamanca, and English translations were sent to Dublin and Rome.45 Much of the report, four leaves in the 41 Micheline Walsh (ed.), Spanish Knights of Irish Origin: Documents from Continental Archives (4 vols, Dublin, 1960–78); Declan Downey, ‘Purity of blood and purity of faith in early modern Ireland’, in Alan Ford and John McCafferty (eds), The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 216–28, at 226. 42 UUL, MS. H. 248, fols 59r–68r, at 67r–67v. 43 Cf. Clare Carroll, ‘Irish and Spanish cultural and political relations in the work of O’Sullivan Beare’, in Carroll, Circe’s Cup, pp. 104–23, at 116–21. 44 Trinity College Dublin [TCD], MS 580, ‘A Briefe Relation of Ireland and the diversity of Irish in the same’, fols 95r–98r; online edition by Beatrix Färber and Benjamin Hazard, www.ucc.ie/celt/published/T100077.html, accessed 30 May 2011. 45 O’Scea, ‘In search of honour’, p. 293; Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Salazar, tomo N-11, fols 163r–166v; RLM, SA, S. 52. 7/40; ‘Briefe relation of Ireland and diversity of Irish in the same, c. 1618’, University College Dublin,

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Spanish text which was held at the Irish College in Salamanca, reads as a summary of O’Sullivan Beare’s Compendium, outlining the Milesian origin of the Irlandeses Antiguos, Old Irish, and then the degrees of Englishness of the Irlandeses Mixtos, mixed Irish, who included the Fitzgeralds, Butlers, and Barrys, and the Irlandeses Inglesados, Anglicised Irish, who inhabited the Pale and towns. This report, like the Compendium, explained that King Henry II’s request to be granted Ireland had been made under false pretences, and also provided a list of fifty-five prominent Irishmen in Spain, Flanders, Rome and Ireland divided carefully into the three above-mentioned groups, thus complementing and updating the lists included in the Compendium.46 However, the relacion differed from the Compendium and Zoilomastix in remarking on the nature of Irishmen of English descent, and using theological terms to do so. O’Sullivan Beare had matriculated as far as the fourth year of the theology degree at Santiago de Compostella; though the report’s emphasis on theological concepts might suggest some contribution by Florence Conry, who had studied theology at Salamanca and later became a prominent proto-Jansenist theologian.47 As the translation owned by Ussher put it: These severall kindes of Irish agree all in one thing, to wit, in being true Catholickes, and children of the church of Rome; yet doe they differ in their manner of living, natural inclinations and desires to have princes and lawes over them, every one desireing his naturall inclination, and imitating his predecessors.48

The author of the relacion returned frequently to these inclinationes naturales throughout its length, insisting that Irishmen of English descent followed not just the laws, language, customs, and habits, of the English, but also their innate tendencies. The author admitted that the Irlandeses Mixtos, as their blood (sangre) was a mixture of Irish and English, so too their ‘inclynations and manners of life’ were a mixture of both, with some following the Irish side and others the UCD-OFM, MS D. 01., vol. 1, pp. 15–26; Hazard, Faith and Patronage, pp. 110–12, 129–30. 46 O’Sullivan Beare, Compendium, fols 114–16. 47 O’Scea, ‘In search of honour’, p. 147; Hazard, Faith and Patronage, p. 28. 48 TCD, MS 580, fol. 95v; ‘Estos tres generos de Irlandeses conbienen en una cosa que es ser catolicos y hijos de la Iglesia romana pero diffieren mucho en la manera de vivir . . . y en las inclinationes naturales y desseos de tener principes y leyes a que se sogeten que Cada genero dellos appetece su natural y dessean imitar sus antepassados’, RLM, SA, S. 52. 7/40.

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English.49 And the author explicitly placed this talk of natural inclination in a theological context: These three sortes of Irish have their abovesaid inclynations soe deepely rooted in them, that in what state soever they live, they keepe them still; which is true not only in seculars, as Knightes, souldiers, and others, but allso in others as schollers, priestes, yea and religous men; yet as man hath free will by which he may forsake his owne inclynation, and follow the contrary, soe wee have seene sometymes, that an English-Irished hath followed or imitated the auncyent Irish . . .50

Hammering at his point monotonously, the author continued to argue that these natural inclinations had been plainly visible during the last war, as the Gaelic Irish and more noble of the ‘mixt Irish’ sided with the king of Spain, while the ‘Englyshed-Irish’ took the English king’s side. The latter group, suffering persecution, now regretted their rash actions: but while persecution varied in intensity, ‘their naturall inclynations carrieth them more towards the English King and nation’.51 Chapter 2 above mentioned that the Protestant Barnaby Riche employed the term ‘natural inclination’ when writing on the Gaelic Irish. In a slightly more technical vein, the English Irish Protestant, Rowland White, wrote in a report forwarded to Sir William Cecil in March 1571, that disorder was endemic to Ireland, ‘the people strongelie rooted therein, of suche longe acquayntance and custome, that to alter their old demeanors semeth in manner a vehement suppression of their naturall inclynacions, as it weare the forcinge of a newe nature in them’.52 Others distinguished customs or mores from 49 TCD, MS 580, fol. 95v; ‘Inclinationes naturales y modo de vivir’, RLM, SA, S. 52. 7/40. 50 TCD, MS 580, fol. 95v; ‘Estos tres generos de Irlandeses tienen las dichas inclinationes naturalmente tan arraygadas que en qualquer estado que vivan las llevan consigo, viviendo conforme a ellas enquanto les es permittido por el estado que professan que no solo es verdad en los seglares assi cabelleros, soldados y otros, sino tambien en los estudientes, sacerdotes y religiosos, loqual es assi commun y ordinariamente que como el hombre tiene libre alvidrio conque puede dexar de seguir su inclination y hacer su contrario – assi alguna vez se ha visto que un Irlandes Inglesado siguiesse los Antiquos’, RLM, SA, S. 52. 7/40. 51 TCD, MS 580, fol. 96r; ‘su natural appetito les inclina al Rey y nation de Inglaterra’, RLM, SA, S. 52. 7/40. 52 National Archives, London, SP 63/31/32, Rowland White ‘Discors touching Ireland’, fols 73–117, at 100; Nicholas Canny, ‘Rowland White’s “Discors touching Ireland”, c. 1569’, Irish Historical Studies, 20 (1977), 439–63, at 444.

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reason.53 What exactly did all these terms mean? Aquinas had thought of appetites or inclinations as internal sources of motion; and the lowest level of appetite which operated without any cognition on the part of the creature he labelled natural inclination. Reason was conscious; natural inclination unconscious. In humans, there was a natural inclination towards self-preservation shared with all substances; a natural inclination towards reproduction and the care of young shared with animals; and a natural inclination to know the truth about God and live in society, which was proper to humans alone.54 Many of these positions, and certainly this basic vocabulary, were common to a variety of theological traditions well into the seventeenth century. So the Irishman John Punch, writing up his lecture notes in the early 1640s, held that humans had a natural inclination towards God, that after the fall all humans had a natural inclination towards sin, and that the human will could overcome natural inclination.55 The term was also commonly employed by Calvinists, including the Frenchman Pierre du Moulin, who studied at Cambridge in the 1590s, and later became both a favorite of King James I and the leading voice of French Protestantism.56 Du Moulin’s Anatomia Arminianismi of 1619, translated as The Anatomy of Arminianisme in 1620, explained carefully during a treatment of free will that if the will were determined by an external principle or law, then it would no longer be will, but rather a natural inclination of the kind found in irrational creatures.57 For all these Protestants and Catholics then, a natural inclination was a subconscious drive, distinct from the reason and the will. Habits and customs were different. For the Aristotelians, a habit (hexis in Greek, habitus in Latin) was a durable characteristic of an agent, disposing him or her to certain actions and reactions.58 53 [John Milton?] Articles of Peace, Made and Concluded with the Irish Rebels, and Papists, by James Earle of Ormond . . . Upon All which Are Added Observations (London, 1649), p. 47. 54 D. M. Gallagher, ‘The will and its acts (Ia IIae, qq. 6–17)’, in S. J. Pope (ed.), The Ethics of Aquinas (Washington, D. C., 2002), pp. 69–89; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae, qu. 94, a. 2. 55 John Punch, Theologiae Cursus Integer ad Mentem Scoti (Lyons, 1671), pp. 42, 230, 313. 56 B. G. Armstrong and Vivienne Larmine, ‘Du Moulin, Pierre (1568–1658), Reformed minister and religious controversialist’, in ODNB, vol. 17, pp. 189–94. 57 Pierre du Moulin, The Anatomy of Arminianisme (London, 1620), p. 282. 58 Bonnie Kent, ‘Habits and virtues (Ia IIae, qq. 49–70)’, in Pope (ed.), Ethics of Aquinas, pp. 116–30; John Prendiville, ‘The development of the idea of habit in the thought of Saint Augustine’, Traditio, 28 (1972) 29–99.

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Aristotle defined moral virtue itself as a type of habitus: virtue was a habitus concerned with choice, lying in a mean, this being decided by reference to reason and in the way that a wise man would determine it.59 By ‘lying in a mean’, Aristotle meant that true human excellence would often involve a certain moderation; being not cowardly or foolhardy, but brave for example. Writing in the 1580s, the Oxford Aristotelian John Case paraphrased Aristotle to define virtue as a ‘voluntary and elective’ habitus, ‘placed in the mean, according as a wise man defines the circumstances for action’.60 Domingo de Soto, professor of theology at Salamanca in the 1550s, preferred to echo Cicero, defining virtue as a habitus of the mind in harmony with reason and nature.61 A virtue was a good durable characteristic or habitus; a vice was a bad habitus. Nevertheless, habitus was a word which very often carried a negative charge among Christian theologians. Augustine, who preferred to use the term consuetudo (custom) in place of habitus, explained in his De Civitate Dei (City of God) that God punished no one for their natural defects, but only for sins which proceeded from the will. He then added that even those sins that had become naturally ingrained in a person by consuetudo had their origin in an act of the will and so would be punished.62 The fiercely Augustinian Flemish theologian, Cornelius Jansen, so popular among the Irish, was thus prepared to accept Aquinas’s characterisation of the matter of original sin as concupiscence, which might be understood as a corrupt habitus.63 All humanist writers on education worried that a habitus was very easily fixed in childhood and changed only with the greatest difficulty thereafter; that a habitus or consuetudo might indeed become a second nature. So the English Protestant and Munster colonist Ludowick Bryskett wrote in the 1580s that only a rigorous education and disciplining of the soul, ‘by long custome, converted into an habite’ could tame ‘those parts which by nature are rebel59 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1106b36–1107a2. 60 ‘Virtus est habitus voluntarius & electivus, in mediocritate positus, prout prudens praescribit agendi circumstantias’, John Case, Speculum Moralium Questionum in Universam Ethicen Aristotelis (Oxford, 1585), p. 14. 61 Domingo de Soto, Libri Decem de Iustitia et Iure (Lyons, 1569), bk. 1, qu. 4, a. 2, fol. 11v. 62 Augustine, De Civitate Dei, 12. 3. 63 Cornelius Jansen, Augustinus, seu Doctrina Sancti Augustini de Humanae Naturae Sanitate . . . accessit huic editioni Tractatus F. Florentij Conrij Archiepiscopi Thuamensis de Statu Parvulorum sine Baptismo Decedentium iuxta Sensum B. Augustini (3 vols in 1, Rouen, 1643), bk 1, chap. 23, p. 112.

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lious to reason’. The corollary of this was that no greater evil could be wished on a person, then that they might be ‘ill-habituated . . . for he that is fallen into an ill habite, is no lesse blind to vertuous actions, then he that wanteth his sight to things visible’.64 To return to the ‘Breve Relation de Irlanda’ and Rowland White, an ingrained and in this case bad habitus or consuetudo might indeed seem close to an inclinatio naturalis, but the distinction between the first two terms and the third remained significant. Although popular attacks on Spanish Jews and Christians of Jewish ancestry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sometimes did claim that Jews had wicked natural inclinations, elite defences of the exclusion of those of Jewish ancestry from prestigious institutions more often rested their arguments on grounds of habituation.65 Diego de Simancas’s Defensio Statuti Toletani (Defense of the Statutes of Toledo) of 1573, printed in defence of Archbishop Juan Martínez Guijarro of Toledo’s statutes of 1547, was one of the most accomplished of these elite, Latinate, arguments advocating Limpieza legislation, and it later became internationally important in the Society of Jesus.66 The wickedness of those Jews who had killed Christ, Simancas wrote, was incontrovertible; and Christians of Jewish ancestry remained depraved. He explained precisely how that depravity was transmitted: ‘For although diseases of the soul may not pass from parents to children, nevertheless, children often are accustomed to fall into those vices, by which their parents were weakened.’67 Simancas emphasised this point again later, arguing that ‘Jewish superstition’ was very easily learned by children from parents, and cited and paraphrased Cicero’s De Officiis: children were 64 Lodowick Bryskett, A Discourse of Civill Life: Containing the Ethicke part of Morall Philosophie (London, 1606), pp. 115–16. 65 David Nirenberg, ‘Mass conversion and genealogical mentalities: Jews and Christians in fifteenth-century Spain’, Past and Present, 174 (2002), 3–41, at 24–5, 26–7; Jerome Friedman, ‘Jewish conversion, the Spanish pure blood laws and Reformation: a revisionist view of racial and religious Antisemitism’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 18 (1987), 3–30, at 16–18. 66 Didacus Velasquez [Diego de Simancas], Defensio Statuti Toletani a Sede Apostolica saepè Confirmati, pro his, qui Bono & Incontaminato Genere Nati Sunt (Antwerp, 2nd edn, 1575); R. A. Maryks, The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews: Jesuits of Jewish Ancestry and Purity-of-Blood Laws in the Early Society of Jesus (Leiden, 2010), pp. 29–39. 67 ‘Nam & si animi morbi ex patribus in filios non transeant; saepe tamen filii solent in ea vitia incidere, quibus parentes fuere affecti’, Simancas, Defensio Statuti Toletani, p. 99.

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imbued with their parents’ teachings, and so were drawn towards their consuetudines and mores.68 It was not just a lingering Jewishness in general that these children learned from their parents, Simancas continued, but in particular the hereditary and particularly unsocial vices of ambition, restlessness, caprice, and sedition.69 He concluded that just as human societies were inherently unequal, and the commonwealth distinguished between noble and plebeian, learned and unlearned, magistrate and subject, so it was just that certain colleges and chapters should exclude persons of Jewish ancestry, with their exasperating vices, from membership.70 There is no doubt that Simancas’s cautious and learned arguments were quite different to the semi-mystical anti-Judaism of, for example, Alonso de Espina’s Fortalitium Fidei (Fortress of Faith), first printed in 1464 and often re-printed thereafter, especially in Germany.71 The relationship between Christians and Jews has always been unique and it would be a mistake to seek close analogies between the ideology of Limpieza and the Gaelic Irish hostility towards Irishmen of English descent. Nevertheless, it is clear that the anti-English ideology of some of these Gaelic Irish exiles, intellectuals, and military men shared a vocabulary, derived from the universities, with the more moderate exponents of Limpieza de Sangre. Seen in the context of the radical Gaelic Irish political tradition, the attack on English Irish natural inclinations in the ‘Breve Relation de Irlanda’ was unusual. More common was to allege that the English Irish, living from commerce with the English and in proximity to them, underwent a process of habituation which rendered them less good Catholics than the Gaelic Irish. In 1625, Peter Lombard, the English Irish archbishop of Armagh, died, and two years of debate followed before the appointment of a successor.72 In 1626, the papal nuncio at Flanders, Giovanni Francesco Guidi Di Bagno, archbishop of Patras, wrote a long letter to Rome on behalf of the Gaelic Irish and Ulster interest.73 This 68 69 70 71

‘superstitionem Judaicum’, ibid., p. 106; Cicero, De Officiis, 1. 32. Simancas, Defensio Statuti Toletani, pp. 107–108. Ibid., p. 108. [Alonso de Espina], Fortalitium Fidei contra Judeos Sarracenos aliosque Christiane Fidei Imimicos (Lyons, [1464?]); A. A. Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre: controversias entre los siglos XV y XVII, trans. Mauro Armiño (Madrid, 1985), pp. 92, 100–1. 72 O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, pp. 124–126. 73 Nuncio of Flanders to [cardinal assessor of the Holy Office], 21 February 1626, in Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on Franciscan Manuscripts Preserved at the Convent, Merchants Quay, Dublin (Dublin, 1906), pp. 87–92, at

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purported to lay out the claims of each side (Gaelic Irish and English Irish) fairly, but in fact advocated a Gaelic Irish candidate for the see. The English Irish claimed the greater civility, the nuncio explained, and the Gaelic Irish agreed that the English Irish were more civil when it came to making contracts, buying, and selling, but less civil when it came to liberality, hospitality, and charity. This was why, the Gaelic Irish continued, there were lots of Gaelic Irish saints, but no English Irish ones. Therefore, continued the nuncio’s account of Gaelic Irish opinion: Whereas . . . the civility of the manners and virtues of the Saints is more to be sought in bishops than that of contracts, the Old Irish, who have received, as it were, by hereditary right the exercise of the said virtues from their ancestors, are rather to be chosen bishops than the Anglo-Irish, whose predecessors exercised the arts and methods of acquiring worldly possessions rather than the said virtues, but neither are they to be altogether excluded from the exercise of the said virtues, although they do not attain to the excellence of the virtues of the Old Irish.74

The nuncio concluded his report with his own recommendation that for a diocese where there were a greater number of Gaelic Irish, and a good Gaelic Irish candidate could be found, a Gaelic candidate should be chosen.75 If O’Sullivan Beare was indeed the author of the ‘Breve Relation de Irlanda’, then his radicalism changed over the course of his life – the later Zoilomastix said nothing concrete about the natural inclinations of the English Irish and focused on their ill-habituation. And Conry’s hostility to English Irishmen varied over time also. In a report to King Philip III in 1602 Conry was prepared to write that 92; Brendan Jennings (ed.), Wadding Papers 1614–38 (Dublin, 1953), pp. 168– 174; Cathaldus Giblin, ‘Catalogue of material of Irish interest in the collection “Nunziatura di Fiandra” Vatican Archives: part 1, vols. 1–50’, Collectanea Hibernica, no. 1 (1958), pp. 7–136, at 24, 38. 74 Report on Franciscan Manuscripts, pp. 90–1. ‘Cum igitur urbanitas sanctorum morum ac virtutum, potius quam illa contractum, in episcopis magis exigatur, antiqui Hiberni, qui quasi hereditario jure praedictarum virtutum exercitium ab antecessoribus receperunt, sunt potius elegendi in episcopos quam Anglohiberni, quorum praedecessores artes et modos acquirendi mundum, magis quam praedictas virtutes, exercuerunt; sed nunc illi a praedictarum virtutum exercitio sunt omnino excludendi, licet ad excellentiam virtutum antiquorum Hibernorum non pervenerint’, Jennings, Wadding Papers 1614–38, p. 172. 75 Report on Franciscan Manuscripts, p. 92.

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the then president of the Irish College at Salamanca was a native ‘of those provinces subject to the queen and consequently schismatical’, but his priority always remained establishing a Catholic government in Ireland, and all other concerns were subordinate to that objective.76 Late in 1627, King Philip IV of Spain himself wrote to Isabella Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain and governor of the Spanish Low Countries. The king summarised a plan which John O’Neill, recognised by the Spanish as earl of Tyrone, his cousin Owen Roe O’Neill, and Conry had submitted for establishing a commonwealth and kingdom of Ireland (‘Republica y Reyno de Irlanda’), which contained provisions for the management of provincial and ethnic rivalries very similar to those of the Catholic Confederation of the 1640s.77 But while Conry clearly intended Irishmen of English descent to play a prominent role in this Catholic commonwealth, the invasion itself was such a delicate matter, he wrote, that English Irish noblemen would have to be excluded.78 O’Sullivan Beare died in 1636, but his arguments for a Gaelic and Catholic ancient constitution survived in his Compendium and were taken up by Conor O’Mahony in the 1640s and Richard O’Ferrall in the 1650s and 1660s.79 Archbishop Conry died in Madrid in 1629; his political ideals were maintained less by texts than by institutions. Chief among these was the Franciscan College of St Anthony of Padua at the University of Leuven, founded as a result of Conry’s adroit lobbying in 1607. Conry intended the new college 76 ‘natural de las provincias subjectas ala Reyna y por consiguiente Sçismaticas’, Florence Conry, ‘Un Memorial de la parte del Collegio de Salamanca que ha dado el Conde Odonel, a 22 de Mays del año 1602’, in C. P. Meehan, The Fate and Fortunes of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and Rory O’Donel, Earl of Tyrconnel (Dublin, 2nd edn, 1870), pp. 526–30; Hazard, Faith and Patronage, p. 149. 77 Brussels, Archives Générales du Royaume, Secrétaire d’Etat et de Guerre, Correspondance des Gouverneurs, reg. 197, Philip IV to the Infanta Isabella, 27 December 1627, fols 410–22, at 414; Brendan Jennings (ed.), Wild Geese in Spanish Flanders, 1582–1700: Documents Relating Chiefly to Irish Regiments, from the Archives Générales du Royaume, Bruxelles, and Other Sources (Dublin, 1964), pp. 228–235, at 230–1; Jerrold Casway, Owen Roe O’Neill and the Struggle for Catholic Ireland (Philadelphia, 1984), pp. 32–4. 78 Duke de Messia to the Infanta Isabella, 30 January 1627, in Jennings (ed.), Wild Geese in Spanish Flanders, pp. 213–15, at 214; Hazard, Faith and Patronage, pp. 144–5. 79 Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, ‘“Though Hereticks and Politicians should misinterpret their goode zeal”: political ideology and Catholicism in early modern Ireland’, in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Kingdom or Colony? (Cambridge, 2000), pp.155–75, at 158–9.

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to offer an alternative religious and political atmosphere to that prevalent at Salamanca, Santiago de Compostella, Douai, and other Irish colleges dominated by English Irish Jesuits. St Anthony’s looked determinedly to the education and indeed evangelisation of Gaelic Ireland and Ulster.80 And the relationship between St Anthony’s and those other crucial anti-Stuart institutions, the noble houses of O’Neill and O’Donnell and their tercios (units of over a thousand infantry) in the Low Countries, was an intimate one. In 1607, St Anthony’s welcomed the exiled Ulster earls, Hugh O’Neill of Tyrone and Rory O’Donnell of Tyrconnell, before Conry journeyed on with them to Rome.81 Two years earlier, Henry O’Neill, Hugh’s second son, educated under Irish Franciscan tutelage at Salamanca, had been commissioned colonel of a tercio of Irishmen.82 Hugh O’Donnell, son of the earl of Tyrconnell, educated at Leuven by Conry’s Franciscan colleagues, was commissioned colonel of his own tercio in 1632.83 The friars of St Anthony’s acted as regimental chaplains, and indeed the very existence of the Irish tercios was due in no small part to Conry’s skills as a courtier.84 The officers of the tercios certainly favoured the establishment of a Catholic commonwealth in Ireland, with the associated antiProtestant and anti-Stuart attitudes which that implied; an ethos captured in Lughaidh Ó Cléirigh’s Beatha Aodha Ruaidh Uí Dhomhnaill (Life of Red Hugh O’Donnell) composed probably between 1616 and 1630, and the pro-O’Neill version of Archbishop Peter Lombard’s history of Ireland printed at Leuven in 1632.85 80 Hazard, Faith and Patronage, pp. 50–54; Bernadette Cunningham, ‘The culture and ideology of Irish Franciscan historians at Louvain 1607–1650’, in Ciaran Brady (ed.), Ideology and the Historians (Dublin, 1991), pp. 11–30. 81 Tadhg Ó Cianáin, Turas no dTaoiseach nUltach tar Sáile: from Ráth Maoláin to Rome, ed. Nollaig Ó Muraíle (Rome, 2007), pp. 23–4, 87, 109–33. 82 Jerrold Casway, ‘Henry O’Neill and the formation of the Irish regiment in the Netherlands, 1605’, Irish Historical Studies, 18 (1973), 481–88. 83 Brendan Jennings, ‘The career of Hugh, son of Rory O Donnell, earl of Tirconnel, in the Low Countries, 1607–1642’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 30 (1941), 219–34. 84 Jennings, Wild Geese in Spanish Flanders, pp. 82, 93, 108, 224, 261, 262; Cunningham, ‘Culture and ideology’, pp. 15–16; Hazard, Faith and Patronage, pp. 47–50. 85 Benjamin Hazard, ‘“A new company of crusaders like that of St John Capistran”: interaction between Irish military units and Franciscan chaplains, 1579–1654’, in Óscar Recio Morales and Enrique García Hernán (eds), La Nación Irlandesa en el Ejército y la Sociedad Española, 1580–1818 (Madrid, 2007), pp. 181–97; Mícheál Mac Craith, ‘The Beatha in the context of the literature of the Renaissance’, in Pádraig Ó Riain, Beatha Aodha Ruaidh: The

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However, intellectuals associated with the tercios did occasionally attempt to reassure Irishmen of English descent of their place in the new Ireland. So Eoghan Rua Mac an Bhaird, dedicating an Irishlanguage military manual to the young Hugh O’Donnell, perhaps in the first decade of the seventeenth century, reassured his little book that the Burkes, Butlers, and Fitzgeralds would be glad of its message, and called down blessings on the fionn ghaill, fair foreigners, now united with the Gaeil as Éireannaigh, Irishmen.86 Moreover, Owen Roe O’Neill, who had taken command of his own tercio in 1633, was horrified by the disorder and cruelty of the Gaelic peasantry and gentry he observed on his return to Ulster in 1642. He immediately labelled them barbarians, comparing them to Indians, Arabs, and Moors.87 During his campaigns in Ireland up to his death in 1649, O’Neill always denied any attempt to unseat the Stuarts and establish a new Catholic commonwealth, though these denials were widely disbelieved.88 Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the specifically anti-English, and anti-English Irish ideology of O’Sullivan Beare, Conry, and the tercios found a home in the household of Gianbattista Rinuccini, papal nuncio to the confederate Catholics of Ireland between 1645 and 1649. As early as 1646 Rinuccini was comparing Gaelic Irish and English Irish customs to the disadvantage of the latter, and by 1649 the nuncio was describing to Pope Innocent X himself not just the ill-habituation of the English Irish, or even their natural inclinations, but the concrete characteristics of their bodies.89 It was the combination of their ill-habituation and their physical peculiarities, according to Rinuccini, that rendered them inferior as Catholics to the Gaelic Irish. The details of Rinuccini’s criticisms, especially his criticisms of English Irish bodies, will be examined in detail in the

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Life of Red Hugh O’Donnell: Historical and Literary Contexts (Dublin, 2003), pp. 36–53, at 45–6; Peter Lombard, De Regno Hiberniae Sanctorum Insula Commentarius, in quo . . . res a Principe ONeillo ad Fidem Catholicam Propagandam Foeliciter Gestae Continentur (Leuven, 1632). Osborn Bergin, Irish Bardic Poetry:Texts and Translation, ed. David Greene and Fergus Kelly (Dublin, 1970), pp. 25–7, 219–20. O’Neill to [Hugh Bourke], 16–26 September 1642, Jennings, Wild Geese, pp. 507–9, at 507. Ó hAnnracháin, ‘Though Hereticks and Politicians’, pp. 164–6. ‘Relazione del Regno d’Irlanda 1 Marzo 1646’, in Giuseppe Aiazzi (ed.), Nunziatura in Irlanda di Monsignor Gio. Batista Rinuccini Archivescovo di Fermo negli anni 1643 a 1649 (Florence, 1844), pp. 104–115, at 105; ‘Relazione delle Cose D’Irlanda fatta al Pont. Innocenzio X da Monsignor Rinuccini dopo il suo ritorno’, ibid., pp. 391–433, at 392.

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next chapter. The question that must be addressed here is how Rinuccini came to employ this radical Gaelic ideology. John Lynch thought he had the answer. In his Supplementum Alithinologiae, printed in 1667, Lynch alleged that Heber MacMahon, bishop of Clogher, and Boethius MacEgan, Franciscan bishop of Ross, whom the nuncio took to himself on terms of ‘intimate familiarity’, even before all the rest of the Gaelic Irish, had alienated the nuncio from the confederation.90 Lynch repeated these charges, at greater length, in the great history of the Irish episcopate which he completed in 1672, the De Praesulibus Hiberniae (On the Prelates of Ireland).91 In particular, Lynch laid the nuncio’s notion that Irishmen of English descent were more inclined towards heresy at the door of Clogher and Ross. Lynch considered this of a piece with the remark of the papal agent, PierFrancesco Scarampi, who on hearing that his interlocutor was of the newer Irish (that is, of the English Irish), remarked that this meant he was a less sincere Catholic.92 There is no doubt that MacMahon and MacEgan belonged to a radical wing of the Irish church. MacMahon had been educated at Leuven in the early 1620s (though at the Pastoral College, not St Anthony’s) where he came to the attention of the then Colonel Owen Roe O’Neill.93 He was then involved in a plot to secure a French invasion in 1628, had recruited for O’Neill in Ireland in the 1630s, and seems to have been party to the conspiracy of October 1641. MacMahon was also prominent in the synod of Ulster Clergy of March 1642 which welcomed the rebellion as a war for the defence of the faith.94 MacEgan’s family had been brehons to the MacCarthys, and he had served as both chaplain general and vicar general of O’Neill’s Ulster army, with Rinuccini’s blessing.95 Both MacMahon and MacEgan led Irish resistance to Parliamentarian invasion in 1649 and were captured and executed by the Parliamentarians during 1650. Of the two, MacMahon was 90 Lynch, Supplementum, pp. 75–6. 91 John Lynch, De Praesulibus Hiberniae, ed. J. F. O’Doherty (2 vols, Dublin, 1944), vol. 2, p. 173, vol. 1, pp. 200–3. 92 Lynch, Supplementum, pp. 73–4. 93 Lynch, De Praesulibus, vol. 1, pp. 200–5; Benignus Millett, ‘Heber Macmahon, Bishop of Clogher (d. 1650)’, Clogher Record, 16 (1997), 136–44, at 138–9. 94 S. P. Ó Mórdha ‘Heber Mac Mahon, soldier-bishop of the Confederation of Kilkenny’, Clogher Record (Clogher Record Album: A Diocesan History) 3 (1975), 41–62, 331–3, at 45–8; Com. Rin., vol. 1, pp. 314–9. 95 Terry Clavin, ‘McEgan, Boetius’, in DIB, vol. 5, pp. 987–88; Canice Mooney, Boethius MacEgan of Ross (Dublin, 1950), pp. 9, 10, 18; Lynch, De Praesulibus, vol. 2, p. 173; Com. Rin., vol. 4, pp. 392–3.

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the more reflective and flexible, to the extent that he enjoyed the favour of James Butler, marquis of Ormond and lord lieutenant, during his last months in Ulster.96 And Bishop Nicolas French claimed that MacMahon’s last words before he was hanged by the Parliamentarians (in questionable circumstances) were ‘I, a Catholic bishop, and subject of the king of England, die here contrary to the law of nations, for the promise of my life made to me is violated.’97 Nevertheless, the bishops of Clogher and Ross connected Rinuccini directly to the radical anti-English ideology of O’Sullivan Beare and the Gaelic Irish exiles in the Spanish empire. Neither Clogher nor Ross ever authored a programmatic political treatise; but Lynch thought Clogher’s political outlook was fundamentally similar to that contained in the relatio or report which Rinuccini’s client Richard O’Ferrall submitted on 5 March 1658 to the secretary of the congregation De Propaganda Fide, the committee of cardinals which governed the Irish church.98 O’Ferrall, educated and trained at Lille, Douai, and Charleville, had returned to Ireland in the 1640s, working first around Dublin, in circumstances of some danger, then moving to Galway. There he joined Rinuccini’s circle. When Rinuccini excommunicated the supporters of the Confederation’s truce with Protestant forces in 1648, he sent O’Ferrall and other key servants to Rome to defend his actions. The Capuchin radical excelled at the Curia, quickly securing an appointment as expert witness to the committee of cardinals which governed the Irish Catholic church, the congregation De Propaganda Fide, and then defeating all attempts to have Rinuccini’s sentence of excommunication overturned. When O’Ferrall fell from favour in 1658, he sought shelter under Rinuccini patronage in Florence where he composed the massive Commentarius Rinuccinianus with the help of his fellow Capuchin Robert O’Connell. Finished in 1666, three years after O’Ferrall’s death, this manuscript Latin narrative of Rinuccini’s nunciature was the longest and most 96 Jerrold Casway, ‘The Belturbet council and election of March 1650’, Clogher Record, 12 (1986), 159–79, at 167. 97 ‘Hic contra jus gentium (quia scilicet violata est fides illi data pro vita) morior Episcopus Catholicus et subditus Regis Angliae’, Bishop Nicolas French to Archbishop Jean Francois de Gondis, Archbishop of Paris, 18 November 1651, in Com. Rin., vol. 4, pp. 625–34, at 631. 98 Lynch, De Praesulibus, vol. 1, pp. 202–3; British Library, Add. MS 33744; Com. Rin., vol. 5, pp. 485–504; Nienke Tjoelker and Ian Campbell, ‘Transcription and translation of London version of Richard O’Ferrall’s report to Propaganda fide (1658)’, Archivium Hibernicum, 61 (2008), 7–61.

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ambitious of all the contemporary political histories of seventeenthcentury Ireland.99 O’Ferrall had fallen from his eminent position at Rome in 1658 because he declared himself an enemy to the English Irish episcopate and nobility, and also to Stuart monarchy. His 1658 report was a radical proposal for a reconstituted church which would exclude all Irish Catholics of English descent from positions of ecclesiastical authority and especially from the episcopate. O’Ferrall saw the Irish kingdom and commonwealth as entirely subordinate to the church; the Irish church in turn was entirely subordinate to the papacy. The Capuchin’s arguments rested on an ancient constitution derived from O’Sullivan Beare’s Historiae Catholicae Iberniae Compendium, reinforced with details from Geoffrey Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, but lacking the Compendium’s sympathy for the English Irish nobility, and informed by a high doctrine of papal monarchy. O’Ferrall explained briskly that the Gaelic Irish were the descendants of those three Milesian brothers who founded the ancient Irish kingdom 2,500 years ago, and were distinguished both by their martial valour and their piety. For this point O’Ferrall leaned neither on O’Sullivan Beare nor on the Jesuit Conor O’Mahony, but on Keating’s Foras Feasa, which the Capuchin possessed in a Latin translation by his former friend John Lynch.100 The English Irish, in contrast, were descended from a dishonourable rabble of Ostmen (Vikings), Danes, English, and Welsh. O’Ferrall dwelt at length on the perfect Christianity of the ancient Irish, who submitted all business of importance in secular government to the arbitration of the archbishops of Armagh, and whose reverence for the papacy was so great that they bestowed their kingdom’s crown on the pope. The perfection of Ireland’s early Christianity invalidated the English crown’s right to the kingdom of Ireland. O’Ferrall argued that since the ancient kingdom was firmly Christian, King Henry II’s claim in his application to Pope Adrian IV that Ireland had collapsed into paganism was untrue. O’Ferrall cautiously implied that a papal grant resting on such falsehood could not be valid. In any case, according to O’Ferrall, the conditions under which Henry and his successors accepted Ireland were violated. The English kings crushed holiness 99 P. J. Corish, ‘Two contemporary historians of the Confederation of Kilkenny: John Lynch and Richard O’Ferrall’ in Irish Historical Studies, 8 (1953), 217– 36; Com. Rin., vol. 5, pp. 418–31. 100 Keating, Foras Feasa, vol. 1, pp. 108–9, vol. 2, pp. 88–9, 96–101; Bernadette Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating: History, Myth, and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2nd edn, 2004), pp. 187–9.

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and religion, and raised to the episcopacy only those who would alienate their temporalities to the crown. Moreover, the viceroy and the colonists usurped the name of the whole of Ireland, and deprived the Irish of learning, military service, public office, lands, and goods. Even before the arrival of Protestantism in Ireland in the reign of Henry VIII, the English regime in Ireland had been tyrannical and illegitimate, and the colonists and city dwellers, as O’Ferrall called the English Irish, were its chief agents. While the Capuchin did admit that the English Irish did not embrace heresy themselves, they did cooperate with heretics in parliament in exchange for monastic lands, and their chief families aided Queen Elizabeth I in her war against the Irish Catholics. The English Irish shared both language and customs (mores) with the English heretics. Consequently, O’Ferrall wrote, both the religious zeal and political mores of the English Irish had been perverted by ‘partnership and cohabitation’ with English heretics.101 As the Gaelic Irish did not share language and customs with the heretics, O’Ferrall argued, they had escaped this process of ill-habituation and successfully resisted the allurements of heresy. O’Ferrall restricted his criticisms of the English Irish to their language, laws, and customs: he did not mention the natural inclinations of souls or bodies. But in O’Ferrall’s report, as in the later works of O’Sullivan Beare, Englishness and heresy were synonymous. The Commentarius Rinuccinianus portrayed Ireland in the 1640s in substantially the same way as O’Ferrall’s 1658 report. Its hero was Rinuccini, champion of the Catholic faith and the Gaelic Irish; its villain James Butler, earl, marquis, and later duke of Ormond, chief agent of Protestant heresy in Ireland. The Commentarius depicted the English Irish as the foolish, duplicitous, greedy, and imperfectly Catholic servants of Ormond and the heretical Stuart kings. The frequently extreme major arguments of the Commentarius, arguments sustained by its authors over many hundreds of folios, can make any brief characterisation of the work as a whole sound like pantomime; but very often the individual components of an argument were built up with great care, subtlety, and extensive support from primary sources. Anthony Grafton has written that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ecclesiastical history was the genre of history writing ‘that paid the most attention and gave the most space to documentation, that covered the widest range of topics, and that used the evidence not only to establish the order of 101 ‘consortio et cohabitatione’, Tjoelker and Campbell, ‘Richard O’Ferrall’s report’, pp. 12–13.

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events, but also to recreate past social . . . conditions’: the authors of the Commentarius, deeply read in the works of Cardinal Caesare Baronius and other church historians, belonged to that historical school.102 The analytical sophistication of ecclesiastical history was apparent in the portrait which O’Ferrall and O’Connell composed of those people whom they labelled Anglo-Iberni, the English Irish. The first volume of the Commentarius, in which these arguments are contained, was entirely in the hand of Robert O’Connell, though no doubt composed in collaboration with O’Ferrall.103 Like the 1658 report, the Commentarius made it clear that by the 1640s the greed of the English Irish for ecclesiastical property had blinded these people to the justice of maintaining a Catholic church and Catholic commonwealth in Ireland and the injustice of re-establishing an underground church and Protestant monarchy. However, the greater sophistication of the Commentarius was apparent in the way it accounted for this illhabituation. O’Ferrall had mentioned briefly that the Anglo-Iberni had supported King Henry VIII in the parliament of 1541 in exchange for the lands of churches and monasteries; this property intoxicated them ever after and distorted their entire political and religious outlook.The first three parts of the Commentarius, which ran from the Milesian conquest of the island up to 1641, developed this criticism at great length, narrating the corruption of the Anglo-Iberni through the history of their entanglement with the institution of parliament.104 As the Gaelic Irish had always been excluded from this institution, the Commentarius claimed, so they had always remained uncorrupted by its power of ill-habituation. The first English invasion of Ireland, according to the Commentarius, was unjust, and the English obtained the bull Laudabiliter surreptitiously.105 But over time the first Englishmen in Ireland became Irish, joined to the Gaelic Irish by maternal blood, the Irish language, laws, prayer, custom, and love; the Fitzgeralds were treated with particular warmth.106 The exception to this 102 Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2007), p. 111; Com. Rin., vol. 1, p. 4. 103 Kavanagh, ‘History and authorship of the Commentarius Rinuccinianus’, Com. Rin., vol. 6, pp. 3–27, at 5, 15–20; P. J. Corish, ‘The crisis in Ireland in 1648: the nuncio and the supreme council: conclusions’ in Irish Theological Quarterly, 22 (1955), 231–57, at 237–9. 104 Cf. O’Sullivan Beare, Compendium, fols 75v–76v. 105 Com. Rin., vol. 1, pp. 4–5. 106 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 7, 57, 75–8.

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general rule were the English of the Pale, towns, and cities. It was in these areas alone that English law was effective.107 The Commentarius repeatedly emphasised the weakness of English royal power in Ireland for two reasons. First, in order to argue that the Gaelic princes had always been free enemies, not subjects or rebels, of the English crown and were untouched by English laws and institutions; second, to insist that the English Irish had complied with the crown’s schism and heresy voluntarily, without violent compulsion.108 Thus, the Reformation parliament held in Dublin between 1536 and 1537 should not in fact have been called the parliament of Ireland, maintained the Commentarius, but rather the Anglo-Ibernorum conventiculum, assembly of the English Irish.109 Puzzling over the easy passage of Reformation legislation through parliament, the Commentarius speculated that the schismatical tyrant Henry VIII fraudulently excluded the best of the English Irish and admitted the most wicked; but its authors nevertheless insisted that the English Irish were at fault for not shaking off Henry’s yoke of tyranny and schism.110 Not only was the Irish parliament no more than the representative assembly of the English Irish alone; it did not even perform that function correctly. Throughout the first two parts of the Commentarius dealing with Ireland before 1599, its authors relied heavily on Sir Richard Bolton’s Irish statute collection of 1621, quoting from and paraphrasing dozens of acts, and complaining in passing of the barbarous English in which they were written.111 But the first act quoted by the Commentarius was Poynings’ Law of 1594. This act, the Commentarius argued, was passed by only a few of the English Irish, but robbed the whole English Irish nation of the libertas, freedom, to call their own parliaments and vote their own legislation. ‘Poynings’ made slaves of the English Irish even when the kings of England remained Catholic; after Henry VIII’s apostasy it made the parliaments no more than instruments of monarchs’ perverted wills.112 The fundamental purpose of parliament as a representative political institution was thus damaged by Poynings. But what fatally corrupted parliament was its use as a tool for the 107 108 109 110 111

Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 9–10. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 6–7, 59, 67, 74–5, 87. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 39. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 38–9. Sir Richard Bolton, The Statutes of Ireland (Dublin, 1621); Com. Rin., vol. 1, p. 39. 112 ‘hoc acto, quod ab illo Poyningo Poyninganum vocitatur’, ibid., vol. 1, p. 40.

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destruction of the church and the disbursement of the church’s former property. The Commentarius maintained that, beginning in the parliament of 1536–37, ecclesiastical property was first the bait and later the intoxicant by which the English crown procured the loyalty of the English Irish.113 Henry’s use of former church lands was thus not just heretical, but also political: The largest ecclesiastical estates in Ireland had been transferred by Henry VIII and Edward VI to their supporters there for heretical ends, prejudicial to the Church, but also political ends, in order to enrich their English Irish faction in Ireland and make it more powerful, more bound and enslaved to the English crown, against the Old Irish princes.114

The English Irish would do anything to get and keep this property, whether defying God’s own positive law by admitting the rights of Henry’s children by Anne Boleyn, or imitating the ‘insanity’ of the English by recognising Henry as head of the Irish church.115 Parliament was also the instrument by which the poison of ecclesiastical property was injected into the English Irish nobility. Before Sir Anthony St Leger’s parliament of 1541–43, the Commentarius explained, there had been very few titled English Irish noblemen; but after the passing of the ‘act for lands given by the king’ earls and viscounts multiplied in Ireland, all enriched by the former lands of the church.116 The English Irish deceived the papacy and Cardinal Reginald Pole during Queen Mary’s reign in order to receive dispensations and enrol statutes which secured the former property of the church in their own possession; but those dispensations were obtained dishonestly and the statutes were consequently unlawful.117 On Queen Mary’s death the English Irish could easily have resisted the weak young Elizabeth, but again their greed held them captive.118 The war which the Gaelic Irish began in 1641 was fought 113 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 42, 58, 69–70, 94–5, 111–33, 166. 114 ‘Vastissima praedia ecclesiastica apud Iberniam ab Henrico octavo et Eduardo sexo sui ibi fautoribus transcripta fuerunt in fines nedum haereticos Ecclesiae praejudicantes, sed etiam politicos, ut scilicet suam in Ibernia factionem Anglo-Ibernicam ditarent, ut potentiorum, Coronaeque Anglicanae devinctiorem ac addictiorem redderent in veterum Iberniae Principum’, ibid., vol. 1, p. 127. 115 ‘insaniam’, ibid., vol. 1, p. 54. 116 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 91–3; 33 Henry VIII, cap. 4, in Bolton, Statutes of Ireland, pp. 218–20. 117 Com. Rin., vol. 1, pp. 111–33. 118 Ibid., pp. 135, 166.

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against legislation freely passed by the English Irish nobles and commons in Queen Elizabeth’s parliament of 1560: the first reactions of the English Irish to the fighting in 1641 left no doubt but that they preferred comfortable slavery to the demands of Catholic freedom.119 This account of the interplay of a people’s institutions, virtues, and vices over time made the Commentarius the most sophisticated Gaelic Irish critique of English Irish ill-habituation composed during the seventeenth century. Conclusion Richard Stanihurst and many other advocates of English government in Gaelic Ireland portrayed its institutions as irrational and its people ill-habituated; though certainly Stanihurst thought that Gaelic Ireland’s bad laws and customs would yield to education. It is a mark of the radicalism of the anti-English tradition between the 1610s and 1660s that nothing was ever said about the recovery of the English Irish from their sorry state: presumably this would happen in the years following the Catholic invasion as Irishmen of English descent were broken out of their wicked habits.120 Admittedly, many of the treatises in question were composed in the course of a battle for resources from the Spanish government and the matter was not pertinent; but the omission is nonetheless striking. Perhaps more important is the fact that these Latinate Gaelic radicals employed an ethical, political, and anthropological vocabulary which was not at all foreign either to their Catholic or Protestant opponents. Whether Thomist, Scotist, or Calvinist, all employed almost identical conceptual tools when treating the interactions of distinct human societies. Historians are sometimes given to posit a lack of understanding as an explanation for conflict, but there was no such lack of understanding among the peoples of seventeenth-century Ireland.

119 Ibid., pp. 164, 252. 120 Cf. Hazard, Faith and Patronage, p. 52.

4

Humanists and genealogists on nobility and the human body 

How did the Renaissance humanists who debated true nobility, and the genealogists who served the elite, explain human heredity? This chapter will focus on two instances of Irish intellectual engagement with this problem: the dispute between John Lynch and Richard O’Ferrall in the 1660s over the nobility of Irishmen of English descent; and Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh’s physiognomical analysis of the peoples of Ireland, an analysis undertaken also in the household of Gianbattista Rinuccini. The previous three chapters have described the various theories of human society available in late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland, and distinguished between habituation and natural inclination. The Irish debates on nobility will provide a useful introduction to the medical and theological theories of the mind and body treated in this chapter and the next. Lynch, O’Ferrall, and perhaps Mac Fhirbhisigh too, accessed the same resources as their continental contemporaries when tackling the phenomenon of hereditary nobility. But placing these Irish interventions and disputes in their European context reveals something peculiar. Humanists who wrote on true nobility and genealogists, in Ireland and throughout the rest of early modern Europe, were very reluctant to commit themselves unambiguously to any particular theory of heredity. True nobility The previous chapter outlined Richard O’Ferrall’s adherence to a radical political tradition that posited a natural or habituated inclination towards heresy among Irishmen of English descent: but O’Ferrall’s 1658 report also contained a virulent critique of the English Irish nobility. John Lynch, archdeacon of Tuam, responded to O’Ferrall in his Alithinologia of 1664 and Supplementum

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Alithinologiae of 1667. The archdeacon’s books defended the right of the Stuart monarchs to the kingdom of Ireland, and insisted on the firm allegiance of the English Irish to the Catholic faith. However, included in these Latin works was a distinctive defence of the English Irish nobility. Nobility was a concept and social phenomenon in which both Lynch and O’Ferrall had a great deal invested. John Lynch and Richard O’Ferrall both spent their lives on the fringes of Irish, French, and Italian noble society, and both were humanists. Lynch was born in Galway about 1600 to a family which the Gaelic genealogists and Lynch’s enemies regarded as English Irish, and received an excellent education first in the town’s Jesuit grammar school, then at a series of both Jesuit and Oratorian colleges in France and the Low Countries, including Dieppe, Douai, and Rouen. Returning to Ireland in 1625, Lynch was appointed archdeacon of Tuam and chaplain to Sir Richard Blake, the richest of Galway’s Catholic merchants. Lynch’s patron was himself something of a humanist: as a young man he had composed a three-book Latin epic on the life of St Patrick. Blake was also a client of Ulick Burke, earl of Clanricarde, whom Lynch later celebrated in print as the ideal Irish nobleman, and the Galway merchant became a prominent figure in the Catholic Confederation which governed most of Ireland between 1642 and 1649. Blake sought the reward of a baronetcy for his efforts to establish the second Ormond peace in the latter year.1 Lynch lived in Galway until the town’s surrender to a Parliamentarian army in 1652. Then, expelled by the new regime, he fled to Nantes. He found new patrons among the local nobility, the Lesquem family, and settled at St Malo, where he died in 1677. Lynch could not have regarded nobility as an abstract or impersonal phenomenon.2 Richard O’Ferrall’s career has been sketched in the previous chapter. It is enough to mention here that O’Ferrall appears to have claimed untitled Gaelic noble status himself, despite his family’s dispossession in the Longford plantation of 1619; that he spent a portion of his youth in the household of Sir Thomas Nugent, brother-in-law of Richard Nugent, earl of Westmeath; that 1 Sir Richard Blake to George Lane, 25 Jan 1648–9, in J. T. Gilbert (ed.), History of the Irish Confederation and the War in Ireland (7 vols, Dublin, 1882– 91), vol. 7, pp. 220–1. 2 René D’Ambrières and Éamon Ó Ciosáin, ‘John Lynch of Galway (c.1599– 1677): his career, exile and writing’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, 55 (2003), 50–63; Ian Campbell, ‘Alithinologia: John Lynch and seventeenth-century Irish political thought’ (PhD thesis, Trinity College Dublin, 2008), pp. 38–45.

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Rinuccini, whose circle O’Ferrall joined at Galway, was himself a Florentine noble; and that the Roman curia, where O’Ferrall successfully defended Rinuccini’s reputation for a decade, was a largely noble society. When O’Ferrall’s 1658 report earned him dismissal from the congregation De Propaganda Fide, the Rinuccini family in Florence took him under their protection.3 Among the other radical arguments contained in O’Ferrall’s 1658 report was a severe attack on the English Irish nobility. O’Ferrall wrote that their fortunes were derived not from martial virtue, but from trade, and that their ancestry was too closely interwoven with the urban merchants. Indeed, O’Ferrall argued that all the English Irish, including the nobility, were descended from a mish-mash of coastal, urban settlers, not just English and Welsh, but also Ostmen, including Normans, Norwegians, and Danes. The Ostmen in particular had amassed great wealth by pillaging the ancient Irish church, and their ancestry was obscure. The kings of England bought the obedience of this motley crew with the titles of lord and baron, and this pseudo-nobility held those offices in the parliament and the council of the Irish kingdom from which the Gaelic Irish nobility, distinguished by ancient valour and piety, had been excluded. According to O’Ferrall, the greed of the English Irish nobility, and their English language and manners, made them easy for the crown to bribe and manipulate with church lands at the time of the Reformation. It was their desire to retain these lands, O’Ferrall argued, that caused the Irish nobility of English descent to resist the restoration of the holy see and the Catholic faith in Ireland ever after. O’Ferrall went on to name those noble families who had aided Queen Elizabeth in her wars against the real Irish Catholics: Butlers, Burkes, Nugents, Fitzgeralds, Plunketts, Barnewalls, Prestons, Flemings, Barrys, Whites, Cusacks, Talbots, Berminghams, Darcys, Purcells, and Taafs. The claim of the Stuart heretics to the kingdom of Ireland was just as illegitimate as that of the Tudors, O’Ferrall insisted, and the support of the English Irish nobility for this claim was just another instance of their wickedness.4 As explained above, 3 Richard O’Ferrall and Robert O’Connell, Commentarius Rinuccinianus, de sedis apostolicae legatione ad foederatos Hiberniae catholicos per annos 1645–9, ed. Stanislaus Kavanagh (6 vols, Dublin, 1932–49), [hereafter Com. Rin.] vol. 5, pp. 418–31; John Lynch (Eudoxius Alithinologus), Supplementum Alithinologiae ([St Malo], 1667), p. 161. 4 Com. Rin., vol. 5, pp. 485–504; Nienke Tjoelker and Ian Campbell, ‘Transcription and translation of London version of Richard O’Ferrall’s report to Propaganda fide (1658)’, Archivium Hibernicum, 61 (2007–8), 7–61.

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the Commentarius Rinuccinianus adopted the same approach on a grander scale with greater sophistication. The language and customs of this English Irish nobility were fundamentally English, and for O’Ferrall, as for O’Sullivan Beare, Englishness and heresy were synonymous. O’Ferrall’s report was leaked by his Italian superiors, who wished to be rid of its strident author, and it caused uproar among the Irish church in exile. John Lynch wrote both in the Alithinologia of 1664 and the Supplementum Alithinologiae of 1667 that Gaelic Irish and English Irish had long since grown together into one people united by love for patria and church. Nevertheless, Lynch regarded O’Ferrall’s assessment of the virtues of the Irish nobility of English descent to be a grave calumny, and could not let it pass.5 Lynch conceded a major point to O’Ferrall. It was true, Lynch wrote, that the Gaelic Irish nobility had longer and more splendid genealogies than the English Irish. The ‘ancient families of the Irish’ could trace their stock all the way back to Adam, and Lynch never questioned the validity of these genealogies.6 Ancient lineage, Lynch continued, had spurred many Gaelic Irish noblemen to imitate the virtue of their ancestors; Cicero would have called this aemulatio, a fruitful rivalry.7 But among members of that numerous nobility who possessed the lower sort of mind, those long lineages inspired rather a foolish pride. Drawing on the work of Sir John Price, Lynch pointed out the similarities between the Gaelic Irish petty nobility, so poor that their claims to noble status were absurd, and the petty nobility of Wales.8 Such was the poverty of these men that it would be most fitting for them to be instructed in agriculture, commerce, or some other mechanical craft; instead they lived lives of idleness, disqualified by their poverty from political leadership in the commonwealth. Lynch quoted Juvenal, ‘in he whose only merit is birth, all nobility is lost’, and cited Seneca: ‘as sordid places are lit only by the reflection of the sun, so the worthless shine only by the light of their ancestors’.9 5 John Lynch (Eudoxius Alithinologus), Alithinologia sive Veridica Responsio ad Invectam Mendaciis ([St Malo], 1664), pp. 15–18; Nienke Tjoelker, ‘The Alithinologia (1664) by John Lynch: an edition of part of the text with introduction, translation and commentary’ (PhD thesis, NUI Cork, 2010). 6 Lynch, Alithinologia, p. 17. 7 Ibid., p. 17; Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes, 4. 17. 8 Sir John Price (Prise), Historiae Britannicae Defensio (London, 1573). 9 Lynch, Alithinologia, p. 17; ‘Perit omnis in illo / Nobilitas, cuius laus est in origine sola’, Juvenal, Satire VIII, 1–9; Seneca, De Beneficiis, 4. 30. 4.

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However, while conceding the greater antiquity of the Gaelic Irish, Lynch refused to accept that the major noble families of English origin were obscure and from unknown places before they arrived in Ireland. The De Burghs, he wrote, included a king of Jerusalem among their ancestors; the Berminghams were once lords of that fine English city; the Fitzgeralds were connected through their Florentine ancestors to Julius Caesar; and the first Butlers were cousins of St Thomas Beckett.10 However, Lynch insisted that antiquity never provided any family with such glory as virtuous deeds themselves. Families like the De Burghs, Berminghams and Fitzgeralds won their nobility through service to the crown both on the battlefield and in the administration of the commonwealth.11 Moreover, the great monasteries of which O’Ferrall spoke were in fact founded by these families. The Butlers alone founded monasteries at Arklow, Nenagh, and Aughrim among others; like Augustus, the nobility of English ancestry found the churches of Ireland in wood, and left them in stone. Lynch went on to express the entirely impractical hope that James Butler, then Duke of Ormond, might be inspired by such ancestral example to return to the Catholic faith.12 The English Irish, Lynch insisted, were outdone by the Gaelic Irish neither in martial virtue nor in piety. Lynch also incorporated an elaborate defence of noble wealth acquired through commerce into his argument. O’Ferrall had attempted to taint the Old English nobility with trade because working for a living was a political disqualification in classical ethical schemes. Working for a living meant one was dependant on others and lacked liberty, and thus unable to develop and exercise the political virtues which were required for high office. Lynch argued cautiously, using William Camden and Plutarch’s Life of Solon in support, that once nobility was established in a family, it was not then extinguished by trade.13 He then moved his argument further, connected trade to the practice of law, and proposed that just as courage was rewarded in wartime, so in peacetime it was reasonable for the prince to reward the virtues of eloquence, jurisprudence, liberality, and magnificence. If these were displayed by the citizens of the towns, Lynch asked, why should they not be ennobled? No names were named at this point in his argument, but it is reasonable 10 11 12 13

Lynch, Alithinologia, pp. 18–19. Ibid., pp. 21–2. Ibid., pp. 21–2. Ibid., p. 15.

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to expect that Sir Richard Blake’s unsuccessful grab at a peerage was on Lynch’s mind.14 John Lynch’s position on nobility overall thus seems clear. Nobility of blood alone was worthless. A grand pedigree was valuable merely as a spur to the individual to acquire virtue and excel his ancestors. Lynch could easily compress his whole response to O’Ferrall to a few words: Those who strive for honour by means of virtue, will always rise to nobility. Indeed virtue is the one and only nobility, and it is not held by birth alone. For it is proper to rely on virtue, not on blood.15

This position was an entirely normal one among the European humanists, and one could find similar statements in the work of Poggio Bracciolini in fifteenth-century Italy or Josse Clichtove and Jeronimo Osorio da Fonseca in sixteenth-century France and Portugal.16 At the same time, few humanists who wrote on the problem of true nobility felt they could dismiss heredity completely. The Portuguese Osorio was an authority on nobility held in high esteem not just by the Catholic Lynch, but by Protestants writing on Ireland such as Barnaby Riche.17 Osorio’s De Nobilitate Civili et Christiana, was printed in nine Latin editions in the sixteenth century, could be found in Latin in the libraries of Queen Elizabeth I and William Cecil, and enjoyed an English translation in 1576.18 The first book of the De Nobilitate conceded a great deal to this hereditary factor. As men took careful account of parentage in agriculture, in 14 Ibid., pp. 15–17. 15 ‘Qui per viam virtutis ad honorem tendunt, ad nobilitatem semper emergent. Etenim nobilitas sola est, atque unica virtus, nec solo genere continetur. Nam virtute decet non sanguine niti’, ibid., p. 15. 16 Poggio Bracciolini, ‘On nobility’ and ‘Letter to Gregorio Correr’, in Albert Rabil, Jr. (ed.), Knowledge, Goodness, and Power: The Debate over Nobility among Quattrocento Italian Humanists (Binghamton, 1991), pp. 53–96; Josse Clichtrove, ‘On true nobility: selections’, ed. Alison Holcroft, in Jil Kraye (ed.), Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts Volume II: Political Philosophy (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 247–57; Jeronimo Osorio da Fonseca, De Nobilitate Civili et Christiana (Lisbon, 1542). I have used Osorio, De Nobilitate Civili Libri II . . . De Nobilitate Christiana Libri III (Florence, 1552). 17 Lynch, Alithinologia, p. 15; Barnaby Riche, Allarme to England (London, 1578), sigs Aiiii–Bii. 18 Sydney Anglo, Machiavelli – the First Century: Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility, and Irrelevance (Oxford, 2005), pp. 143–63; L. V. Ryan, ‘The Haddon-Osorio controversy (1563–1583)’, Church History, 22 (1953), 142–54.

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choosing dogs and horses, Osorio wrote, so it made no less sense to observe carefully the parentage of humans. That the manners of individuals were communicated to their posterity, Osorio thought, was demonstrated very clearly in the characteristics of nations. Osorio was not shy of using a somewhat technical vocabulary in describing this: ‘there is no nation upon which nature has not made its mark, either in vices or in virtues, which are generated in its posterity by a seminal power’, meaning the power of the parents’ seed.19 In the same way, virtue no less than vice could be communicated through family bloodlines, so that true nobility, in William Blandie’s 1576 translation, ‘is nothinge els then the glorious sparcke of vertue ingraffed in some Noble and renowned family’.20 One of Osorio’s aims in the De Nobilitate was to justify the very institution of nobility in a Christian commonwealth, which meant no less than defending what Paul Rahe has called the ‘differential moral and political rationality’ of classical politics to his readers.21 That is to say, Aristotle, Cicero, and the rest of the ancient political writers were committed to the position that some men were more rational and thus more suited to true political life than others. Osorio connected the institution of sixteenth-century European nobility to that classical politics by paraphrasing Cicero’s account of the origins of political life in De Inventione.22 Humans first wandered the woods and desolate places, Osorio explained, as barbarians, lacking in reason and civility, until certain humans excelling the rest in talent and wisdom persuaded their fellows to forsake barbarism and embrace civil government.23 So great was the gratitude of ordinary humans to their natural leaders, that: When they were dead, they gave unto them devine honoures, and embraced wyth entyre love, theyr children and offspring. Principally 19 ‘Italis summum ingenium, & summam facundiam. Nulla denique natio est, quam natura non finxerit aliquibus, vel vitiis, vel virtutibus insignem, quae virtute seminis posteritate ingenerantur’, Osorio, De Nobilitate, p. 15. 20 Jeronimo Osorio da Fonesca, The Five Bookes . . . contayninge a Discourse of Civill, and Christian Nobilitie, trans. William Blandie (London, 1576), fol. 5. ‘Id autem nobilitatem esse dicimus, quado quidem [sic, for quandoquidem] nihil aliud est nobilitas, quam vitutis praestantia, in aliqua gente constituta’, Osorio, De Nobilitate, p. 15. 21 Osorio, The Five Bookes, fol. 1; Osorio, De Nobilitate, pp. 5–6; Paul Rahe, Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic (Cambridge, 2008), p. 104. 22 Cicero, De Inventione, 1. 2–3. 23 Osorio, The Five Bookes, fol. 9; Osorio, De Nobilitate, pp. 23–4.

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they were moved thereunto, for that their benefites were freshe in memorye, which were so great and many, that of deuty they thought to render thanckes to theyr posteritye. When afterwardes they founde, and had experienced, that there was in they issue the true and lively image of the parente, not to be seen so much in the feature and maknge of the bodye, as in the qualitye and disposition of the mynde, then they were styred up exceedingly, not onely for the love that they bare to their ancestors, as for the especiall regarde that they had to the Noble dispositions of their progeny, to honour that stocke and family, to whom they did offer the swaye and government of the common wealth most wilinglye.24

Thus was founded the institution of nobility as Europeans knew it. Osorio’s account of the workings of nobility from the ancient world to the present might seem a remarkably rigid one; a prescription, using terms that early modern Europeans would easily have understood, for a race of masters. That this was not the case was due to two themes which emerged as the Portuguese humanist’s book unfolded. First, he insisted bluntly that there could be no true nobility without true virtue: nobility rested on virtue as though on a pillar, and ‘the Pillour of vertue beinge shaken and overthown, nobilitye it selfe falleth to the grounde’.25 He also emphasised the mutability and fragility of all human institutions since Adam’s fall, including noble bloodlines. Osorio translated Glaucus’s words from Book VI of Homer’s Iliad, eagerly quoted again by Lynch in the Alithinologia to emphasise the necessity of ennobling new men:

24 Osorio, The Five Bookes, fol. 9v. ‘Tantaque extitit virtutis admiratio, ut quamdiu in vita manebant ii, a quibus beneficium illud acceperunt, omnem illis sui regendi potestatem traderent: mortuos vero divinis honoribus afficierent: eorumque liberos omni caritate amplectendos statuerent. Primum movebat homines recens memoria principium, a quibus tam multis fuerant obstricti beneficiis, eorumque posteritati gratiam referendam esse putabant. Deinde ubi experientia didicerunt, inesse in liberis paternam effigiem, non tantum corporis lineamentis, quantum animi indole evidenter expressam: iam non solum parentum memoria, sed etiam indolis admiratione provocati, gentem illam praecipue coluerunt, eique reipublicae gubernacula libentissime tradiderunt’, Osorio, De Nobilitate, pp. 24–5. 25 Osorio, The Five Bookes, fol. 38; ‘Omnis autem nostra disputatio, eo pertinebat, ut demonstraremus, nobilitatem, virtutis radicibus innixam sustenari: virtute vero fracta, atque debilitata concidere’, Osorio, De Nobilitate, p. 87.

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Since that ech mortal race most like is to the leaves in spring: Some, smallest breath and blast of winds them skattreth from the tree. Some eke amid the groves do grow, when trees their branches bring, So chaunce doth nowe mens state advaunce, nowe downe doth headlong fling.26

Thus the great Roman families of Scipio’s time were now utterly obscure, and no noble line would endure forever. Second, Osorio argued that as all virtue derived ultimately from God, so all Christians were noble and of God’s kindred, with God as their father and Christ as their brother, superior to any ‘mortal affinitie or alliance’.27 Osorio thus offered a coherent account of conventional European nobility, reconciled with classical differential rationality, which moderated the raw power of heredity through a Christian awareness of human weakness and the superiority of spiritual to temporal things. Lynch left Osorio’s thorough treatment of heredity unexploited. The Galway humanist saw his task as defending the newer nobility of the English Irish against the more ancient nobility of the Gaelic Irish. But Lynch did engage obliquely with the problem of heredity, when he strained every nerve to prove that the ancestors of the English Irish did not include any Vikings or Ostmen at all. O’Ferrall’s report had argued that the English Irish were not even really English, and were rather the descendants of Ostmen, Normans, Danish and similar ‘rabble peoples’, as he called them.28 Lynch forthrightly denied that a single Irish family could trace their origin to those people. Lynch went on to deny O’Ferrall’s assumption that coastal towns – Dublin, Cork, Limerick and so on – were founded by the Ostmen. Lynch described the defeat of the Ostmen in the twelfth century by the invading English and insisted that they were almost annihilated by this defeat, either retiring to their Scandinavian homelands, or living on in a much degraded manner among the common people. Even the surnames of the present citizens of the coastal towns, Lynch maintained, indicated ‘Irish and 26 Osorio, The Five Bookes, fol. 21v; ‘Nam genus humanum est foliis par, empore verno / Haec nunc fundit humi aurae lenis sibilus: illa / Sylva uirens nutrit, renouat dum frondis honorem: / Sic genus humanum viget hoc nunc: excidit illud’, Osorio, De Nobilitate, p. 52; Tjoelker, ‘The Alithinologia (1664)’, p. 123. 27 Osorio, The Five Bookes, fols 73v, 108v–109; Osorio, De Nobilitate, pp. 161–2; ‘Quam nulla mortalis affinitas attingit: nempe quae solum Deum tutorem, atque parentem agnoscat’, ibid., p. 243. 28 ‘gentibus collectitiis’, Com. Rin., vol. 5, p. 486.

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British origin’ rather than Scandinavian.29 Lynch was desperate to eradicate the Ostmen from the lineage not only of the English Irish nobility, but from the lineage of all Irishmen of English descent, because he understood them to be pirates. Pirates, rootless people of diverse origins, living by theft and acts of barely rational violence, with no institutions of law, government, or religion worth the name, could contribute only dishonour and hereditary vice to the lineage of the English of Ireland. Cicero had used pirates as an example of persons with whom oaths and promises need not be kept; they were the common enemy of all humanity.30 The seventeenth-century copy of O’Ferrall’s report now in the British Library, which appears a slightly later version than the copy quoted by Lynch due to its smoother Latin and occasional small additions, contains the remark that the Ostmen of the coastal cities were coalesced from diverse groups of immigrants like the ‘people of Liburni in Etruria’.31 Despite confusing Tuscany with the Liburnian’s true home in modern Croatia, the copyist amplified O’Ferrall’s thought by introducing an analogy to one of the most notorious groups of pirates in the pages of Livy, understanding the Capuchin’s aim perfectly.32 Lynch flung the insulting allegation back at O’Ferrall when he compared him to Vigilantius, born by the seed of those thieves and tramps whom Pompey had displaced from the Pyrenees.33 It seems likely that Lynch was referring here to O’Ferrall’s own family, displaced, and therefore dishonoured, in the plantation of Longford.34 There was nothing in this debate between Lynch and O’Ferrall on the nature of nobility which other contemporary European humanists would have found unusual: virtue, individual human excellence, was the only true nobility, but virtuous children were more likely to be born of virtuous parents, and this virtue could be transmitted not merely by careful education and example, but during the physical process of generation itself. But Lynch, 29 ‘Hibernicam et Brittanicam originem’, Lynch, Alithinologia, pp. 6–7. 30 Cicero, De Officiis, 3. 107; Phillip de Souza, Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 149–50, 200–4. 31 ‘instar civium et populi Liburnici in Hetruria’, Com. Rin., vol. 5, pp. 486. 32 Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, 10. 2. 33 ‘qui de latronum, et convenarum natus est semine, quos Cn. Pompeius . . . de Pyrenaei jugis deposuit’, Lynch, Alithinologia, pp. 4–5; Jerome, Adversus Vigilantivm, ed. Jean-Louis Feiertag (Corpus Christianorum 79c, Turnhout, 2005), sect. 4, p. 9. 34 Com. Rin., vol. 5, pp. 418–31.

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O’Ferrall, Clichtrove, Osorio and the rest were vague on the actual mechanism of transmission. Genealogy and the body Between 1647 and 1650 another highly accomplished scholar was working in Galway and living in the college house of St Nicolas’s Church. He had been educated in a learned tradition quite different to that of the continental colleges and universities. Although Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh certainly knew Latin, he did not work primarily in that language, and had been trained in the ancient traditions of the Gaelic learned order, perhaps at the MacEgan school at Ballymacegan in County Tipperary; he had not attended any continental seminary, college, or university. In Galway in the spring of 1649 Mac Fhirbhisigh began his massive Leabhar na nGenealach, book of genealogies, which he completed in December 1650.35 Lynch and Mac Fhirbhisigh certainly maintained a professional relationship, as the Gaelic scholar had compiled a collection of annalistic materials for Lynch’s use in the early 1640s now known as the Fragmentary Annals of Ireland, and possibly a copy of the Chronicum Scotorum as well. However, any suggestion that there was a warmer relationship of patronage or friendship between the two men must founder on Mac Fhirbhisigh’s omission of the name Lynch from the Leabhar na nGenealach, which contained 40,000 names.36 Mac Fhirbhisigh’s aim in the Leabhar na nGenealach was to provide a synthesis of all the medieval Irish genealogical material in an accessible form, just as during the 1630s Míchéal Ó Cléirigh and his associates had synthesised the medieval annals into Annála Ríoghachta Éireann (Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland), now known as the Annals of the Four Masters.37 Mac Fhirbhisigh carried on the now established tradition of including prominent English Irish families, such as Butlers, Burkes, Fitzgeralds, and Berminghams, in his genealogical lists.38 However, it is notable that the Gaelic scholar 35 Nollaig Ó Muraíle, The Celebrated Antiquary: Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh (c. 1600–1671), His Lineage, Life and Learning (Maynooth, 2nd edn, 2002), pp. 63–5, 110, 166–9. 36 Ibid., pp. 88–93, 100. 37 Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh, The Great Book of Irish Genealogies, ed. Nollaig Ó Muraíle (5 vols, Dublin, 2003), vol. 1, p. 14; Bernadette Cunningham, The Annals of the Four Masters: Irish History, Kingship and Society in the Early Seventeenth Century (Dublin, 2010), pp. 102–35. 38 Mac Fhirbhisigh, Great Book, vol. 3, pp. 138–51, 103–37, 75–103, 151–3.

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included these English Irish, whom he called sean ghaill, old foreigners, or saxghaill, English foreigners, in the last book of his compilation, which also included the Fomhóraigh, a mythical people of demonic barbarity, and the Lochlonnaigh or Viking pirates.39 The genealogies of the Fomhóraigh and Lochlonnaigh were unknown, Mac Fhirbhisigh explained, because rather than settling in Ireland, they plundered the country and carried their loot away with them, so that Irish historians never had the chance to learn their lineage. Mac Fhirbhisigh clearly considered this a grave mark of dishonour. He also thought the lineages of the sean ghaill who began to arrive in Ireland in 1167 confused: a mixture of Frank, Briton, and Saxon. In the later Cuimre na nGenealach (an abridgement of the Leabhar na nGenealach), Mac Fhirbhisigh mentioned that the foreigners who began arriving in 1167 carried on arriving in successive companies to the year in which he wrote, 1666.40 This would seem to suggest hostility to Englishness in general, from a man who described the war then being waged in Ireland as ‘the religious war between the Catholics of Ireland and the heretics of Ireland, Scotland, and England’. Characterising the war in this way, rather than as a war between the king’s loyal subjects and the king’s enemies, was certainly the mark of a hardline nuncioist, if not of an anti-Stuart revolutionary.41 Nevertheless, Mac Fhirbhisigh also included genealogies of the Stuart kings which recorded their descent from the kings of Ireland, Leinster, and Munster, and admitted in the Cuimre that some gaill were now Gaeil and Gaeil were now gaill.42 The Leabhar na nGenealach thus contained a complete account of the origins of the Irish Catholic political nation, shot through with ethnic and political ambiguities. Mac Fhirbhisigh was very anxious to defend the accuracy of this genealogical material. He noted that he had heard many say that the Gaelic genealogies could not trace the origins of so many kingroups back to Adam as they claimed. Mac Fhirbhisigh’s response to this objection was to explain the institutional basis of scholarship in ancient Irish society, both before the arrival of the Gaeil and then 39 R. A. Stewart Macalister (ed.) Lebor Gabála Érenn: The Book of the Taking of Ireland (5 vols, Dublin, 1938–56), vol. 3, pp. 12–13. 40 Mac Fhirbhisigh, Great Book, vol. 3, pp. 46–9, 66–7, 722–3. 41 ‘an chogaidh chredmhigh edir Chatoilcibh Ereann agus eriticibh Ereann, Alban, agus Saxon’, ibid., vol. 1, pp. 162–3; Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Reformation in Ireland:The Mission of Rinuccini, 1645–1649 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 227–8. 42 Mac Fhirbhisigh, Great Book, vol. 2, pp. 150–2, vol. 3, pp. 722–3.

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after. All of the peoples who invaded Ireland, Mac Fhirbhisigh wrote, had their own families of historians and genealogists to record their generation (except the Vikings). The contemporary learned Gaelic kindreds had been established in the eleventh or twelfth century, he continued, and these orders were bound by the law to preserve the genealogical material; whatever historian, from the senior grade of ollamh down, failed to tell the truth would lose half his honour-price (a letheneaclann) and his honour (a onóir). Such was the technical proficiency and honourable truthfulness of the Gaelic learned orders, Mac Fhirbhisigh continued, that one could still draw from the ancient texts the names of the first physician, first craftsman, and first fisherman to land in Ireland: Capa, Luasadh, and Laighne.43 Mac Fhirbhisigh carefully defended not just the discipline of genealogy itself, but also a particularly Irish way of speaking about heredity. According to Mac Fhirbhisigh, the Irish were a mixture of peoples who had invaded Ireland in waves over thousands of years. Not all the Gaeil, he wrote, could be traced back to the three sons of Míl, because the Irish people as they now stood contained remnants of the Fir Bholg, Fir Dhomhnann, Gáiliúin and Tuatha Dé Danann.44 Experts in Irish history had argued in the past, according to Mac Fhirbhisigh, that the physical and moral traits of each people were preserved through the male line over the centuries, so that: Everyone who is bright skinned, brown haired, bold, honourable, brave, happy, a bestower of valuables and wealth and golden treasure and unafraid of battle or combat – those are the remnants of the sons of Míl in Ireland. Everyone who is fair haired, comely, big, every plunderer, every musical person, both makers of string-sweet music and minstrels, and practitioners of every magical craft and also every medical art – those are the remnants of Tuatha Dé Danann in Ireland. Everyone who is black haired, noisy-voiced, insolent, tale-telling, vociferous, insignificant, every wretched, ill-bred, vulgar, unstable, unreliable, crafty, angry person, every slave, every pilfering servant . . . those are the remnants of Fir Bholg and Gáilióin and Lioghmhaine and Fir Dhomhnann in Ireland. The remnant of Fir Bholg, however, are the most numerous of those.45 43 Mac Fhirbhisigh, Great Book, vol. 1, pp. 162–3, 168–9, 170–3; cf. Stewart MacAlister, Lebor Gabála Érenn, vol. 2, pp. 214–17. 44 Mac Fhirbhisigh, Great Book, vol. 1, pp. 176–7. 45 ‘Gach áon as geal, as donn, as dána, as enigh, as déudla, as sona, as tiodhnaictheach séud agus maoíne agus órdhuisi, agus nach eagal fria cath na comhlann, as íad sin iarsma Mhac Míleadh in Érinn. Gach áon as fionn, as iních, as mór, gach airgtheach, gach ceolmhar, lucht tédbhinniosa ciúil agus

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The historian then quoted some verses to the same effect, which he identified as the ‘version of an old book’.46 Mac Fhirbhisigh was uneasy at exposing this tradition to the contemporary reader, and continued: However, I do not propose to say with certainty that peoples can be identified by their dispositions and appearance, although this might have been true in the first ages (or until the races later frequently became intermixed), for we see daily in our time, and we often hear from our elders, that every kindred in Ireland has in itself a similarity of appearance and traits, and of mannerisms also, to one another; and not only is this so, but it is said that the people of a single territory have a similarity therein one to another, and that they all have a single manner by which they are identified.47

The genealogist added, in justification of the tradition, a law from the Seanchus Mór of St Patrick, which provided that if a woman were unsure which of two men were the father of her child, she should wait three years until the child had attained ‘hereditary features, way of speaking, and mannerisms’, and then sue the man whom the child more resembled.48 Considering the pedigree of this knowledge, Mac Fhirbhisigh concluded, it was not ‘unseemly’ to derive physical and moral qualities from descent.49 Mac Fhirbhisigh believed that he was explaining a native physiognomic tradition to his reader; physiognomics being the general term for disciplines which derived a person’s character, disposition

46 47

48 49

airfidigh, is marcach for gach cerd draoidheachta, agus gach miadchuinche ar cheana, as iad sin iarsma Tuatha Dé Danann in Erinn [sic]. Gach áon as dubh, as labharghlorach, beudach, sgeulach, engech, éucaidhe, gach dona, disgir, daosgair, udmhall, anbfhosuidh, aindiuid, aininidh, gach mogh, gach mogladraoin . . . as íad sin iarsma Fhear mBolg agus Gailióin agus Lioghmaine agus Fhear nDomnann in Erinn [sic]. Acht ceana, as iarsma Fear mBolg as lia dibh sin’, Mac Fhirbhisigh, Great Book, vol. 1, pp. 176–7. ‘Sliocht senleabhair’, ibid., i, pp. 178–9. ‘Gidheadh, aithne fhire aicmeadh ar a n-aigeantaibh agus crothaibh, ni chuirim go cinnte róm a rádh, gidh go madh édir a bheth fíor isna céudaimsioruibh (no gur cumaisgeadh na cinneadha ar a chele go minic iaramh), úair ad-chímid go laetheamhuil rer linn, agus ad-chluinmid go minic ór seanaibh, samhlughadh crotha agus caile, agus béus bheós, do bheth ag gach fine innte fén do Érinn re aroile; agus ní headh amháin go mb(h)í sin samhluidh, acht aderthear go mbí cosmhaileas ag gach lucht énchríche innte fén chéle, agus go mbí éinbhéus abhain ar a n-aithnighear íad aca uile’, Mac Fhirbhisigh, Great Book, vol. 1, pp.178–9. ‘go ttí fineachruth, fineaghuth, agus finebheusa dho’, ibid., vol. 1, pp. 178–9. ‘ní fhuil egcneasdocht eoluis ann’, ibid., vol. 1, pp. 178–9.

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or destiny from their external appearance.50 There is no hint of the physiognomical material Mac Fhirbhisigh described in the Lebor Gabála Érenn (Book of Invasions), the fundamental Gaelic mythological history of the peoples who had conquered Ireland, which had been compiled in the late eleventh century.51 Throughout that work there was a general association of the Milesians with military aristocracy, the Tuatha Dé Danann with magic and learning, and the Fir Bholg with manual labour; and also an association of good things with brightness and bad things with blackness, but there was certainly no physiognomical scheme as elaborate as the one outlined by Mac Fhirbhisigh.52 Nor did Geoffrey Keating’s gentleman’s guide to the Gaelic learned tradition completed in the 1630s, the Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, contain any such material.53 The source of Mac Fhirbhisigh’s physiognomic learning, the senleabhair which he mentioned, appears to be a vellum manuscript written in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.54 Once the property of the Polestown Butlers, the manuscript seems to have been in the possession of the Fitzgerald earls of Desmond in the early sixteenth century, when six leaves were added to it by their historian Torna Uí Mhaoil Chonaire (Conry).55 Both the prose description of the ancient peoples of Ireland, quoted above from Mac Fhirbhisigh’s text, and the subsequent verses, were copied into the manuscript by Uí Mhaoil Chonaire; Robin Flower thought them pre-twelfth century in origin.56 Many cultures have developed disciplines like this without interconsciousness, but it is possible that the Gaelic physiognomics which Mac Fhirbhisigh described and cautiously endorsed was originally 50 T. S. Barton, Power and Knowledge: Astrology, Physiognomics, and Medicine Under the Roman Empire (Ann Arbor, 1994), p. 95. 51 John Carey, A New Introduction to Lebor Gabála Érenn (London, 1993). 52 MacAlister, Lebor Gabála Érenn, vol. 1, pp. 120–3, vol 2, pp 122–3, vol. 5, pp. 472–3. 53 Geoffrey Keating, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn: The History of Ireland, ed. David Comyn and P. S. Dinneen (4 vols, London, 1902–14). 54 British Library, Additional MS 30512; Ó Muraíle, Celebrated Antiquary, p. 170, n. 37; Bernadette Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating: History, Myth, and Religion in Seventeenth Century Ireland (Dublin, 2nd edn, 2004), pp. 77–8. 55 Robin Flower (ed.), Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the British Museum Volume II (London, 1926), pp. 470–1; David Beresford, ‘Butler, Edmund (‘MacRichard’) (c. 1420–1469), and James (c.1440–1487), father and son’, in DIB, vol. 2, pp. 104–5. 56 Flower (ed.), Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts, pp. 473–5.

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an off-shoot of the classical physiognomic tradition.57 A number of Hellenic texts on physiognomics were available to medieval and Renaissance European readers: Polemo of Laodicea’s Physiognomics, for example, was translated into Arabic in the early Middle Ages and from there was re-absorbed into European medical literature.58 This was an Arab-mediated physiognomical tradition that reached even Ireland’s medieval English Pale. The Arabic Sirr al-asra-r or Secret of Secrets, translated in Latin as the Secretum Secretorum, was translated into English by the Dublin chancery clerk James Yonge in 1422 for the fourth earl of Ormond. This purported to be Aristotle’s advice on government to Alexander the Great, and included chapters on physiognomics derived substantially from Polemo via the medical literature.59 However, Mac Fhirbhisigh’s physiognomics appears to have been connected to an Aristotelian tradition. The text known to modern scholars as Pseudo-Aristotle’s Physiognomy was composed by two later members of Aristotle’s school, and the attribution to Aristotle was understood to be uncertain by Renaissance humanists like Isaac Casaubon. Nevertheless, the arguments of the PseudoAristotelian Physiognomy on the relationship of mind and body were in tune with those of the real Aristotle’s Prior Analytics and History of Animals, and the work was easily accessible in the collected editions of the philosopher’s works.60 Mac Fhirbhisigh’s remarks on the relationship between the mores and the appearance of the descendants of the Milesians, Tuatha Dé Danann, and Fir Bholg, appear closely related to the PseudoAristotle. The Physiognomy argued that if a human resembled a beast in matter or body, then it was likely that the human would also 57 Martine Dumont, ‘Le Succès mondain d’un fausse science, la physiognomie de Johann Caspar Lavater’, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 54 (1984), 2–30. 58 Simon Swain (ed.), Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s Physiognomy from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam (Oxford, 2007). 59 Robert Hoyland, ‘The Islamic background to Polemon’s Treatise’, in Swain (ed.), Seeing the Face, pp. 227–80; Lin Kerns (ed.), The Secret of Secrets (Secreta Secretorum): A Modern Translation with Introduction of the Governance of Princes (Lampeter, 2008), pp. 61–124. 60 E. C. Evans, ‘Physiognomics in the ancient world’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 59 (1969), 1–101, at 7, 11, 24; Simon Swain (ed.), ‘Appendix: Ps.-Aristotle, Physiognomy’, in Swain (ed.), Seeing the Face, pp. 637–61; Ps.-Aristotle, ‘Physiognomicȣn Liber, incerto interprete’, in Aristotle, Operum Aristotelis Stagiritae Philosophorum Omnium Longe Principis Nova Editio, Graecê & Latiné, ed. Isaac Casaubon (2 toms in 1 vol., Lyons, 1590), tom. 1, pp. 713–21.

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resemble that animal in form or soul. So a man who looked like a lion might also have some of the qualities of soul of a lion.61 The treatise went on to describe a lion’s qualities in body and soul: strong shoulders and powerful chest, tawny mane, generosity and liberality, magnanimity, a love of victory, justice, and friendship. If the lion embodied the most perfect male form, then the leopard followed more the female form: generally smaller, ill-proportioned, spotted in colour of body, and petty, dishonest, and crafty in soul.62 Colouring was an important clue to the mores of the soul. Very dark colouring marked a coward (as found in Ethiopians), as did very light colouring (as found in women); the desirable medium was the tawny colouring of the lion, which indicated the right quantity of heat in the body.63 The conclusion of this short treatise brought this thinking on the relationship of innate heat, body, and mind to a point: Very small men are sharp; for as the motion of their blood is contained in a small space, its movements also very rapidly approach the intelligence. However, those who are very large are slow. For the motion of the blood being contained in a large space, that motion approaches the intelligence slowly.64

The middle of these two natures was the best, with the blood moving through the body and serving the faculties of the mind at a healthy pace. A moderate size of body was thus conducive to the most effective mind. It seems very likely that the Gaelic physiognomic tradition which Mac Fhirbhisigh described had drawn, at some point in the past, this classical physiognomic material. The genealogist’s brave, bright, tawny-coloured Milesians corresponded to the lion-like, masculine, large-bodied men of the Aristotelian text. The black-haired, plebeian Fir Bholg marked Mac Fhirbhisigh’s human nadir, similar to the dark, feminine, leopard, while his own ancestors, the learned 61 Swain (ed.), ‘Appendix’, p. 639; Ps.-Aristotle, ‘Physiognomicȣn Liber’, pp. 713–14. 62 Swain (ed.), ‘Appendix’, pp. 651–2; Ps.-Aristotle, ‘Physiognomicȣn Liber’, p. 717. 63 Swain (ed.), ‘Appendix’, pp. 657; Ps.-Aristotle, ‘Physiognomicȣn Liber’, p. 719. 64 ‘Parvi valde, acuti sunt: motu enim sanguinis paruum locum continente, motiones quoque valde velociter accedunt ad sapere. Qui autem sunt valde magni, tardi. Motu enim sanguinis magnum locum continere, motus tarde accedunt ad sapere’, Ps.-Aristotle, ‘Physiognomicȣn Liber’, p. 720; Swain (ed.), ‘Appendix’, p. 661.

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Tuatha Dé Danann, marked the happy medium between the low cunning of the Fir Bholg and the courageous bluntness of the sons of Míl. However, Mac Fhirbhisigh was apparently unaware of these classical resonances, and it is notable that he attempted to support this physiognomic tradition with an appeal to commonly acknowledged patterns of human heredity. The relationship between Mac Fhirbhisigh’s brand of Gaelic learning and Renaissance humanism is uncertain; but there is no such uncertainty in the case of GianBattista Rinuccini, archbishop of Fermo and papal nuncio to Ireland from 1645 to 1649. Born in 1592 to a Florentine seigniorial family, Rinuccini had been educated first by the Jesuits in Rome, then at the universities of Bologna and Perugia, finally taking his doctorate in both civil and canon law from the university of Pisa.65 The fruit of this education included substantial manuscript treatises on logic and a commentary on Aristotle’s Physics.66 Accustomed to life among noblemen and the committee work of the Roman congregations, well educated in philosophy and law (if not theology), and experienced in the pastoral work of Catholic reform, Rinuccini was also flatly uninterested in those distinctions between different varieties of Protestantism considered important by his Irish contemporaries.67 Moreover, the nuncio took insufficient care in preserving the delicate ethnic balances necessary to the smooth functioning of the Irish church. The importance of managing ethnic difference was recognised in both civil and ecclesiastical government in Ireland in the 1640s. In 1641, a revolt of mainly Ulster gentry and noblemen became a religiously inflected peasant revolt which triggered a war throughout the three kingdoms of Ireland, Scotland, and England resulting in the execution of King Charles I by parliament in 1649, and continuing in Ireland until the surrender of the town of Galway to the Parliamentarians in 1652. In 1642 a number of Catholic lawyers and noblemen in Kilkenny composed a working constitution, or ‘model of government’, for the portion of the Irish kingdom under their control. These Catholic confederates wrote into their constitution the provision that there should be no distinction made in the new provisional government ‘betwixt old Irish, and old or new English’, under pain of punishment by the county, provincial, or supreme 65 Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Reformation in Ireland, pp. 83–5. 66 Ibid., pp. 84–5. 67 Ibid., pp. 89–91.

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councils.68 Analysing those events some years later, the Capuchin Robert O’Connell explained that there was a general principle in the Catholic government of the time that as there were four provinces in the kingdom, and two kinds of Catholics, natives (aborigines) and those of English descent, ‘reason itself suggested that these divisions should be taken into consideration in all Confederate government’.69 Certainly if there were four places on an ecclesiastical committee, two members would tend to be English Irish and two Gaelic Irish. In 1648 the Irish Catholic church, an institution which had developed over the previous half century out of the medieval churches ‘among the Irish’ and ‘among the English’, failed to withstand the pressure of wartime politics and split in two. The division was between those who were prepared to countenance a truce with local Protestant commanders as a prelude to aiding the king against his Parliamentarian opponents, and those who followed the nuncio Rinuccini in seeing the best chance of restoring the full splendour of Catholic worship in Ireland as lying outside conventional royalism. Of twenty-seven Catholic bishops and archbishops, ten opposed the nuncio. All but one of the nuncio’s episcopal opponents were English Irish; all but two of the nuncio’s supporters were Gaelic Irish.70 The Irish Franciscans also split, with the Gaelic Irish majority following the nuncio, and a prominent English Irish minority opposing him. That English Irish minority seems to have been identical with that group which had been agitating since the 1620s for the foundation of a new Franciscan province in Ireland which would include Munster and possibly Leinster, leaving the old Franciscan province to be run by mainly Gaelic Irish friars from Connacht and Ulster.71 Even the Jesuits, a predominantly English 68 Micheál Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland 1642–1649: A Constitutional and Political Analysis (Dublin, 1999), p. 48; ‘Acts of general assembly of confederation, October 1642’, in Gilbert (ed.), History of the Irish Confederation, vol. 2, pp. 73–84, at 80. 69 ‘Denique cum in Regno essent et quatuor Provinciae et duplex Catholicorum genus, nempe aborigines et Iberni majoribus ex Anglia oriundis prognati, harumque partium rationem in omni Faederatorum regime habendam ipsa ratio suaderet’, Com. Rin., vol. 3, pp. 265–6. 70 Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Reformation, pp. 235–7; Com. Rin., vol. 3, pp. 284–8, 327, 335, 342, 491–2, 500. 71 Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Reformation, pp. 235–7, 240–3, 262, 265; Cathaldus Giblin, ‘A seventeenth-century idea: two Franciscan provinces in Ireland’, Franciscan College Annual (1951), pp. 55–67.

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Irish order, upon whose support a papal nuncio in other countries could unquestionably have relied, largely opposed Rinuccini.72 During his time in Ireland, Rinuccini became drawn into the radical anti-English tradition described in Chapter 3 above: the nuncio’s own analysis of the problems of the Irish church, and indeed of the kingdom as a whole, was resolutely ethnic. The report on his Irish nunciature that Rinuccini presented to Pope Innocent X on his return to Rome began with the claim that the Catholics of Ireland were divided in two ‘adverse factions’: the Ibernesi antichi (Old Irish) and the antichi Inglesi (Old English). The former, based mainly in Ulster, were averse both to heresy and the dominion of England, and so declined to be enriched with ecclesiastical property at the Reformation; the latter, whose stock had been introduced to Ireland in the time of Henry II and whose colonies were scattered through Munster and Leinster, were bound to the English kings by bonds both of obligation and interest, had been enriched with monastic estates, intermarried and did business with the English, were dedicated entirely to the English common law and the royal perogative, were fundamentally English in their sentiments, and were less jealous of the difference of religion than the Old Irish. This constituted a criticism of the society, manners, customs, and political choices of the antichi Inglesi; an account of their ill-habituation similar to that of O’Sullivan Beare or Richard O’Ferrall. Then Rinuccini went further and began to criticise the bodies of the antichi Inglesi: Nature even seems to widen the breach by difference of character and qualities, the new party being for the most part of low stature, quick-witted, and of subtle understanding, while the old are tall, simple-minded, unrefined in their manner of living, generally slow of comprehension, and quite unskilled in negotiation.73

72 Louis McRedmond, To the Greater Glory: A History of the Irish Jesuits (Dublin, 1991), pp. 68–75. 73 ‘e pare che la natura aiuti fra loro la dissensione dei costumi; essendo questi moderni per lo più di non alta statura, vivaci di spirito, e sottilissimi d’ingegno; ma gli antichi sono grandi di corpo, semplici, son rozzi nel vivere, e più presto di tarda apprensione, e minore disinvoltura nei negoziati’, Giuseppe Aiazzi (ed.), Nunziatura in Irlanda di Monsignor Gio. Batista Rinuccini Archivescovo di Fermo negli anni 1643 a 1649 (Florence, 1844), p. 392; Giuseppe Aiazzi, The Embassy in Ireland of Monsignor G. B. Rinuccini, Archbishop of Fermo, in the Years 1645–1649, trans. Annie Hutton (Dublin, 1873), pp. 486–7.

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This was clearly a physiognomical analysis. The Pseudo-Aristotle had written that the faster blood-flow in smaller men lead to a sharper intelligence, though perhaps of a low and crafty sort; whereas the slower blood-flow in large men meant a blunter intelligence, though perhaps a more plainly virtuous manner of life. It is unsurprising that Rinuccini, expert in Aristotelian logic and physics, should know something of Aristotelian physiognomics also. Those small, cunning men of English descent were blamed by Rinuccini for the collapse of the Catholic government of the island into civil war in 1648. Rinuccini’s arguments against the English Irish were developed by his client, Richard O’Ferrall, in the report which he submitted to the congregation De Propaganda Fide in 1658, and in the Commentarius Rinuccinianus completed in 1666. Very similar arguments were maintained by other Gaelic Irish members of the episcopate who had supported the nuncio in subsequent years, such as Bishop Edmund O’Dempsey.74 However, O’Ferrall, O’Dempsey and the rest restricted their criticisms of the English Irish to their society, manners and customs: they did not follow the nuncio in criticising English Irish bodies. As explained in the previous chapter, John Lynch believed that the anti-English Irish atmosphere in the nuncio’s household was due in part to Heber MacMahon, bishop of Clogher, and Boethius MacEgan, bishop of Ross. As well as being well connected to the anti-English tradition of the Gaelic Irish exiles, MacEgan’s family were members of the Gaelic learned order, specialising in law. There is thus a strong possibility that conversations between the nuncio and the most radical members of his Irish household between 1645 and 1649 raised not just the defective mores of the English Irish, but also the characteristics of their bodies. Aristotelians, like Rinuccini, and the Gaelic learned orders, among whom MacEgan was raised, both possessed physiognomic traditions which linked bodies to virtues and vices. The noble soul One must travel very far from early modern Ireland to find an intellectual prepared openly to tackle the relationships between nobility, heredity, and the body.André Devyver’s encyclopaedic study of 74 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rome, MSS Barberini Latini, vol. 2853, relatio of the diocese of Leighlin by Bishop Edmund Dempsey, presented by Richard O’Ferrall, no date, fols 11r–15r.

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ideologies of nobility in early modern France identified no theories of heredity more detailed than Osorio’s; and even the early eighteenthcentury author often portrayed as the acme of noble ‘racism’, Henry de Boulainvilliers, did not offer a precise account of how noblemen’s virtues were transmitted to their children.75 Surveying writings on nobility and genealogy in early modern Germany, Anthony Grafton remarked that genealogy was not understood primarily to be about heredity, but about the complex ways in which providence had blessed or withheld favours from great kin groups, and consequently their nations and states.76 It is an index of the obscurity of the problem of noble heredity that the most concrete statement on transmission of virtues and vices to be found is that contained in the work of the fifteenth-century Venetian humanist, Lauro Quirini. Unlike Osorio, Quirini was an erratic and unorthodox figure in his own time, and his work was never printed in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries.77 His tract on nobility, composed while he was lecturing on Aristotle’s moral philosophy at Venice in 1449, is instructive because he marched resolutely onto ground that more orthodox authors preferred to avoid. Quirini’s aim was to defend the ‘closed’ nobility of Venice, which admitted very few new men, against contemporary criticism from more conventional humanists. This meant raising nobility of birth to a position higher than most of his contemporaries would have allowed, and also offering a more detailed theory of heredity. Beautiful offspring were born to beautiful parents, Quirini wrote, and not only extrinsic qualities were propagated through generation, but also intrinsic properties (posture, voice, actions) which belonged to the soul: Whence a great many of the noblest philosophers believe that apart from the intellect, which they consider separate, the soul is born from the soul. The leading proponents of this idea are Aristotle, Theophrastus, Demetrius of Phalerum, Straton of Lampsacus, and many others who have followed his illustrious Peripatetic family. I omit all the outstanding physicians, whose art proves that the whole 75 André Devyver, Le sang épuré: les préjugés de race chez les gentilshommes français de l’Ancien Régime, 1560–1720 (Brussels, 1973), pp. 164–75, 353–90; H. A. Ellis, ‘Genealogy, history and aristocratic reaction in early eighteenth-century France: the case of Henri de Boulainvilliers’, Journal of Modern History, 58 (1986), 414–51. 76 Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 153–62. 77 Rabil (ed.), Knowledge, Goodness, and Power, pp. 143–48; Lauro Quirini, ‘De nobilitate contra Poggium Florentinum’, ed. Konrad Krautter, P. O. Kristeller and Helmut Roob, in Vittore Branca (ed.), Lauro Quirini Umanista Studi e Testi (Florence, 1977), pp. 74–98.

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image of the parents is clearly perceived in the children and that this image comes not from matter but from form. Thus we see that not only are people with sanguine and bilious temperaments born to sanguine and bilious parents, but also that free-born and wise people are born to free-born and wise parents.78

Quirini’s argument exposes the fact that any early modern treatment of heredity was in fact a treatment of the soul and of the origins of the soul: he referred to the soul as it was treated in philosophy, a humble science in the early modern universities, and as it was treated in medicine, a more prestigious one. Aristotle had indeed argued, in the Generation of Animals, that the vegetative part of the soul (possessed by all living things), and the sensitive part (possessed by all animals), were caused directly by the parents, but that the rational part entered in from outside (he did not say from where).79 Of the three other members of the Peripatetic School named by Quirini, modern scholarship has established that Theophrastus certainly did share the basics of Aristotle’s approach to ensoulment, but rather than referring to facts such as these it is possible that the Venetian simply borrowed the names of Aristotle’s successors from the list in Diogenes Laëtius’s Lives of the Philosophers.80 Moreover, the doctors did indeed wrestle with the distinction between matter and form when attempting to explain heredity and especially hereditary disease. But the Venetian omitted from this treatment, and from his whole tract, the queen of early modern sciences: theology. Both early modern philosophers and doctors showed themselves very cautious when approaching theological matters, and there was hardly a theological question as controversial in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe as the nature of the human soul. 78 ‘Unde et plurimi atque nobilissimi philosophi opinantur preter intellectum, quem separatum extimant, animam ex anima nasci, in quibus prinicipes sunt Aristoteles, Theophrastus, Demetrius Phalereus, Strato Lampsacenus et alii permulti, qui hanc peripateticam illustrem familiam secuti sunt. Taceo universos prestantes medicos , quorum ars hoc vel maxime affirmat, quod tota parentum imago in filiis perspicue cernitur, que sane non a materia, sed a forma provenire necesse est. Sic enim non modo sanguineos a sanguineis et colericos a colericis, verum etiam et ingenuosos ab ingenuosis et prudentes a prudentibus nasci videmus’, Quirini, ‘De nobilitate’, p. 85; Quirini, ‘On nobility against Poggio’, in Rabil (ed.), Knowledge, Goodness, and Power, pp. 155–76, at 164. 79 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 736b28–30. 80 Themistius, On Aristotle on the Soul, trans. R. B. Todd (London, 1996), p. 133; Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Philosophers, 5. 36–64, 75–85.

5

Irish doctors and theologians on heredity and the human soul 

Writers on nobility, genealogy, and physiognomics frequently alluded to heredity and the hereditary transmission of virtue and vice, but how did learned men in the seventeenth century characterise heredity itself? This chapter, the second of two on ethnicity and the human body, will explore those two fields where Aristotelians might have been expected to confront the problem of heredity directly. First, contemporary physicians were keenly interested in hereditary disease, not least because the most prestigious positions in the profession were appointments in noble or royal households. Heredity was a matter of great practical importance in those environments. Second, contemporary theologians struggled with the origin of the human soul, the relative contributions of the child’s parents and God to the creation of that soul, and the transmission of original sin. Medicine and theology were both prestigious disciplines in early modern universities; considerably more so than ethics, politics, or other sorts of philosophy.1 And the many thousands of young men who graduated in those disciplines every year went on to expound their sciences at sickbeds and from pulpits all over Europe. Medicine and heredity On 18 November 1590, Risteard Ó Conchubhair added a scribe’s note to the Irish translation of Bernard of Gordon’s Lilium Medicinae that he had been copying. Ó Conchubhair explained to his reader 1 P. A. Vandermeersch, ‘Teachers’, in Walter Rüegg (ed.), A History of the University in Europe Volume II: Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800) (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 210–55.

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that he was finishing the present part of the manuscript at the house of Oliver Grace in Courtstown, Queen’s County; it had been begun in County Kildare when the author had been the guest of John Og Aye, sometime agent and interpreter for Dublin Castle. The manuscript was continued in the households of a range of Kildare Berminghams, Fitzgeralds, and Husseys, and also – Ó Conchubhair related with pride – at the home of Edmund Butler, Viscount Mountgarret; the nobleman’s wife, Grainne, herself daughter of Brian Mac Giollapadraig, baron of Upper Ossory, had provided for the doctor’s education from the age of twelve.2 It is possible that Ó Conchubhair was an unusually peripatetic doctor: his parents had died, he was unmarried, and it seems likely that the senior members of his kindred were displaced during the Offaly plantation under Queen Mary.3 Nevertheless, the picture this colophon paints of the ability of physicians to move freely among the gentry and nobility of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland seems an accurate one. Along with lawyers and clergymen, doctors were entirely normal features of elite households in both English and Irish Ireland. It is also remarkable that Gaelic Irish doctors – Ó Conchubhair was an accomplished member of a prestigious medical dynasty – do not seem to have had any difficulty finding patients and hosts on the borders of the Pale and even among stalwarts of English power in Ireland like the Butlers.4 Finally, the subject of Ó Conchubhair’s labour was also characteristic: a new manuscript of an existing Irish translation of a popular and orthodox continental medical text.5 Judging from the one hundred Irish medical manuscripts which survive from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, the medicine practised by the physicians of Gaelic Ireland belonged to the same medical tradition which dominated contemporary continental medical schools and practice; that tradition rested on the medicine of the second-century Greek physician Galen of Pergamum.6 All the extant Irish-language medical literature comprises translations, compilations, or adaptions 2 Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, MS 439 (formerly 3 c 19), fols 1v–234v; Paul Walsh, Gleanings from Irish Manuscripts (Dublin, 2nd edn, 1933), pp. 123–52. 3 Walsh, Gleanings, pp. 129–33. 4 Aoibheann Nic Dhonnchadha, ‘The medical school of Aghmacart, Queen’s County’, Ossory, Laois and Leinster, 2 (2006), 11–43, at 24. 5 Luke Demaitre, Doctor Bernard de Gordon: Professor and Practitioner (Toronto, 1980), pp. 51–9. 6 Owsei Temkin, Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy (Ithaca, 1973), pp. 1–9.

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of mainstream Galenic texts.7 Richard Stanihurst’s estimate of the Gaelic Irish medical profession, though very hostile, seems to have been fundamentally accurate: members of the hereditary Gaelic medical families, though perhaps not comfortable reading the medical texts in Latin, certainly had access to the ‘Aphorismes of Hippocrates’ in Irish translation, if in ‘ancient and grimy parchments’.8 Gaelic Irish doctors might have been a little behind the times in relying on medieval medical textbooks, like the Lilium Medicinae, rather than texts of Galen and Aristotle which were the product of obsessive humanist scholarship, but their medicine was still the medicine of their English and continental colleagues. In short, the relationship between physicians and the political elite was an intimate one, and doctors in Irish and English Ireland, whether educated in Oxford or Aghmacart, generally shared the same Galenic medical theory and practice. It is thus very surprising that the author of the first medical text ever printed in Ireland, an Oxford-educated humanist and a client of Ireland’s most powerful noble house, was in some ways a more radical, less mainstream figure than Ó Conchubhair. Dermot O’Meara published his Pathologia Haereditaria in Dublin in 1619. Its subject was the nature and treatment of hereditary disease.9 The Pathologia was a clear and well-written book which offered useful summaries of opposing theories, and it enjoyed a remarkably long life. Denis Diderot drew on it extensively when writing the article on hereditary disease for the famous Encylopedie of 1765.10 1615 had seen the printing in London of O’Meara’s epic in highly competent Latin verse celebrating the life of Thomas Butler, tenth earl of Ormond. On the title page of that work, O’Meara proclaimed himself a former student of Oxford University without mentioning his degree, and indeed there is no record of his matriculation; never7 Aoibheann Nic Dhonnchadha, ‘Medical writing in Irish’, Irish Journal of Medical Science, 169 (2000), 217–20; Aoibheann Nic Dhonnchadha, ‘Irish medical writing, 1400–1600’, in Angela Bourke et al. (eds), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Volume IV: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions (Cork, 2002), pp. 341–57. 8 Liam Miller and Eileen Power (eds), Holinshed’s Irish Chronicle (Dublin, 1979), p. 114; Stanihurst, De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis Libri Quattuor (Antwerp, 1584), p. 44; Nic Dhonnchadha, ‘Medical writing in Irish’, p. 218. 9 Dermot O’Meara (Dermitius Meara), Pathologia Haereditaria Generalis, sive de Morbis Haereditariis Tractatus Spagyrico-Dogmaticus (Dublin, 1619). 10 Carlos López-Beltrán, ‘Human heredity 1750–1870: the construction of a scientific domain’ (PhD thesis, King’s College London, 1992), appendix, section 1.2.

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theless, the title page of the Pathologia described O’Meara as a doctor of medicine. The O’Meara family belonged to the apparatus of Butler power in North Tipperary, and Dermot served both Thomas, the tenth earl, and Walter Butler, the eleventh earl of Ormond as physician. It would seem that the Catholic O’Meara became estranged from James Butler, the Protestant twelfth earl, who on 12 October 1642 signed a letter reporting that the doctor had been indicted for high treason.11 Nevertheless, the bond between the two families was not entirely severed; when James, by then duke of Ormond, fell ill in 1674, Dermot’s son Edmund, also a prominent physician and a determined defender of his father’s medical writings, was called to give a second opinion.12 Hereditary disease was an inevitable topic of concern to noblemen: O’Meara’s inquiry into it was not the product of unworldly seclusion. O’Meara’s radicalism lay in the fact that he was not a practitioner of conventional Galenic medicine, but rather a Paracelsian; and while there was a certain fashion for Paracelsianism among royalty and nobility in England and France in the early seventeenth century, Paracelsians were still often subject to professional ostracism by the Galenists of the universities.13 Belonging to a tradition established in the early sixteenth century by the Swiss Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus, these practitioners of chemical medicine, or iatrochemists, argued that balance of the Galenist’s four humours, blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm, did not in fact determine health. Rather O’Meara and the other Paracelsians claimed to have established by a process of experiment that those four humours, and indeed the four elements of fire, air, water, and earth themselves could be reduced in turn to the really fundamental chemical principles of sulphur, mercury, and salt; good health depended on the management of these principles.14 However, 11 Lords Justice and Council to Sir Edward Nicholas, 12 October 1642, in Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde . . . New Series, Volume II (London, 1903), pp. 208–9. 12 John Barry, ‘O’Meara, Dermot (fl. c.1614–1642)’, in ODNB, vol. 41, pp. 807–8; J. B. Lyons, ‘O’Meara, Edmund (c.1614–1681)’, in ODNB, vol. 41, p. 808. 13 Temkin, Galenism, pp. 1–9; Hugh Trevor Roper, Europe’s Physician:The Various Life of Sir Theodore De Mayerne (New Haven, 2006), pp. 30–43, 60–116. 14 O’Meara, Pathologia Haereditaria, pp. 50, 52–3; Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (New York, 1958), pp. 126–34; A. G. Debus, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1977), pp. 66–126.

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O’Meara was careful to reject two damaging allegations. It was untrue, he insisted, that the iatrochemists rejected such fundamental metaphysical principles as matter, form, and privation. Neither did the iatrochemists reject the four elements; rather they sought a synthesis between old and new knowledge.15 O’Meara might have added, though it would have seemed too obvious a remark, that he preserved and relied on the distinction between essential and accidental qualities, and also made use of Aristotle’s four causes. All of these learned doctors, whether they considered themselves Galenists or iatrochemists, had proceeded through the university arts course, and so all had received a thorough grounding in Aristotelian metaphysics. O’Meara held this Aristotelianism in common with his opponents. It is worth emphasising the fundamental orthodoxy of O’Meara and his chemical colleagues, not least because some of their conservative opponents lumped them together with Machiavellians, as the Oxford Aristotelian, John Case, did in 1588.16 O’Meara regarded such accusations of heterodoxy as unfair, and with good reason. First, the Aristotelian distinction between essence, that which made a thing what it was, and accident, which could be changed without changing the nature of the thing, was central to his very definition of hereditary disease: I call all those diseases accidental whose seed, origin, and cause of illhealth are not innate, and have arrived from somewhere other than from the origins of life; and that is either by self-generation, or by formation over time, by the hidden influence of the planets and unchanging stars . . . or during the remaining time of carriage, from a fault in nutrition that the foetus consumes in the womb, or after the foetus is born, the cause may be of any sort or any time whatsoever: for the root of a solely hereditary disease is attached to some unchanging part of one or other of the parents, before creation of the foetus or at least before complete formation, and which with one origin of life or another, namely the semen or the blood poured into the offspring, whence the not accidental characteristics, strictly speaking, of the disease advance on the unfortunate posterity by hereditary right.17 15 O’Meara, Pathologia Haereditaria, pp. 60–72. 16 John Case, Sphaera Civitatis (Oxford, 1588), p. 2. 17 ‘Accidentarium appello morbum omnem, cuius semen, principia et causae morboso non sunt ingenita, et aliunde quam ex vitae principiis advenerunt; idque vel ipso generationis, aut conformationis tempore, occulta planetarum, fixorumque astrorum influentia, (cui non levem morborum procreandorum vim assignandum censeo) vel reliquo gestationis tempore, ex alimenti, quod

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By O’Meara’s definition, hereditary disease was disease of the essence; present in the seed or blood from which the foetus grew, not contracted later. The second orthodoxy which O’Meara shared with those other learned doctors who wrote about generation was the use of Aristotle’s four causes for explaining natural phenomena, and O’Meara used these causes to explain the relative contributions of mother and father to the conception of their child. Aristotle’s causes were the material, that from which an entity comes to be; the formal, the pattern, shape or structure of an entity; the efficient, the agent imposing the shape or structure; and the final, that for the sake of which the entity comes to be.18 Aristotle had argued that in human generation, the father’s semen provided both the efficient and formal causes, imposing form on the material, blood, provided by the mother. Galen disagreed slightly, arguing that the mother also provided a sort of seed or semen. There was also disagreement about the relative roles of semen and blood in creating the solid or spermatical parts such as bone, cartilage, and sinew. O’Meara summed up: There are two principles of human generation, just as of whatever other action: namely the active and the passive: both the medical and Peripatetic school teaches that semen is both active and efficient: the medics add that semen is not only efficient but also the material from which all the spermatical parts are constituted. The Peripatetics contend against this that all parts both spermatical and fleshly depend upon the blood alone as the material principal, and that the semen performs the function only of the efficient: and although indeed it must be said with the medics that the semen consists of a dual substance, spiritual and solid; by its spiritual rationale it is the artificer, by its solid rationale the material of the spermatical parts . . .19 foetus in utero carpit, vitio, vel postquam foetus in lucem est editus, qualis & quaecunque sit causa: solius namque morbi hereditarii radix, ante foetus generationem, vel saltem ante absolutam conformationem, alicui alterutrius parentis parti fixae inhaeret, unaque cum alter utro vitae principio, semine scilicet, vel sanguine in prolem transfunditur, unde proprii, proprie loquendo, prolis morbi, non accidentarii, in faustae haereditatis iure consurgunt’, O’Meara, Pathologia Haereditaria, pp. 2–4. 18 Aristotle, Physics, 194b23–35; Christopher Shields, Aristotle (London, 2007), p. 44. 19 ‘Humanae generationis, quemadmodum et alius cuiusque actionis duo principia: activum scilicet et passivum: semen activum esse, et efficiens, tum medica, tum Peripathetica schola docet: Addunt medici semen non solum efficiens esse, sed et materiam ex qua spermaticae omnes partes constant. Peripathetici contra ex solo sanguine partes omnes tum spermaticas, tum

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In fact, by stating the problem in this way, emphasising the causal contribution of the parents, O’Meara deftly avoided having to make a conclusive statement on the problem of whether women contributed seed to generation. O’Meara was happy to allow that the seed was the active, efficient cause of generation; he did not say whether any of that seed was female. Was this disagreement between Peripatetics and Galenists on the relative contribution of father and mother to generation significant to the early modern understanding of heredity? Those who followed Aristotle’s theory of generation held that only the father contributed seed to the making of the foetus, whereas the Galenists argued that the mother too contributed seed. Aristotle’s theory, elaborated in the De Generatione and other works, which can be fairly described as deeply patriarchal, if not misogynistic, gave a much more important role in generation to the father than to the mother. Aristotle could not deny that children sometimes looked more like their mothers than their fathers, but offered a purely negative explanation: the failure of the father’s seminal force to impress itself on the mother’s material, the result of some weakness of age or illhealth on the father’s part.20 Aristotle’s theory was defended both by the medieval Arab commentator Averroes, widely printed through the sixteenth century, and by Paduan philosopher Cesare Cremonini in the early seventeenth century.21 In contrast, Galen felt that the fact that children sometimes look like their mothers implied that the mother contributed more than merely material or blood to the foetus. While Galen thought female seed weak stuff, nevertheless a careful reading of his De Semine indicates that he saw the female seed joining with the female blood to counterbalance strong male seed and gave each parent an equal contribution to the generation of the foetus.22 carnosas, ut materiali principio constare contendunt, et semen solius efficientis munere fungi: et sane quanquam cum medicis dicendum semen, quod duplici constat substantia spiritibus, et crassamento; ratione spiritvum opificem esse, ratione crassamenti materiam spermaticarum partium . . . ’, O’Meara, Pathologia Haereditaria, pp. 37–9. 20 Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, 768a–768b; L. A. Deer, ‘Academic theories of generation in the Renaissance: the contemporaries and successors of Jean Fernel (1497–1558)’ (PhD thesis, Warburg Institute, University of London, 1980), p. 86. 21 Deer, ‘Academic theories of generation’, pp. 141–161, 222–44. 22 Galen, De Semine, in C. G. Kühn (ed.), Medicorum Graecorum Opera Quae Exstant (20 vols, Leipzig, 1821–33), vol. 4, bk 2, ch. 1, pp. 512–651, at 607,

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Jean Fernel’s Physiologia of 1567, the fullest exposition of Renaissance Galenism ever published and a work with which O’Meara was intimately familiar, certainly preferred Galen’s approach to heredity to Aristotle’s, but with reservations.23 Fernel was certain that women produced seed, though it was weaker than male seed, and in fact wrote that progeny usually resembled the mother.24 However, rather than emphasising the importance of the female material contribution to compensate for weak female seed, Fernel preferred to posit the powerful female imagination as an influence in his chapter on heredity. Fernel read Galen as arguing that children did not always look like their fathers despite the greater strength of male seed because the mother’s seed acquired extra power from the mother’s menstrual blood over a period of nine months. Fernel disliked the implication that the mother’s blood contributed to the efficient cause as well as the material, did not see how this explained why a child sometimes looked like someone who had contributed nothing to procreation, and felt that the weakness of female semen should be taken seriously. The answer lay in the power of the female imagination over the form of the foetus developing in the same body, so that by thinking a woman might cause her child to look like the father, like the grandfather, or even like a picture of an Ethiopian she had seen on the wall.25 Despite having begun his chapter by admitting the hard, difficult obscurity of the problem, Fernel professed to be entirely satisfied by this explanation of heredity.26 O’Meara’s Pathologia vigorously attacked Fernel’s Galenic treatment of hereditary disease, elaborating instead a chemical explanation from a work on arthritis by the French Paracelsian Joseph du Chesne, known as Quercitanus.27 O’Meara left Fernel’s wider treatment of heredity, and the place of maternal imagination in it,

23 24 25 26 27

bk 2, ch. 2, p. 614, ch. 5, p. 642; Hippocrates and Galen, Hippocratis et Claudii Galeni Opera, ed. Renatus Charterius (13 vols in 9, Paris, 1679), vol. 3, 185– 228, at 215, 217, 226; Deer, ‘Academic theories of generation’, pp. 99, 101; Michael Boylan, ‘Galen’s conception theory’, Journal of the History of Biology, 19 (1986), 47–77. Jean Fernel, The Physiologia of Jean Fernel (1567), ed. J. M. Forrester (Philadelphia, 2003), pp. 4–5; O’Meara, Pathologia Haereditaria, pp. 11–31. Fernel, Physiologia, bk 7, chap. 6, pp. 554–5. Ibid., bk 7, chap. 12, pp. 588–95. Ibid., bk 7, chap. 12, pp. 588–9, 592–3. O’Meara, Pathologia Haereditaria, pp. 19–31, 48–60; Debus, Chemical Philosophy, pp. 148–68.

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unremarked. In fact, O’Meara’s basic assumptions about the nature of heredity and the transmission of hereditary virtues and vices were really quite different to those of Fernel. In the first pages of the Pathologia, O’Meara felt he had to reassure his readers on the reality of hereditary disease by introducing an analogy with hereditary moral qualities: Now if the power of place, seasons, age, and wind, is so great as to contaminate great numbers of people on account of the joint action of sky and sun, is it proper to deny the same power to the semen, which is the intrinsic and essential property of many things? Since indeed, we admit that the virtues and vices of the parents, which are considered rather predispositions of the soul than of the body, are propagated by the semen by a certain hereditary force in the offspring, what prevents us believing that diseases, material and corporal conditions, are communicated by parents to children by a most astonishing seminal power, fertile not less in good things than in bad? Rather indeed, since the semen contains in itself potentially the idea, form and characteristics of each part of the body from where it issues (from here the special ground of sex, temperament, and appearance is to be sought), one could justly wonder why, in any case when the parents are afflicted by disease, the fertile power latent in that semen does not pass onto the children.28

Unlike Fernel then, O’Meara did think that the semen (whether of the mother or of the father), not the maternal imagination, provided the form of the foetus with regard to sex, temperament, and appearance. He also thought that the parents’ semen might propagate virtues and vices, which pertained to the soul rather than the body, in their children. And finally, he thought that his readers would agree 28 ‘Iam si loci, temporum, aetatis, et aurae tanta est in multitudine inquinanda robur, ob coeli, solisque communionem, eandemne vim negare decet semini, quod intrinsecum, et essentiale est multorum principium? Cum denique parentum virtutes, et vitia, quae animi potius; quam corporis diatheses censentur, vi quadam haereditaria a semine in sobolem propagari agnoscamus, quid suadet ut morbos, materiales, corporeosque affectus, natis a parentibus, seminali admiranda nimis, et foecunda non minus in bonis, quam in malis, virtute communicari non credamus. Imo vero cum semen in se singularum partium corporis, unde dimanat, ideam, formam, et proprietates potentia contineat, hinc sexus, temperiei, effigieique praecipua petenda ratio) [sic] admirari quis merito posset, morborum genere ullo parentes afflictos, quod fertilis illa in semine occulta facultas in liberos non derivet’, O’Meara, Pathologia Haereditaria, pp. 9–11; Conway Zirkle, ‘The early history of the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters and of pangenesis’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new series, 35 (1946), 91–151, at 134–5.

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that virtues and vices could be transmitted in a hereditary manner, but that they would be uncertain about the transmission of disease in the same way. It was noted above that Fernel believed heredity to be one of the most difficult problems in medicine; and this recognition of the difficulty of the problem was widespread. The caution with which O’Meara posited the very existence of hereditary disease, and even applied the term ‘hereditary’ to disease, is remarkable. A hereditary disease, O’Meara explained early in the Pathologia, was one that was rooted to the parent and descended by ‘a kind of hereditary right to future generations’.29 O’Meara then explained the purpose of his analogy with the law of inheritance: ‘I have associated it with hereditary right, because both father and son are very often seized by the same class of disease, which, however, happens to each by chance, and therefore should be called accidental, not hereditary.’30 This cautious characterisation of hereditary disease by analogy with inheritance law was common in seventeenth-century treatments of disease. Another treatise on hereditary disease which enjoyed a long life into the eighteenth century was Robert Lyonnet’s Brevis Dissertatio de Morbis Haereditariis, printed in 1647 to reassure the French court and public generally that the fevers which killed King Louis XIII could not have been transmitted to his son the dauphin, who would become Louis XIV.31 Lyonnet, an orthodox Galenist, needed to demonstrate that hereditary disease was disease of the solid parts, whereas the king had died of fevers, contracted over the course of ‘a long and laborious life for the kingdom in ornament, growth, and care, and through no neglect of remedies’, which arose from the fluid humours. At a late point in his book, Lyonnet offered an etymology for his key term: Let me begin from the name of hereditary, taken over from civil things to natural ones, as the jurisprudents say that it is that universal right which another has to succession. Among doctors also a disposition transferred from parents to descendants is called hereditary; and therefore just as the jurisprudents do not exclude things detrimental or burdensome from the appellation of hereditary . . . just so 29 ‘haereditario quodam iure in posteros descendit’, O’Meara, Pathologia Haereditaria, pp. 1–2. 30 ‘Addidi haereditario iure, quod tum pater, tum natus eodem specie morbo persaepe corripiantur, qui tamen ex accidenti utrique contingit, ac proinde accidentarius, non haereditarius dici debet’, ibid., p. 2. 31 Robert Lyonnet, Brevis Dissertatio de Morbis Haereditariis (Paris, 1647); LópezBeltrán, ‘Human heredity 1750–1870’, appendix, section 1.2.

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our diseases and good health, good temper, form, strength, and similar things are called hereditary for us.32

If anything, both O’Meara and Lyonnet were more confident in their statements on the transmission of hereditary disease and other characteristics than was the norm. More characteristic was the honest statement of perplexity made by the accomplished English physician William Harvey during the course of which he naturally linked the problems of nobility and heredity.33 In his Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium, composed over the course of the 1630s and 1640s, the revolutionary argument of which was that all living things had their origin in an egg, Harvey pointed out that offspring looked sometimes more like the father, sometimes the mother, sometimes the grandparents, and continued (in the English translation of 1653): This also is a wonderful thing, that the Virtues, and Vices, the Diseases, the Marks, the Moles or Spots should be transferred to Posterity: and that to some only of the Progeny, and not unto all. In the race of Cocks, some are of a generous spirit, and born to battle; who will dye rather than turn their backs upon their Adversaries: and yet their Nephews, unless they proceed of like parents, do by degrees forfeit their galantry; according to that saying, Fortes creantur fortibus. In many other Animals (and especially in Man) the Bravery of the Succession, or Family is observable: and many of the Indowments both of body and soul are derived down to it ex traduce.34

Harvey went on to wonder how, if heredity was no more than a simple mixing of the characteristics of mother and father, different sexes were born with such regularity and so few hermaphrodites 32 ‘Ordiar ab hereditatis nomine, a rebus civilibus ad naturales translato, quam dicunt Jurisperiti esse in Jus universum quod habuit alius, successionem. Medicis etiam a parentibus in posteros translata dispositio dicitur hereditaria; atque ideo sicut ab illis hereditatis appellatione damnosa etiam & onera non excluditur, sicut etiam pars hereditatis cum honoribus & oneribus, pars bonorum deductis oneribus nobis etiam non minus hereditarii dicuntur morbi ac bona dispositio, proba temperies, forma, robur & simila’, Lyonnet, Brevis Dissertatio, p. 79. 33 J. J. Bono, ‘Reform and the languages of Renaissance theoretical medicine: Harvey versus Fernel’, Journal of the History of Biology, 23 (1990), 341–87. 34 ‘Fortes creantur foribus’, the brave are begotten by the brave,William Harvey, Anatomical Exercitations Concerning the Generation of Living Creatures (London, 1653), p. 346; William Harvey, Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium (London, 1651), exercitatio 56, pp. 188–93; Geoffrey Keynes, The Life of William Harvey (Oxford, 2nd edn, 1978), pp. 329–60.

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appeared. Harvey did not see that the seed acting on the maternal blood, or the seed’s fertilisation of the maternal egg, or indeed the maternal imagination acting on the foetus, provided a convincing explanation of the hereditary phenomenon. The understanding of heredity among the Aristotelian, Galenic, Paracelsian, and new physicians (like Harvey) was thus ambiguous: there was a widespread agreement that heredity existed, even if this existence had to be described through metaphors drawn from the law, but no agreement on how it worked. The doctors provided slightly more technical insight into the problem of heredity than genealogists and writers on true nobility, but in order to understand the place of heredity in the early modern world one most turn to theology. Theology and heredity Theology was the most prestigious discipline in the early modern university, and early modern Ireland, as a battle-ground between Reformation and Counter-Reformation, was flooded with men with theology degrees. Such was the success of the Irish colleges in the university cities of Catholic Europe that by 1623, there were about 800 Catholic secular clergy and 300 regulars in Ireland; by 1641 there were over 1,600 regulars alone.35 These priests and friars were educated by senior members of their own orders and the professors of the universities and colleges in a range of different theological traditions, all of which adopted different positions on the possibility of hereditary transmission of characteristics physical and mental from parent to child. Similarly among the Protestants of Ireland, whether educated in Dublin, London, Oxford, or Cambridge, a variety of positions could be adopted which remained within orthodoxy. Three of these theological traditions on the soul and heredity will be examined here: the tradition derived from the theology of Thomas Aquinas taught among Dominicans and Jesuits; the Franciscan theological tradition derived from John Duns Scotus’s theology; and a Protestant tradition which had absorbed various elements from those medieval scholastics. 35 P. J. Corish, ‘The Cromwellian regime, 1650–60’, in T.W. Moody, F. X. Martin and F. J. Byrne (eds), A New History of Ireland, vol. III: Early Modern Ireland 1534–1691 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 353–86, at 381; P. J. Corish, The Catholic Community in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Dublin, 1981), p. 26; Brian Mac Cuarta, Catholic Revival in the North of Ireland, 1603–41 (Dublin, 2007), pp. 128, 235.

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All these seventeenth-century doctrines on the soul, Dominican, Franciscan, and Protestant, rested on a common Aristotelian basis. All living things, whether plant, animal, or human, were composites of matter and form. The form of a living thing was the same as its soul: plants had vegetative souls or forms, animals had sensitive souls or forms and human beings alone had intellective or rational souls or forms. Aristotle had argued that human beings were not only exceptional for being rational, but exceptional in that their rational souls were infused into their bodies from outside (presumably by God), rather than being established naturally from seed as in the case of plants and animals.36 A being’s soul was its essence and gave that being life: the difference between a dead woman and a live woman was that the live woman had a soul, the dead one did not.This much was uncontroversial among seventeenth-century Aristotelians. Thomas Aquinas, writing his Summa Theologiae in the 1260s and 1270s, insisted that there was one, individual, immortal, rational soul in man.37 In taking up this position, Aquinas opposed those who followed the Arab commentator Averroes and argued that there were two souls in man, one animal or sensitive and the other rational, which struggled against one another. This seemed to Aquinas to suggest a Manichean position that deprecated the body and all matter as sinful and wicked, or a Platonist position that saw the soul imprisoned in the body perhaps as a punishment. Aquinas found both of those positions were unacceptable; rather it was natural and correct that the soul should be united to the body.These Averroists also claimed that the rational soul was identical in all men and immortal only in that same universal sense: there were no individual human souls in the next world, just one human soul. But for Aquinas if there was one common soul, then there could not be effective sanctions against individuals in the next life; for that reason there must be one individual soul in man. However, Aquinas also wanted to accommodate Aristotle’s statement that the human embryo in the womb was an animal before it was man, so the Dominican came to a compromise argument.38 The sensitive soul, 36 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 736b28–30. 37 F. J. Roensch, Early Thomistic School (Dubuque, Iowa, 1964), pp. 1–19, 173–89, 200–46, 266–96; F. C. Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Volume 2: Medieval Philosophy (1st edn 1950; London, 2003), pp. 375–87; P. M. Huby, ‘Soul, life, sense, intellect: some thirteenth-century problems’, in G. R. Dunstan (ed.), The Human Embryo: Aristotle and the Arabic and European Traditions (Exeter, 1990), pp. 113–22. 38 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, qu. 76, art. 3.

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which incorporated the functions of the vegetative soul, was transmitted or traduced from the parents into the womb by the semen. But the foetus having taken on sufficiently human qualities, God infused a new rational soul into it, about day forty-five. Crucially, Aquinas argued that this new rational soul contained both vegetative and sensitive powers, and removed or corrupted the pre-existing souls or forms.39 The parents thus made no contribution to the final, true soul of the child; that was God’s work alone. All this matters to the problem of heredity because virtues and vices were characteristics of man’s sensitive or animal soul. Human passions or emotions such as love, hatred, desire, pleasure, and sorrow were not really so different from the passions of animals. Human passions and appetites were movements of the human sensitive soul. In contrast, reason (composed of understanding, will, and memory) lay in the highest, intellective part of the soul. Reason moderated and directed the unruly passions in the lower, sensitive part of the soul. Through careful education and practice the reason could come to act on the passions in a consistently good way: this habitual good action of the will on the passions producing good actions was virtue. When the passions escaped the control of the reason, the result was vice and sin. As the English colonist Ludowick Bryskett wrote in the 1580s, the moral virtues are ‘setled habits in ruling the appetite which ariseth out of the unreasonable parts of the soule: for vertues are grounded in those parts which are without reason, but yet are apt to be ruled by reason’.40 Under Aquinas’s scheme in which the parents make no contribution to the form or soul of the child, it is conceivable that the parents might still inflect the future moral character of their child by their material contribution alone. The material they supplied to the child in the seed and the menstrua might contribute to the child’s humours and temperament – so that the child might be choleric like his father or melancholy like his mother. Aquinas seems to have something like this in mind when he wrote, again in the Summa Theologiae, that a disposition to anger was more natural to human beings, and more liable to be transmitted from parent to child: 39 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a, qu. 76, arts 3–4; 1a, qu. 118, art. 2; Aquinas, Prima Partem Summae Theologiae, in Opera Omnia, cum . . . Commentariis partim Thomae de Vio Cajetani, et partim Francisci Ferrariensis (17 toms in 14 vols, Venice, 1593–4), tom. 10, fols 246–50v, 359v–60v. 40 Lodowick Bryskett, A Discourse of Civill Life: Containing the Ethike part of Morall Philosophie (London, 1606), p. 209.

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For a man is disposed to anger according as he has a bilious temperament. Moreover, among the humours, the bile moves fastest, for it is similar to fire. And therefore he who is disposed according to his natural temperament to anger, is more readily incensed with anger, than he who is disposed to desire is inflamed with desire. And on account of this, the Philosopher says in the seventh book of the Ethics, that anger is more easily transmitted from parents to children than desire.41

Very similar arguments, relating the temperament or mixture of humours in the human to that person’s appearance and mental characteristics were to be found in a short treatise by Galen, Quod Animi Mores Corporis Temperamenta Sequantur (That the Mores of the Mind Follow the Temperament of the Body).42 Thomas Medus, an Irishman perhaps educated at the university of Paris, followed this Thomist teaching on the soul in a manuscript philosophy course completed in 1622.43 Just like Aquinas, Medus insisted that human beings had only an intellective soul with vegetative and sensitive operations, and that the vegetative and sensitive souls did not persist after the arrival of the intellective soul in the womb. But Medus tackled the question of heredity head-on when he introduced the question ‘Are all rational souls of equal individual perfection?’ Some men are clever, some stupid: did this not indicate that God had given some men intellective souls inferior to those of 41 ‘Est enim homo dispositus ad irascendum secundum quod habet cholericam complexionem. Cholera autem inter alios humores citius movetur. Assimilatur enim igni. Et ideo magis est in promptu, ut ille qui est dispositus secundum naturalem complexionem ad iram, quod irascatur, quam de eo qui est dispositus ad concupiscendum, quod concupiscat. & propter hoc Philosophus dicit in septimo Ethicorum. Quod ira magis traducitur a parentibus in filios, quam concupiscentia’, Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae, qu. 46, art. 5; Aquinas, Primam Secundae, in Opera Omnia, tom. 11, fol. 93. 42 Galen, Quod Animi Mores Corporis Temperamenta Sequantur, in C. G. Kühn (ed.), Medicorum Graecorum Opera Quae Exstant (20 vols, Leipzig, 1821–33), vol. 4, pp. 767–822; Galen, Quod Animi Mores, in Hippocrates and Galen, Hippocratis et Claudii Galeni, vol. 5, pp. 444–61. 43 Marsh’s Library, Dublin, MS Z3. 5. 16, Thomas Medus, ‘Philosophiae Universiae Compendium’ (1622); Laurence Brockliss and P. Ferté, ‘A prosopography of Irish clerics in the universities of Paris and Toulouse, 1573–1792’, Archivium Hibernicum, 58 (2004), 7–166, at 156–7; Liam Chambers, ‘Irish Catholics and Aristotelian scholastic philosophy in early modern France, c. 1600–c. 1750’, in James McEvoy and Michael Dunne (eds), The Irish Contribution to European Scholastic Thought (Dublin, 2009), pp. 212–30, at 217.

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others? Medus responded that all rational souls were of equal perfection, and that the diversity of human capacities was to be sought from the diversity of the parents and the material which they supplied to generation, the food taken into the body, and the climate in which one lived.44 Medus, and probably Aquinas, thought that one could give a coherent account of heredity without positing a lasting parental contribution to their child’s soul. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jesuit theology was also based in Thomism, so it is not surprising that the Irish Jesuit Peter Pippard, who donated his manuscript treatise on Aristotle’s De Anima to the library of the Jesuit house at Drogheda in August 1647, understood heredity in substantially the same terms as Medus.45 Addressing the plurality of forms, Pippard rejected the two-soul theory which he associated with the Manicheans.46 Then, in his section on the generation of living things, Pippard asked ‘From where springs the similarity of children to their parents in the colour, figure, liniments, complexion of the body, and even in the mores of the mind?’47 In an answer which echoed the language of Galen’s Quod Animi Mores, Pippard insisted that moral similarities in parents and children were to be put down to the parents’ material contribution to the child’s humoural temperament: the operations of the soul depended on the material dispositions of the body. Any irregularities in this scheme of heredity Pippard ascribed to the powerful and erratic female imagination.48 But several of the writers on nobility and medicine treated above did not proceed from this Thomist basis: the idiosyncratic Quirini clearly argued that mental and moral qualities were transmitted with the soul and were not derived merely from the humoral temperament. More importantly, O’Meara stated bluntly that virtues and vices were properties of the soul and propagated by the parents’ seed in the offspring, and to Harvey it seemed that qualities both of body and soul were transmitted from parents to children. In fact, there was very wide disagreement with Aquinas’s account of the infusion of the soul even in his own time. If there were only one form organ44 Medus’s treatise has not been paginated or foliated. See his De Anima, ‘Sectio 1a , De Anima Secundum se’, ‘Quaestio Quinta, De Anima rationali’, and ‘Quaestio Sexta, de Pluralitate animarum in uno vivente’. 45 Trinity College Dublin, MS 437, Peter Pippard, ‘In Libros Aristotelis De Anima [disputationes]’ (1647). 46 Pippard, ‘In Libros Aristotelis De Anima’, fol. 57v. 47 Ibid., fol. 73. 48 Ibid., fols 73–73v.

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ising the human body, then at death when the rational soul departed, the body should disintegrate into unformed matter. But this did not happen immediately: a person’s living body became that person’s corpse and could be recognised as such. The relics of a saint remained in some sense the body of that saint, not merely anonymous matter. And when Christ died his body did not disappear, but remained truly his corpse in the tomb, awaiting the re-unification of his body and soul.49 Some Dominicans and many Franciscans argued that a sort of form, separate from the rational soul, clearly remained in the corpse for a while after death.50 Franciscans like Roger Bacon, writing about 1270, argued that the human soul was derived both from the parents and from God and not from God alone.51 The most important representative of this Franciscan tradition of argument from the perspective of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was William of Ockham. In his Quodlibeta Septem, probably based on disputations held in London between 1324 and 1325, Ockham argued that the fact that we feel contrary impulses within ourselves indicates that there are indeed two souls in each human being; one sensitive (or animal) the other rational and divine.52 Ockham explained that when St Augustine condemned the Manichean opinion that there were two souls in the one human body, he was condemning the opinion that there were two intellective souls in the human body, one infused by God, the other by the devil; according to Ockham, Augustine did not mean to condemn the existence of separate sensitive and intellective souls in the human body.53 Ockham’s theory was not regarded as entirely orthodox in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but even Jesuit 49 Copleston, History of Philosophy, pp. 201–3, 274, 442–8, 451–3, 454, 456–8, 482, 515–16; Emily Michael, ‘Descartes and Gassendi on matter and mind: from Aristotelian pluralism to early modern dualism’, in S. F. Brown (ed.), Meeting of the Minds: The Relations between Medieval and Classical Modern European Philosophy (Turnhout, 1999), pp. 141–61. 50 Stephen Bemrose, ‘“Come d’animal divegna fante”: the animation of the human embryo in Dante’, in Dunstan (ed.), The Human Embryo, pp. 123–35, at 132. 51 Theodore Crowley, Roger Bacon: The Problem of the Soul in his Philosophical Commentaries (Louvain and Dublin, 1950), pp. 124–52. 52 William of Ockham, Quodlibetal Questions, trans. A. J. Freddoso and F. E. Kelley (2 vols, New Haven, 1991), Quodl. II, qu. 10, pp. 132–6; P. V. Spade, ‘Introduction’, in Spade (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ockham (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 1–16, at 7; Marilyn McCord Adams, William Ockham (2 vols, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1987), vol. 2, pp. 647–64. 53 Ockham, Quodlibetal Questions, Quodl. II, qu. 10, pp. 134–5.

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commentators described it as an erroneous argument, not a heretical one.54 The Irish Jesuit Pippard nevertheless firmly dismissed Ockham in his 1647 treatise.55 More important for seventeenth-century Irish Catholics was the opinion of the Franciscan theologian by that time dominant in the order: John Duns Scotus. The Irish Franciscans in particular were fiercely loyal to Scotus and mistakenly claimed him as a fellow countryman, born at Downpatrick. Scotus wove his major treatment of the human soul into his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences which is now known as the Ordinatio or Opus Oxoniense.56 This work was the centrepiece of the ambitious edition directed by Luke Wadding, with the encouragement and assistance of Giovanni di Campagna, minister general of the Observant Franciscans, from St Isidore’s College Rome in the 1630s, and printed at Lyons in 1639.57 Scotus’s chief argument against Aquinas’s position that there was only one form in the human body was that some form or other clearly held the human body together at death. Scotus labelled this form, which remained after death and the departure of the intellective soul, the forma corporeitatis, form of corporeity. This form was transmitted from the parents to the embryo and remained with that new person even for a while after death; but Scotus insisted that this did not mean there were two souls in man; there was one intellective soul in man with vegetative and sensitive powers.58 Scotus developed this position further when defending the contribution which the Virgin Mary made to Christ’s humanity. Mary’s contribution, according to Scotus, was not merely material and passive, but formal and active: all human mothers including Mary contributed to their child’s form of corporeity, and the theologian thought that the fact that children often looked like their mothers was a good 54 Dennis Des Chesne, Life’s Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul (Ithaca, 2000), p. 154. 55 Pippard, ‘In Libros Aristotelis De Anima’, fol. 57v. 56 Antoine Voss, The Philosophy of Duns Scotus (Edinburgh, 2006), pp. 104–47. 57 C. Balic´, ‘Wadding the Scotist’, in Franciscan Fathers (eds), Father Luke Wadding Commemorative Volume (Dublin, 1957), pp. 486–504. 58 John Duns Scotus, Opus Oxoniense, 4, d. 11, qu. 3, n. 54 (plurality of forms); n. 38 (the corpse possesses a form); 3, d. 2, qu. 3, n. 5 (parent contributes a form to the child); 4, d. 44, qu. 1, n. 4 (one soul in each human); John Duns Scotus, Opera Omnia, ed. Luke Wadding et al. (12 toms in 13 vols, Lyons, 1639), vol. 8, pp. 653–4; vol. 8, p. 641; vol. 7, p. 86; vol. 10, p. 98; Peter King, ‘Scotus on metaphysics’, in Thomas Williams (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 15–68, at 51–3.

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proof of this.59 Scotus’s theology of the soul thus offered, albeit in passing, a coherent Christian theory of human heredity; but even Scotus’s most determined Irish partisans did not completely accept his theory of heredity. In the Wadding edition of 1639 Scotus’s forma corporeitatis was carefully defended against the criticisms of later Dominicans in the commentary composed by the Franciscan Anthony Hickey – and Hickey also took the trouble to fend off wilder notions such as the possession of soul by the seed.60 Irish engagement with and explanation of Scotus’s doctrines on the soul extended beyond academic commentaries. John Punch’s Philosophiae ad Mentem Scoti Cursus Integer, intended as a resource for lecturers introducing undergraduates to Scotist philosophy and first printed at Rome in 1642, contained a long treatise on the soul, simpler and more direct than Hickey’s commentary.61 Punch, originally from Cork and educated in Leuven and at St Isidore’s in Rome, was a Franciscan theologian of international standing who had contributed commentaries to Wadding’s edition and taught at Franciscan colleges in Rome, Lyons, and Paris from the 1620s to the 1650s.62 Punch’s Cursus is thus significant as a clue to what young Irish Franciscans were taught in those decades, as well as a popular textbook in its own right. Punch bluntly explained the division between the Thomists and Scotists on the soul, concluding that since the human cadaver clearly had a substantial form, and that this form was not different to that possessed before death, therefore apart from the rational soul there was a form of corporeity in humans.63 His later Cursus Theologicus ad Mentem Scoti, a beginner’s course in Scotist theology first printed at Paris in 1652, connected this psychology to heredity in the course of a treatment of the Virgin Mary’s contribution to Christ’s body.64 Mary, he began, did contribute materially to the production of Christ’s humanity, by furnishing the material from which Christ’s organic body was made, and Christ’s perfect humanity was composed of 59 Scotus, Opus Oxoniense, 3, d. 4, qu. 1, n. 3; Scotus, Opera, vol. 7, part 1, p. 106. 60 Scotus, Opera, vol. 8, pp. 641–3. 61 I have used John Punch, Philosophiae ad Mentem Scoti Cursus Integer (Lyons, 1672). 62 Terry Clavin, ‘Punch, John’, in ODNB, vol. 45, pp. 561–2. 63 Punch, Philosophiae ad Mentem Scoti Cursus, Tractatus de Anima, Disputatio 1, Quaestio 3, p. 728. 64 I have used the later edition, John Punch, Theologiae Cursus Integer ad Mentem Scoti, Editio Novissima Indicibus (Lyons, 1671).

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this organic body and intellective soul. Punch added that this was just such a contribution as other mothers were accustomed to make to the generation of their sons, whether that contribution should be understood as active or passive. The Cork theologian explained that he wished to remain aloof from the philosophical controversies over whether or not women contributed actively, or merely passively, to generation. He wrote that ‘if other mothers contribute effectively to the production of the form of corporeity’ then Mary did so too, but Punch did not endorse Scotus’s confident assertion that all mothers contributed directly to their child’s forma corporeitatis.65 Punch clearly believed that such important theological doctrines should not be made to rest on highly controversial medical knowledge of ensoulment and heredity. Curiously, the fundamental Protestant textbook on the soul openly acknowledged the significance of the most radical Franciscan psychology. In the early years of the Reformation, Martin Luther had shown himself resolutely hostile to Aristotelianism, not least because he believed that Aristotle’s De Anima taught the mortality of the human soul. However, from the late 1520s Luther’s colleague, Philip Melanchthon, tasked with institutionalising Lutheranism and designing the university curricula through which it would be perpetuated, re-embraced Aristotelianism. Melanchthon’s Liber De Anima, first published in 1540 and followed by forty editions and eight commentaries in the sixteenth century alone, did show a keen interest in both in humanist criticism of the old scholastic learning and in the new empirical anatomy, but many of his positions were traditional ones.66 ‘We too will speak’, he wrote, ‘in the manner of the scholastics, just as if there were a unified human soul containing many powers’, including the vegetative and sensitive. Nevertheless, Melanchthon carefully outlined a range of different positions on the human soul or souls, and declined to commit himself absolutely to any one of them. ‘The English writer 65 Punch, Theologiae Cursus Integer, pp. 468–9. 66 Philip Melanchthon, De Anima, in Opera quae Supersunt Omnia, ed. C. G. Bretschneider and H. E. Bindseil (28 vols, Halle-Braunschweig, 1834–60), vol. 13, cols 2–178; Vivian Nutton, ‘The anatomy of the soul in early Renaissance medicine’, in Dunstan (ed.), The Human Embryo, pp. 136–57; Katherine Park, ‘The organic soul’, in Charles Schmitt et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 464–84; Eckhard Kessler, ‘The intellective soul’, ibid., pp. 485–534, at 516–18.

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Ockham’, he explained, said that there were ‘two distinct souls in the human being, one intellective, the other sensitive’.67 Melanchthon noted Ockham’s argument on the contrary rational and sensitive appetites, and continued: It is most natural for living things to beget another of their kind. Therefore the human begets human at least according to the sensitive life, if not according to the intellective soul. And it must be allowed that these souls are vegetative and sensitive by transmission, that is from the nature of the seed.68

Melanchthon did not say whether he thought the arrival of the intellective soul corrupted the other two, but as this statement came directly after his exposition of Ockham, it seems unlikely that he did. A little later Melanchthon explained that the received wisdom was that there was one soul in man. He continued, ‘I will not battle this opinion, but neither do I judge the opinion of those described above as absurd, that the sensitive and vegetative soul is a combination or a continuity, or that those souls are distinct from that divine breath in which is the understanding and the election.’69 Elsewhere in De Anima, Melanchthon adopted conventional Galenic positions on generation, arguing that the mother produced seed, but that this was part of the passive principle in generation with the father’s seed supplying the active principle, that this parental seed was capable of transmitting all characteristics of parents to children, and that it was the degree of dominance which the father’s seed achieved over the mother’s seed which determined paternal or maternal resemblance (though he also thought the stars influenced the final form of the body).70 Thus, while Melanchthon suspended judgement on 67 ‘Movetur hoc argumento et Occam scriptor Anglicus, ut dicat, in homine duas esse distinctas animas, Racionalem et Sentientem’, Melanchthon, De Anima, cols 11–12. 68 ‘Naturalissimum est viventibus gignere aliud simile. Gignit igitur et homo hominem saltem secundum vitam sentientem, si non secundum animam rationalem. Et has Animas vegetativam et sentientem esse ex Traduce, id est ex natura seminis fatendum est’, Melanchthon, De Anima, cols 11–12. 69 ‘Sed haec sententia recepta est. In homine esse animam unam, videlicet spiraculum illud, simul vehens lucem divinam, et adferens vitam partibus omnibus congruentem. Non pugno de hac sententia, nec tamen absurdam esse iudico opinionem supra recitatam, eorum, qui dicunt, animam sentientem, et vegetatricem esse vel ȡțȊȜȓȗ [sic, for ȔțȊȜȓȗ] vel ȏ´ȗȎȏȕȏȡȏȓ´Ȋȝ, vel animas distinctas ab illo spiraculo, in quo est intelligentia et electio’, Melanchthon, De Anima, col. 17. 70 Melanchthon, De Anima, cols 50, 104–5, 107–8.

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whether there were two souls in the human being, one contributed by the parents, the other from God, both his attention to the Franciscan Ockham and his straightforward treatment of seed and hereditary characteristics strongly implied that the sensitive soul was incorporated into the intellective soul rather than being corrupted by it. However, English Protestant treatments of the soul in the vernacular very often preferred a Thomist simplicity to the complexities teased out by Melanchthon, despite the difficulties this raised in giving a coherent account of heredity. Two Protestant treatises are relevant here: the section on the soul contained in Lodowick Bryskett’s Discourse of Civill Life, printed in London in 1606 but composed in Ireland in the 1580s; and Sir John Davies’s long didactic poem Nosce Teipsum, printed in 1599 but circulated in manuscript among the English elite for some years before then. Both Bryskett and Davies belonged to the new Protestant elite in Ireland. Bryskett, who had studied at Trinity College, Cambridge without graduating, was clerk to the Irish Council and the Council of Munster during the 1580s, while Davies, who had spent some time at Queens College, Oxford, served as Irish Solicitor-General between 1603 and 1606, and then as Attorney-General between 1606 and 1619. Bryskett’s elegant and comprehensive dialogue on ethics, which included John Long, Protestant archbishop of Armagh, and the poet Edmund Spenser among its disputants, included a sophisticated treatment of both the parts and the immortality of the soul. Davies’s Nosce Teipsum, the centrepiece of which was a defence of the soul’s immortality, was itself part of a general campaign in courtly accomplishment which saw this younger son of a tanner become Chief Justice of the King’s Bench in England.71 Bryskett’s dialogue was divided into three parts, corresponding to the three days of disputation, the three stages of life (childhood, adolescence, and adulthood), and the three parts of the soul (vegetative, sensitive, and intellective). The ethical questions debated developed in complexity, until on the last day Bryskett and his friends tackled the problems of free will and the immortality of the soul, but not before begging the archbishop’s permission to trespass on theological ground.72 Just as in Cicero’s dialogues, the dominant 71 R. A. McCabe, ‘Bryskett, Ludowick [Lewis] (c. 1546–1609x12), administrator and writer’, in ODNB, vol. 8, pp. 430–1; Hans Pawlisch, Sir John Davies and the Conquest of Ireland: A Study in Legal Imperialism (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 15–33. 72 Bryskett, A Discourse of Civill Life, pp. 167–8.

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voice was that of Bryskett himself, but, again like Cicero, Bryskett lent his interlocutors considerable personality. Earlier exchanges in the dialogue on relatively uncontroversial topics such as the nature of virtue had taken place between Bryskett and the lawyer Sir Robert Dillon or the soldiers Captain Thomas Norris and Captain Christopher Carlisle. However, Bryskett’s thoughts on the soul were laid out in conversation with the character early on identified as a man more learned than Bryskett himself: Edmund Spenser.73 In the soul debate, the Spenser character played devil’s advocate, arguing that the soul’s mortality was suggested by its apparent corruptibility, capacity to suffer, lack of memory after death, and other characteristics.74 Particularly important here is Spenser’s suggestion that Aristotle meant that there were two souls in each human, one sensitive and mortal, the other intellective and immortal. Bryskett reacted violently against Spenser’s argument, branding it ‘manifest heresie as well in Philosophie as in Christianitie’ (Melanchthon and the Coimbra Jesuits would have disagreed). Bryskett insisted that Aristotle meant that the vegetative and sensitive souls were contained in the intellective just as two right-angled triangles were contained in a square, and also alluded to what he thought was St Augustine’s condemnation of the two-soul idea.75 Bryskett argued, just as Medus and the other Thomists did, that there was no plurality of forms and that the ‘Intellectiue soule . . . is the onely and true forme of man.’76 This might still leave open the possibility that the vegetative and sensitive souls were drawn into the intellective soul and not destroyed by it, as a strict Thomist would allege. Not that Bryskett seemed particularly interested in leaving this possibility open. The intellective soul, he wrote, was simple and divine, ‘not drawne from any power of matter, but infused into us from abroade, not ingendred by seede’.77 When the question of heredity did arise directly in the dialogue (a Mr Dormer, queen’s solicitor, asked about wicked children born of good parents), Bryskett addressed himself firmly to the importance of education and good companions. Even baleful astral influence, Bryskett argued, could be overcome just as a man temperamentally inclined to lust or greed might overcome those natural inclinations also through the exercise of free will.78 73 74 75 76 77 78

Ibid., pp. 26–8, 278. Ibid., pp. 271–6. Ibid., p. 275. Ibid., p. 276. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 134–5, 171–2.

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Davies’s Nosce Teipsum, though it apparently won the approval of King James I and VI himself, was a somewhat less sophisticated production than Bryskett’s Discourse, to the extent that Davies might have intended it to be taught in grammar schools. Davies’s poem was also more purely Thomist. The future Irish Attorney-General was very clear that there was one intellective soul which possessed vegetative and sensitive powers, ‘not three Soules, but one’.79 Davies also explicitly rejected the plurality of forms, writing ‘No bodie can at once two formes admit / Except the one the other do deface’, which meant that the existing sensitive and vegetative souls were corrupted when God infused the intellective soul.80 In all this, Davies showed no interest in secular, biological heredity whatsoever. In contrast, Davies was very interested in the problem of the origin of the soul. Was the intellective soul carried by the parents’ seed into the foetus, or was the intellective soul infused directly into the foetus by God? The former position, known as traducianism, had the advantage of explaining the transmission of original sin from Adam to his descendants, but Davies firmly rejected it.The soul (and Davies did not distinguish between different kinds of souls here) was infused directly into each person by God.81 Davies noted that some Church Fathers had employed traducianism to explain original sin, ‘the sinne of kind’, but frankly labelled this position erroneous.82 If the human soul was traduced from the parents, ‘if soules do other soules beget’, then the soul is clearly a material thing, subject to change, motion, and corruption, and thus mortal.83 Davies insisted that the immortality of the soul had to be safeguarded at all costs; no other position which brought the central truth of immortality into question could be permitted.The future Attorney-General preferred to explain original sin through a civic analogy. Human positive law, which was rooted in God’s and nature’s law, could take 10,000 men to be one corporation, not only jointly responsible for all their decisions, but binding their descendants to those decisions also; so Adam and all his heirs were one: ‘his forfeitures are theirs, / And unto them are his advancements given’.84 Davies’s rejection of traducianism 79 Sir John Davies, Nosce Teipsum. This Oracle Expounded in Two Elegies. 1. Of Humane Knowledge. 2. Of the Soule of Man, and the Immortalie thereof (London, 1599), p. 53. 80 Ibid., p. 23. 81 Ibid., pp. 25, 27. 82 Ibid., p. 27. 83 Ibid., p. 30. 84 Ibid., p. 34.

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was normal and orthodox: although the doctrine provided a simple explanation of the transmission of original sin, Aquinas, Scotus, Melanchthon, and indeed Bryskett all shunned it as bringing into question the immortality of the soul.85 The only prominent exception to this orthodoxy was a traducianist tradition among Lutheran theologians in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries at Strasbourg and Wittenberg.86 Davies mentioned that some Church Fathers had favoured traducianism; these were Tertullian and St Augustine of Hippo. During the second century, Tertullian had taught that the human soul had the properties of matter, and was carried in the father’s seed into the mother’s body, which was how Adam’s sin was transmitted to all humanity. It does not seem to have occurred to Tertullian that this threatened the immortality of the soul, but as he ended his days as a Montanist heretic he was not a central figure in later tradition.87 Augustine in contrast was one of the greatest Christian theologians, and his inability to reconcile his doctrine of original sin with some coherent account of the soul’s origin left a permanent confusion at the heart of Christian theology, the reverberations of which were felt even in seventeenth-century Ireland. The baptism of infants was a widespread Christian practice in Augustine’s fourth-century world, and could only be logical if those infants carried some stain of sin with them into this world. Augustine identified this sin which marked even the new-born with that innate, disobedient law which St Paul felt in his body warring against the law of his mind, and with concupiscence, sexual desire, the very type of all sin.88 Augustine’s doctrine of original sin thus implied a materialistic understanding of the soul which he in fact rejected. The bishop of Hippo coped with 85 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, qu. 118, art. 2; Aquinas, Prima Partem, in Opera Omnia, tom. 10, fols 359v–60v; Scotus, Opus Oxoniense, 3, d. 2, qu. 3, n. 5; 4, d. 44, qu. I, n. 4; Scotus, Opera Omnia, ed. Wadding, vol. 7, p. 86; vol. 10, p. 98; Melanchthon, De Anima, cols 17–18; Bryskett, Discourse of Civill Life, pp. 126, 128–9, 276. 86 Emily Michael, ‘Daniel Sennert on matter and form: at the juncture of the old and new’, Early Science and Medicine, 2 (1997), 272–99, at 285–6, 295–6; Emily Michael, ‘Renaissance theories of body, soul and mind’, in J. Wright and P. Potter (eds), Psyche and Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the MindBody Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment (Oxford, 2000), pp. 147–72. 87 F. R. Tennant, The Sources of the Doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin (Cambridge, 1903), pp. 328–36. 88 Romans 7:23; N. P. Williams, The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin: An Historical and Critical Study (London, 1927), pp. 317– 91; J. J. O’Donnell, Augustine: A New Biography (New York, 2005), pp. 295–300.

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this self contradiction by refusing to commit himself to a single explanation of how original sin was transmitted from Adam to all humankind. Augustine’s overall theology of human depravity and utter dependence on God’s saving grace, a theology which required a strong notion of heredity and was careless of the consequent threat to the immortality of the soul, underwent a radical revival in the Low Countries and France during the seventeenth century, and Irishmen played a central role in that revival. The Leuven-based theologian who gave this revival its name, Cornelius Jansen, bishop of Ypres, published his massive summary of Augustine’s doctrines, the Augustinus, in 1640. But Irishmen like Peter Lombard, archbishop of Armagh, and the Franciscan Florence Conry, archbishop of Tuam, were contributing directly to the Augustinian ethos at Leuven from as early as the 1590s.89 Conry in particular promoted a hard, pure Augustinianism in matters of original sin, grace, and salvation over what he described as the contemptible Aristotelian evasions of the scholastic theologians.90 Conry’s popular, Irishlanguage exposition of Augustinianism, Sgáthán an Chrábhaidh (Mirror of Piety), was printed in 1616; in 1619 Conry attempted to reconcile his Franciscan allegiances with Augustine’s doctrine of original sin in the Tractatus de Augustini Sensu circa Beatae Mariae Virginis Conceptionem (Treatment of Augustine’s Meaning in Respect to the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary).91 Conry organised the foundation of the Franciscan college St Anthony’s at Leuven in 1607, saw to it that those who taught there shared his theological point of view, and in the 1610s and 1620s was in contact with Jansen.92 Jansen encouraged Conry to have his work on the fate of infants who died unbaptised, the De Statu Parvulorum, printed in 89 Thomas O’Connor, Irish Jansenists 1600–70: Religion and Politics in Flanders, France, Ireland and Rome (Dublin, 2008), pp. 56–73. 90 Florence Conry, Tractatus de Statu Parvulorum sine Baptismo Decedentium ex hac Vita Secundùm Sensum B. Augustini, appended to Cornelius Jansen, Augustinus, seu Doctrina Sancti Augustini . . . accessit huic editioni Tractatus F. Florentij Conrij Archiepiscopi Thuamensis de Statu Parvulorum sine Baptismo Decedentium iuxta Sensum B. Augustini (3 vols in 1, Rouen, 1643), vol. 3, p. 31. 91 Florence Conry, Desiderius otherwise called Sgáthán an Chrábhaidh, ed. T. F. O’Rahilly (Dublin, 1975); Florence Conry, Tractatus de Augustini Sensu circa Beatae Mariae Virginis Conceptionem (Antwerp, 1619); C. Heaney, The Theology of Florence Conry, O.F.M. (1560–1629) (Drogheda, 1935), pp. 40–1. 92 Benjamin Hazard, Faith and Patronage: The Political Career of Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire c. 1560–1629 (Dublin, 2010), pp. 50–4; O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, pp. 65, 71.

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1624; excerpts had been read to the St Anthony’s students at mealtimes for some time before. Conry’s defence of the doctrine that caused Augustine’s enemies to label him the parvulorum tortor, torturer of infants, was reprinted independently twice more, and then bound into the editions of Jansen’s Augustinus printed at Rouen in 1646 and 1652.93 The index to the Augustinus had been made up by another Irish Leuven theologian and unambiguous Jansenist, John Sinnich. The secular priest John Callaghan served as chaplain to Donough MacCarthy, Viscount Muskerry, in the 1640s and implemented a Jansenist pastoral programme near Paris in the 1650s. The Jansenist former secretary of the Catholic Confederation, Richard Bellings, both translated Jansenist pastoral material into English, and wrote a massive English-language history of the confederation’s war, which was pervaded by a fiercely Augustinian political vision.94 The main purpose of Jansen’s Augustinus was to defend Augustine’s theology of salvation, and this involved defending a strong doctrine of human heredity. The spirit of Jansen’s argument is encapsulated in his statement that difficulties in understanding the origin of the soul should not deter Catholic theologians from defending the judgement of the greatest of all theologians, Augustine.95 Augustine clearly meant, Jansen insisted, that original sin was transmitted from Adam to his posterity by concupiscence, unruly sexual desire: concupiscence was both the mark of guilt for our ancestor’s sin, and the inclination to sin itself. Jansen implied that recent Jesuit theologians like Robert Bellarmine and Gabriel Vásquez had seized on Augustine’s uncertainty about the biological means of transmission to discredit his doctrine of original sin overall.96 Like Augustine, Jansen professed himself uncertain about the origin of the human soul, whether it was created from new by God for each human being, or traduced from the first parent, but insisted that heredity was such an ordinary aspect of human life that we should not be surprised that original sin was transmitted somehow from Adam to us. Concupiscence, Jansen wrote, was like 93 Conry, Tractatus de Statu Parvulorum, p. 13. 94 O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, pp. 173–6, 196–217, 259–61, 318, 348; Ian Campbell, ‘Power after Machiavelli: Richard Bellings, reason of state, and Jansenism in seventeenth-century Ireland’, in Anthony McElligott et al. (eds), Power and History from Medieval Ireland to the Post-Modern World, Historical Studies XXVII (Dublin, 2011), pp. 45–62. 95 Jansen, Augustinus, vol. 2, bk 1, chap. 16, pp. 99–101. 96 Ibid., chap. 15, pp. 97–9.

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gout, a disease first contracted by an individual through greed and self-love, but then transmitted to that individual’s descendants as a corruption of their natures.97 Augustine’s fourth-century enemy Julian of Eclanum had objected to Augustine that the first sin was an accidental characteristic of Adam’s own soul, and that accidents did not wander away from their subjects and attach themselves to other subjects, such as the souls of Adam’s descendants.98 With much triumphant crowing, Jansen explained what he saw as Augustine’s conclusive response: the Ethiopian’s black skin was at first an acquired accidental characteristic; it was transmitted by ‘affection’ to his children and became a natural characteristic of Ethiopians. In the same way, Jansen went on, the concupiscence, an effrenitas or wildness of the sensitive appetite, acquired by Adam became innate in his descendants.99 If this concupiscence was not transmitted in the parent’s seed, then it was transmitted by the power of the parent’s imagination over the child in the womb.100 Jansen admitted there was a massive problem in positing original sin as merely concupiscence, a disordered passion. Augustine had written very clearly in Book XVIII of the De Civitate Dei (City of God) that it was not the passions dwelling in the sensitive soul which were good or bad, but the will itself, located in the intellective soul. If concupiscence was the means of transmission of original sin, and was also a disorder in the sensitive soul, how could it not be bad? Jansen had no solution to this problem, but stuck obstinately to his argument that original sin had to be akin to an hereditary illness.101 Above all, Jansen assured his reader that nothing could be more natural than that parents should propagate the ‘most powerful inclinations’ in their children.102 A similarly strong doctrine both of original sin and heredity was the bedrock of Conry’s De Statu Parvulorum of 1624. Conry refused to elaborate on the position that infants had contracted ‘the contagion of ancient death’ merely because they were 97 Ibid., chap. 6, pp. 86–7. 98 Elizabeth A. Clark, ‘Generation, degeneration, regeneration: original sin and the conception of Jesus in the Polemic between Augustine and Julian of Eclanum’, in Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee (eds), Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity through Early Modern Europe (Durham, N. C., 2001), pp. 17–40, at 27. 99 Jansen, Augustinus, vol. 2, bk 1, chap. 17, pp. 101–2. 100 Ibid., chap. 19, pp. 104–5. 101 Ibid., chap. 18, pp. 102–4. 102 ‘robustissimasque inclinationes’, ibid., chap. 22, p. 108.

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human.103 This was a position, he insisted, shared by all Catholics. Conry’s Peregrinus, composed about 1625 but published only after the archbishop’s death, was more explicit.104 This short introduction to Augustine’s vision of human nature contained a chapter on original sin, its transmission, and effects which shared Jansen’s emphasis on the transmission of original sin from Adam to all his offspring by concupiscence, so that the whole ‘damned lump’ of the human race plunge on into eternal perdition.105 One could not adhere to Augustine’s soteriology with the uncritical enthusiasm characteristic of all Jansenists without such a strong doctrine of heredity. Most sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholic and Protestant Christians then, were restrained from elaborating a consistent theory of heredity by the threat which any such theory must have posed to the immortality of the soul. Radical Augustinians took Augustine’s neglect of the immortality problem as carte blanche to promote the bishop of Hippo’s soteriology. It was easy to advance a strong doctrine of original sin and therefore a strong doctrine of heredity if one placed worries about the mortality of the soul to one side. Florence Conry was one such radical Augustinian in theology, employing a strong doctrine of heredity. Chapter 3 above argued also that Conry probably contributed to the composition of the 1619 ‘Breve Relation’, which argued that Irishmen of English descent possessed natural inclinations towards Englishness and consequently heresy. These natural inclinations were subconscious drives of the sensitive soul, they were not merely the result of habituation. Therefore it is possible that Conry’s theology inflected his anthropology on this point, and that accustomed to employ a strong doctrine of heredity in theology, he employed it too in his political writings. Chapter 2 cited Sir John Temple’s 1646 analysis of the barbarism of the Irish; Temple tentatively suggested that the Irish might have contracted that barbarism ‘by infusion from their ancestors’, clearly implying an hereditary process. Temple was a severe Calvinist, sharing with Conry a strong doctrine of original sin, and therefore of heredity.106 But the infrequency with which such charges of specifically secular, hereditary depravity were made, 103 ‘contagium mortis antiquae’, Conry, Tractatus de Statu Parvulorum, p. 2. 104 Florence Conry, Peregrinus Jerichuntinus, hoc est, De Natura Humana (Paris, 1641). 105 ‘massa damnata’, ibid., p. 28. 106 Patrick Little, ‘The Irish “Independents” and Viscount Lisle’s Lieutenancy of Ireland’, Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 941–61.

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both among Catholics and Protestants, is a good index of the general reluctance of most members of the elite to interfere in the theologians’ aggressively policed province.107 Conclusion Christian Aristotelians possessed a very widely disseminated and systematic theory of human society, which rested on the distinction between political life and barbarism (described in Chapters 1 to 3 above). However, Chapters 4 and 5 have argued that they lacked any such strong theory of heredity. It seems not to have been possible to synthesise Aristotelian essentialism, Christian theology, and heredity in a way that gained the assent of a significant proportion of the elite, despite the interest of (for example) the European nobility in promoting such a strong theory of heredity. Writers on true nobility, genealogists, and doctors knew very well that whether or not virtues and vices could be transmitted from parents to children raised the question of the soul’s origin. However, if such educated laymen turned to Aquinas, Scotus, Melanchthon, or the relevant textbooks for guidance (as they almost certainly did) they would have found unresolved theological issues of the highest complexity and importance. When the immortality of the soul was at issue, only a fool would blunder into a theological debate uninvited. Perhaps that conclusion is too speculative; but the fact remains that no such strong theory of heredity existed in the places where one might expect it: treatises on nobility, on genealogy, on hereditary disease, on the human soul.

107 Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man:The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, 2nd edn, 1986), pp. 109–18; John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 8, 94–101.

6

Irish Enlightenment, human societies, and human bodies 

June 1641 saw the printing in Dublin of surely the strangest book ever dedicated to James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh. Written by two Dutch physicians, Arnold and Gerard Boate, the Philosophia Naturalis Reformata (Reformed Philosophy of Nature) claimed to be a complete refutation of Aristotelian philosophy.1 Certainly, the book’s main subject was a vigorous and lengthy attack on Aristotle’s hylomorphism: the doctrine that all physical objects are composed of matter and form. It was normal for orthodox Christians to argue, as seen above, that the human soul was the form of the human being, the body its matter. Thus, forms were not just the shapes or structures of things, but their very rationale. Now the Boate brothers argued, in a book dedicated to one of Europe’s best Protestant scholars, that Aristotle’s forms did not exist. Contemporaries back in Leiden wrote that they had demolished the doctrine.2 In 1624, the Parlement of Paris had forbidden the public defence of similar arguments against Aristotle’s doctrine of forms on pain of death and then banished those scholars who had wished to defend them from the city.3 That the Boates not only proceeded unmolested after the publication of their book, but prospered under the most radical of Protestant regimes in Ireland in the later 1640s and 1650s, is a mark 1 Gerard and Arnold Boate, Philosophia Naturalis Reformata: Id est, Philosophiae Aristotelicae Accurata Examinatio, ac Solida Confutatio et Novae ac Verioris Introductio (Dublin, 1641). 2 J. A. van Ruler, The Crisis of Causality:Voetius and Descartes on God, Nature, and Change (Leiden, 1995), p. 199. 3 Roger Ariew and Marjorie Greene, ‘The Cartesian destiny of form and matter’, Early Science and Medicine, 2 (1997), 300–25.

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of the growing dissatisfaction with Aristotelian science among Europe’s learned elite.4 Maintaining one’s orthodoxy while discarding a philosophical system densely interwoven with all contemporary Christianity was difficult – and certainly the cause of much heartache to sincere, Protestant new scientists like Robert Boyle, son of the first earl of Cork.5 Whether the Boate brothers were as concerned by this problem is harder to judge. Apart from God, they wrote, all substances were bodies. The human intellective soul, which the brothers preferred to call the mind, was a body composed of materia (matter) and natura (nature). By natura the brothers meant both the proportion of elements in matter and their conformation, shape, structure.6 Forms existed, they argued, only as shape or structure, and matter could certainly exist without form.This did not raise any theological difficulties, they continued, because souls were not forms. It is hard to see how a material soul could be immortal, but on this the Boates were silent. They noted only that the attempted proof of the soul’s immortality by the Aristotelian Julius Caesar Scaliger was imprudent and that Plato’s argument on the same subject was not well proven; both rested on a strong doctrine of form.7 So much might go unremarked, were it not for the Boate brothers’ ambiguous handling of the Roman Epicurean Lucretius. Lucretius’s didactic poem De Rerum Natura explained the origin of the world by the random collision of atoms moving in a void. The Roman taught that everything was material, Gods did not intervene in human life, and the human soul died with the body. Christians commonly regarded this Epicureanism as synonymous with atheism.8 The Boates dismissed the notion that the world arose spontaneously without a divine creator as a ‘foul delirium’, and invoked a number of other pre-Aristotelian philosophers who had posited a divine first cause as counterweight.9 But they also carefully 4 T. C. Barnard, ‘The Hartlib circle and the origins of the Dublin Philosophical Society’, Irish Historical Studies, 19 (1974), 56–71. 5 J. W. Wojcik, Robert Boyle and the Limits of Reason (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 1–10. 6 Gerard and Arnold Boate, Philosophia Naturalis Reformata, pp. 2, 262, 287, 289. 7 Ibid., pp. 69–71, 95, 184–5, 277, 342–7. 8 B. P. Copenhaver and C. B. Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford, 1992), pp. 198–9, 258–9. 9 ‘foedissimum delirium’, Gerard and Arnold Boate, Philosophia Naturalis Reformata, p. 315.

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explained Lucretius’s doctrine that there were no final causes. A final cause was the purpose for which a thing existed, as the grass grows to provide sustenance for cattle: the doctrine implied God’s providential ordering of the world. At this point, section five of the book’s first half, the Boates labelled Lucretius’s rejection of final causes an error. But then in section five of the book’s second half, the Boates argued that there was only one cause, the efficient cause or maker of a thing, and claimed Plato as an ally. The final cause had disappeared.10 Moreover, the Boates quoted Lucretius in support of their argument that the relationship of soul to body was not that of form to matter, because the body did not immediately disintegrate at the moment of death. In the English translation of the De Rerum Naturae which the Puritan intellectual Lucy Hutchinson composed during the 1650s, and then dedicated to Arthur Annesley, earl of Anglesey in 1675, the passage read: When quiet death Lays men to sleepe, in whose departing breath Both souls expire, tis not perceived that they Doe from the bodie aniething convey Of weight or forme, for death leaves all entire Except the quickening sence and vitall fire.11

Immediately after those lines, Lucretius went on to emphasise the material nature of the soul, its composition from ‘smallest seeds’ interwoven through the body’s veins, flesh, and sinews.12 It could be that these were matters the Boates had simply neglected to think through, but it is more likely that they wished to communicate their own doubts on these central matters of Christian doctrine to their more reflective readers. For both Jonathan Israel and John Robertson, the Enlightenment as it developed in the second half of the seventeenth century was a fundamentally anti-Aristotelian movement. Robertson has given first place in the composition of that anti-Aristotelianism to 10 Ibid., pp. 226–7, 352–9. 11 ‘Quod simul ac hominem lethi secua quies est / Indepta, atque animi natura animaeque recessit; / Nil ibi libatum de toto corpore cernas / Ad speciem, nihil ad pondus: mors omnia praestat, / Vitalem praeter sensum, calidumque vaporem’, ibid., p. 99; Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 3. 211–15; Hugh de Quehen (ed.), Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation of Lucretius: De Rerum Natura (London, 1996), p. 91. 12 ‘perparvis . . . seminibus’, Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 3. 216–17.

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Epicureanism.13 The anti-Aristotelianism of the early Enlightenment fundamentally changed the ways in which the European elite discussed both human societies and human bodies. This chapter will explore first the new anti-Aristotelian theories of human society employed by intellectuals outside the universities, especially Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius, and John Locke, and the ways in which these new theories were employed in Ireland by John Lynch, Roger Boyle, earl of Orrery, William King, later archbishop of Dublin, William Molyneux, and Sir William Petty. Hobbes, Grotius, and Locke all offered different variations on a new, materialist natural law, quite different to the Aristotelian natural law theories still being taught in the universities. Johann Gottfried von Herder’s theory of culture was developed in opposition to that materialist natural law tradition. Second, this chapter will examine the impact of the new Enlightenment science on contemporary understandings of human bodies. Sir William Petty and Carolus Linnaeus grappled with this problem independently of one another, but with comparable approaches and somewhat comparable conclusions. A brief conclusion will relate the anti-Aristotelianism of the early Enlightenment to the emergence of modern racial ideology. Irish Enlightenment and society Thomas Hobbes offered the most violently anti-Aristotelian of all the new theories of human society. Like the Boate brothers, Hobbes did not think that human reason could see final causes.14 Hobbes’s reason could not see the purposes of things, and so could not pick out those elements of God’s eternal law which comprised natural law. In his Leviathan of 1651, he used the term ‘law of nature’ to mean no more than the sane rule of self-interest which forbid a human from doing anything destructive to his or her own life.15 Humans were frightened and violent. Because languages were just the arbitrary application of words to things and there was no connection between reason and speech (as in Aristotle or Cicero), two humans could not successfully reason, negotiate, and do politics 13 J. I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 14–22; John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 8–9, 32–3, 123–30. 14 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, of the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civill (London, 1651), part 1, chap. 5. 15 Hobbes, Leviathan, part 1, chap. 14.

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just among themselves. Security could only be found when a group of humans alienated their powers to a sovereign. Hobbes’s natural law commanded this alienation, and the sovereign’s word was positive law, without qualification or appeal.16 John Bramhall, Protestant bishop of Derry, was horrified by a version of these arguments which he had heard from Hobbes in person in Paris in 1645: What is become of the eternall law, or the rule of justice in God himself? What is become of the divine positive law recorded in holy Scriptures? What is become of the law of nature, imprinted naturally in the heart of every man, by the finger of God himself? What is become of the law of nations, that is, those principles which have been commonly and universally received as laws, by all nations in all ages, or at least the most prudent, pious and civill nations? What is become of that Synteresis or noble light of the soul which God hath given mankind to preserve them from vices? Are they all gone, all vanished, and is no rule remaining but only the arbitrary edicts of a mortal Law-giver, who may command us to turn Turks or Pagans to morrow?17

Hobbes was indeed extremely antipathetic to the entire Aristotelian tradition.18 While he avoided mentioning Epicurus and Lucretius altogether, he was certainly in contact with Epicureans in Paris during the 1630s and 1640s, and numerous contemporaries understood his system to be an Epicurean one.19 Theories of natural law which appeared so violently antiChristian as that of Thomas Hobbes were never widely popular among the European elite; but anti-Aristotelian natural law systems which pushed Christianity gently to one side were widely employed, even in Ireland, from the mid-seventeenth century on. Hugo Grotius’s De Iure Belli ac Pacis (On the Right of War and Peace) was first printed in 1625: the Dutch humanist offered his readers a system of natural law which could be applied both among rival Christian confessions in Europe as well as among European 16 Hobbes, Leviathan, part 1, chap. 4, chap. 14; part 2, chaps 17–18. 17 John Bramhall, Castigations of Mr. Hobbes his last Animadversions, in the case concerning Liberty and Universal Necessity (London, 1658), pp. 201–2. 18 Hobbes, Leviathan, part 4, chaps 46–7. 19 Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, pp. 213–4; Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the European republic of letters’, in Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), pp. 457–545, at 497–500.

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and extra-European peoples.20 With this aim in mind, Grotius did not derive his natural law from a human reason made by God and so apt to discern God’s ends for natural things; such matters were subject to inter-confessional and inter-religious dispute. Grotius also wished to refute the pagan sceptics who argued that there was no right or wrong, just strong opinion.21 The Dutch humanist built his system of natural law on the right of self-defence; even the most primitive or sceptical persons would have to admit that it was correct to defend oneself and one’s family. And if one infringed the right of another, this clearly undermined one’s own right; so all law was derived from this most basic common right.22 Grotius added that this right would have to be admitted even if God did not exist.23 Moreover, Grotius denied that the Ten Commandments were a succinct statement of natural law: a clear sign that this was not a typical Christian treatment of the subject.24 Nevertheless, conservative Catholic and Protestant Irishmen openly employed Grotius’s new theory of natural law. John Lynch, the leading Irish Catholic intellectual of the later seventeenth century, was closely associated with the Galway confederates of the 1640s, had opposed the papal nuncio in 1648, and was a confirmed Stuart royalist. In the 1660s then, Lynch needed to fend off both the Catholic monarchomachs who opposed Stuart monarchy, and the Protestant members of the Irish parliament who wished to dismantle the Catholic elite. Drawing on the French theorist Jean Bodin and James I’s Solicitor-General for Ireland, Sir John Davies, Lynch argued that unless the king held the decisive attributes of sovereignty the state was in fact a democracy; the idea that a state could exist in which aristocracy and monarchy shared sovereignty was a fantasy. This absolutist approach eliminated the Protestant Commons and Lords from consideration.25 Lynch drew on Grotius’s scheme of law to reinforce Bodin, and to argue that even though a kingdom might have been invaded unjustly, one could acquire a just 20 I have used Hugo Grotius, De Iure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres (Amsterdam, 1631); Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, ed. Richard Tuck (3 vols, Indianapolis, 2005); Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 154–201. 21 Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, vol. 1, preliminary discourse, sec. 5, p. 79. 22 Ibid., sec. 8–9, 19, pp. 85–7, 94–5. 23 Ibid., sec. 11, p. 89. 24 Ibid., vol. 1, bk 1, chap. 1, sec. 26–7, pp. 166–79. 25 Ian Campbell, ‘Aristotelian ancient constitution and anti-Aristotelian sovereignty in Stuart Ireland’, Historical Journal, 53 (2010), 1–19.

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right to it by prescription over time.26 In this way Lynch neutralised the arguments of those Catholic radicals who inferred the injustice of all English government in Ireland from the injustice of Laudabiliter. Moreover, Lynch was prepared to use Grotius for quite strange purposes. Lynch argued, for example, that the papal nuncio’s excommunication of the government of the Catholic Confederation in 1648 constituted an act of war, and that it would have been just to kill him despite his status as an ambassador.27 This argument appeared in a work addressed to the congregation De Propaganda Fide in Rome, and although Lynch was clearly paraphrasing Grotius’s language, he did not name his source. Irish Protestants were employing Grotius at about the same time: the arguments which Roger Boyle, earl of Orrery, delivered before Charles II in 1660 drew on Grotius as support for the argument that the 1649 peace concluded between King Charles I and his Irish Catholic subjects constituted abdication, and as such was unlawful and of no effect.28 Then during the war of 1689–91, when Protestant Ireland dispensed with the Stuarts permanently, Grotius again served as a magazine of arguments. The most systematic defence of the Irish Protestants’ war against King James II was William King’s State of the Protestants of Ireland Under the Late King James’s Government. While King did eventually ascribe the successful intervention of the new King William III in Ireland to God’s providence, his book began with an argument quoted from Grotius’s De Iure Belli ac Pacis with the Latin and English printed in parallel: that a king who set out to destroy ‘one main part’ of his people should be judged as having abdicated their government.29 Charles Leslie, an Irish Protestant clergyman who continued to recognise James II’s right to the three kingdoms and refused the oath of allegiance to William III, interrogated King’s use of Grotius in some detail, accusing his 26 John Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, ed. Matthew Kelly (3 vols, Dublin, 1848–52), vol. 1, p. 27, vol. 2, pp. 492–3, 524–5, 526–7,vol. 3, pp. 48–53, 68–9, 140–1, 292–3, 334–5. 27 John Lynch (Eudoxius Alithinologus), Alithinologia sive Veridica Responsio ad Invectam Mendaciis ([St Malo], 1664), p. 133; Grotius, De Iure Belli ac Pacis, bk 2, chap. 18, sec. 7, p. 275; Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, vol. 2, p. 914. 28 British Library, London, Add. MS 4781, ‘Considerations upon the Articles of Peace, made the 17th of January 1648’, fols. 248r–267r, at 265r–v. 29 [William King], The State of the Protestants of Ireland under the Late King James’s Government (London, 1691), pp. 1–2, 225; Grotius, De Iure Belli ac Pacis, bk 1, chap. 4, sec. 11, p. 85; Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, vol. 1, pp. 375–6.

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opponent of selective quotation as well as following mere material advantage. But even Leslie never insinuated that there was anything unorthodox about the Dutch jurist.30 It is true that adopting individual arguments from an author does not imply a total adherence to that author’s views; nevertheless Lynch, Orrery, King, and Leslie felt Grotius was respectable enough to discuss openly. None of these churchmen and noblemen thought that of Hobbes. Irish Protestants also employed ways of speaking about human societies more unambiguously enlightened. The young William Molyneux enjoyed an education no different in structure to that of his fellow Dubliner Richard Stanihurst one hundred years before. Molyneux probably attended the grammar school attached to St Patrick’s Cathedral, managed to achieve his BA at Trinity College Dublin in three years, and then spent the late 1670s at Middle Temple in London. The difference was that Molyneux regarded Trinity’s Aristotelian curriculum as an utter waste of effort: he spent as much time as possible reading René Descartes, Francis Bacon, the French Epicurean Pierre Gassendi, and (then or later) Thomas Hobbes. The Dubliner had his translation of Descartes’s Meditations Métaphysiques and Hobbes’s reply printed in 1680. Molyneux openly recommended Hobbes’s De Corpore and De Homine to his readers, and attacked Aristotelianism vigorously in his work on optics, though he seems to have been reluctant to dispense with final causes entirely. 31 Molyneux’s reading also made him a confirmed partisan and friend of John Locke, the English philosopher who did most to make Hobbes’s materialist understanding of human societies respectable in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.32 Locke, as an undergraduate and young don at Christ Church, Oxford in the 1650s and 1660s, felt just as much frustration at the Aristotelian curriculum as Molyneux would later in Dublin.33 In the later 1660s Locke taught moral philosophy at Christ Church, and a set of disputations by Locke survives from that time in which he rejected a number of traditional positions on the origins of natural 30 [Charles Leslie], An Answer to a Book, Intituled, the State of the Protestants in Ireland (London, 1692), pp. 3, 9, 10, 29, 30, 57, 63–5, 175–6; Ian McBride, Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (Dublin, 2009), pp. 118, 296. 31 William Molyneux, Six Metaphysical Meditations (London, 1680), p. 114; Molyneux, Sciothericum Telescopicum (Dublin, 1686), epistle dedicatory; Molyneux, Dioptrica Nova (London, 1692), pp. 195–6. 32 J. G. Simms, William Molyneux of Dublin, 1656–1776 (Dublin, 1982), pp. 18–20. 33 Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (London, 1957), pp. 38–40.

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law.34 These speculations became directly relevant as Locke joined the household of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Ashley and later earl of Shaftesbury, in 1667; during the 1680s Locke assisted Shaftesbury in his attempts to prevent a Catholic succession, and the philosopher was implicated in anti-Stuart conspiracy after Shaftesbury’s death in 1683. It was during the 1680s that Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Government, eventually printed in 1689. That the Two Treatises were a manifesto for anti-Stuart revolution, and were indeed composed as an antidote to absolute monarchy everywhere is quite clear. But historians disagree on whether Locke abandoned the old natural law and embraced the new materialist natural law.35 When Locke’s major philosophical work, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding denied the presence of the most basic principles in the human mind at birth, and yet in the Two Treatises Locke wrote that the natural law was ‘writ in the hearts of all mankind’, even Locke’s own friends were suspicious.36 The simplest interpretation of Locke’s arguments is this. All human beings recognised that they should preserve their own lives and also punish murderers with death; the latter provision being derived from the first. Locke called this natural law, and added, sincerely or not, that all men also acknowledged themselves obliged to God to respect this natural law. Nevertheless, this natural law did not require human beings to see into God’s purposes or participate in God’s eternal law in any way, unlike Bishop Bramhall’s natural law. Private property also emerged from the imperative to preserve oneself, and so was another part of Locke’s natural law.37 When humans left the inconvenient state of nature and came together into a society, they gave the power of making laws and the power of punishment to the government for the common good. But the law34 John Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. Wolfgang von Leyden (Oxford, 1954); Leo Strauss, ‘John Locke and natural law’, American Political Science Review, 52 (1958), 490–501. 35 Paul Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (3 vols, Chapel Hill, 2nd edn, 1994), vol. 2, pp. 62–85, 217–306; John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 187–199. 36 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 3rd edn, 1988), pp. 79–82; treatise 2, sec. 11; John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), bk 1, chap. 4, sec. 17, p. 95; Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature , pp. 136–7; Daniel Carey, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 51–68. 37 Locke, Two Treatises, treatise 2, secs 4–13, 26–30.

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making or legislative power and the punitive or executive power had to be kept separate, so that the executive power was always subject to the legislative power. In England, the executive was the king and the legislative was parliament. If the two powers were permitted to coalesce the result was an absolute monarch who both made law and punished, and so was not subject to the law. Not being subject to the law, this absolute monarch was no longer a member of the same society as his or her subjects; rather he or she was in a state of nature relative to them just as to the rest of humankind.38 So a Stuart king, then, who made himself absolute and above the laws abdicated from the three kingdoms and left his subjects free to arrange another executive. Many well-informed contemporaries regarded Locke’s natural law as fundamentally the same as Hobbes’s natural law.39 Locke tried to conceal his distance from the old natural law by quoting frequently and at length from Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.40 The Laws, composed in the 1590s, was a defence of the Elizabethan settlement mainly against Puritan opposition; and part of this defence involved shielding traditional Aristotelian doctrines of reason, politics, and natural law from radical Calvinist scepticism.41 Locke owned the 1676 edition of Hooker’s Laws, and this was the edition which Molyneux cited also.42 The Laws and the Two Treatises were fundamentally antipathetic. Like all Aristotelians, Hooker’s anthropology was teleological: human beings had an essence (the rational soul) which they would try to perfect. Humans, Hooker explained, sought a triple perfection. The first perfection lay simply in those material things necessary for life and satisfied people’s sensual nature; the second was an intellectual perfection, proper to people’s nature as rational animals; the third was a spiritual and divine perfection, which humans would aim at in this world but only attain in the next. Those who made material things their only target had no God but their belly.The second level of perfection was available in the political life which Aristotle had described; it was the 38 Locke, Two Treatises, treatise 2, secs 87–94. 39 Richard Tuck, ‘The “modern” theory of natural law’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 99–119; Robertson, Case for the Enlightenment, pp. 202, 237, 338. 40 Locke, Two Treatises, treatise 2, secs 15, 60, 61, 74, 90, 91, 94, 111, 134, 135, 136. 41 Richard Hooker, The Works of that Learned and Judicious Divine, Mr Richard Hooker, in Eight Books of Ecclesiastical Polity (London, 1676), preface, p. 60. 42 Locke, Two Treatises, ed. Laslett, pp. 56–7; Molyneux, The Case of Ireland’s Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated (Dublin, 1698), p. 151.

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target of those ‘who seek especially to excell in all such Knowledge and Vertue as doth most commend Men: To this branch belongeth the Law of Moral and Civil Perfection’.43 Hooker reinforced this point later: For of every Politick Society, that being true which Aristotle saith, namely, That the scope thereof is not simply to live, nor the duty so much to provide for the life, as for the means of living well: And that even as the soul is the worthier part of man, so human Societies are much more to care for that which tendeth properly to the souls estate, then for such temporal things which the life hath need of.44

And for Hooker, the highest perfection of all for human beings was unity with God. Locke quoted Hooker’s remarks on the first, material level of perfection (while carefully avoiding teleological language even there); he entirely omitted Hooker’s commitment to civil perfection, and also to divine perfection. Molyneux praised Locke’s Two Treatises highly, and followed in his steps exactly.45 In 1698, Molyneux composed The Case of Ireland’s Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated, in response to English attempts to regulate Irish woollen exports. Molyneux argued that only the Irish parliament could make law for Ireland, even if that meant no more than consenting to laws drafted in England. His arguments focused mainly on the minutiae of the reception of English law by the Irish parliament since the Middle Ages. No precedent, he wrote, had been established. But Molyneux also dealt with the argument from conquest, implied rather than clearly stated, which was that as England had conquered Ireland by God’s providence (perhaps in the twelfth century, perhaps later), so God must have intended England to rule Ireland thereafter.46 Certainly the argument from providential conquest was central to Sir John Temple’s often reprinted Irish Rebellion of 1646.47 If this was indeed the argument which Molyneux meant to answer, then Locke’s Two Treatises well suited his purposes. Humans joined together consensually to found societies or commonwealths for 43 44 45 46

Hooker, The Works, bk 1, sec. 11, p. 92. Ibid., bk 8, p. 439. Molyneux, The Case, pp. 26–7. J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 2nd edn, 1987), pp. 53–4, 148–50; Quentin Skinner, ‘History and ideology in the English Revolution’, Historical Journal, 8 (1965), 151–78. 47 Sir John Temple, The Irish Rebellion (London, 1646).

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their own ‘Peace, Tranquility and Ease’, Molyneux wrote, and laws which did not promote that common benefit would be void. ‘For to what end’, Molyneux asked, ‘do Men joyn in society, but to avoid hurt, and the Inconveniences of the State of Nature?’48 Hooker and other Christian Aristotelians would have answered that they also entered society for the ends of this worldly flourishing and nextworldly beatitude. When Molyneux mentioned the ‘laws of nature and reason’ it is clear that he meant self-preservation, the right to punish, the right to private property, and nothing more ambitious. Molyneux’s theory of human societies was firmly anti-Aristotelian, and neither was there any place for God’s providence; Molyneux even copied Locke’s device of quoting Hooker at length.49 And at first glance it would seem difficult to draw from Locke’s Two Treatises any theory of empire; as Molyneux wrote, each free society had the right to appoint its own government and rule itself: No one or more Men, can by Nature challenge an Right, Liberty or Freedom, or any Ease in his Property, Estate or Conscience, which all other Men have not an Equally Just Claim to. Is England a Free People? So ought France to be. Is Poland so? Turky likewise, and all the Eastern Dominions, ought to be so: And the same runs through-out the whole Race of Mankind.50

But omitted from all this were the Irish Catholics: Molyneux seems to have believed that as long as they chose to obey the pope they could not be regarded as free humans.51 These examples of the new natural law of the Enlightenment impinging on political discourse among Irishmen could easily be multiplied. Real ideological change from Aristotelian to Enlightenment ways of speaking about human societies began not when radicals declared that the old systems were to be discarded, but when conventional conservatives felt that the old natural law of the universities was no longer adequate. This late seventeenth-century change was not a sharp rupture between a eudaimonic, Aristotelian natural law tradition and a materialist Enlightenment one; rather the eudaimonic part of the old tradition atrophied and the materialist part developed.The Aristotelians held that humans came together to live, but stayed together to live well: Enlightenment natural law kept the first part of that movement and discarded the second. The 48 49 50 51

Molyneux, The Case, pp. 113–14. Ibid., pp. 151–3. Ibid., pp. 153–4. Ibid., pp. 26–7.

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phenomenon is well illustrated by Lynch, Locke, and Molyneux. Lynch saw nothing in Grotius he should be ashamed to employ, because he was used to traditional schemes of natural law in which material well-being played a prominent (though not dominant) role. Locke and Molyneux could use the Aristotelian Hooker to support their new materialist natural law because there was indeed a strong material element in the English Aristotelian’s theory of law. The modern concept of culture was developed as an alternative to this materialist natural law; and especially as an alternative to the variant of Enlightenment natural law theory known as stadialism. Eighteenth-century social theorists, who, like Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson, developed the new natural law tradition, argued that all societies progressed by similar stages from hunting to herding to farming to commercial life. All human societies could be assigned to one of those stages and on this basis contemporaries built both theories of progress and of empire.52 Johann Gottfried von Herder, writing in the 1770s and bitterly hostile both to European imperial projects and the new racism of his former teacher, Immanuel Kant, argued that each human society worth the name had its own animating spirit, that this spirit would be evident both in high art and in the sports of poor men, and that it was very likely that the values and ideals of one society would not be shared by another. Herder thus believed that humankind was divided not into civil and barbarous nations, or nations at different stages of material development, but into cultures.53 Nevertheless, Herder did not encapsulate his innovation in a single word. In his Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit of 1774, Herder wrote of each people having its own national manner of thought (Nationaldenkart), its own form of customary ethics (Sitten), of national character (Nationalcharakter); individual peoples 52 Istvan Hont, ‘The language of sociability and commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the theoretical foundations of the “Four-Stages Theory”’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 253–76; Knud Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 154–77; Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, 2005), pp. 25–58. 53 Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London, 1976); Steven Lestition, ‘Countering, transposing, or negating the Enlightenment? A response to Robert Norton’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 68 (2007), 659–76; Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler (eds), Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 93, Philadelphia, 2003).

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had their own forms of national happiness (Nationalglückseligkeit) arising from their own national inclinations (Neigungen) and individual processes of national development (Nationalbildung) – but behind all this, instantly familiar, is our modern concept of culture.54 Placing the vastly different cultures of Greenland and West Africa in the same fisher-folk category, or labelling both Bedouin and Peruvians shepherds, or Englishmen and Chinese merchants, Herder thought, obscured the most important truths about those societies.55 Asked if one could apply the same standard of happiness across cultures, and establish if, say, the Romans were happier than the Phoenicians, Herder responded: who can compare the different satisfaction of different senses in different worlds? – the shepherd and father of the Orient, the farmer and artist, the sailor, competitive runner, conqueror of the world – who can compare them? Nothing turns on the laurel wreath or on the sight of the blessed flock, on the merchant ship or the captured standard, but rather on the soul that needed that, strove for it, has now achieved that, and wanted to achieve nothing but that. Each nation has its centre of happiness in itself, like every sphere its centre of gravity!56

Herder insisted that German epic poetry would have more in common with German family life, German legislation, or German grammar, than it would with Hindu or Hebrew poetry, partly because all these German activities were animated by a German spirit just as Hindu or Hebrew practices were animated by their respective spirits also.57 Herder’s new way of speaking about the 54 J. G. Herder, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Bernard Suphan et al. (33 vols, Berlin 1877–1913; 3rd reprint, Hildesheim, 1994–95), vol. 5, pp. 501, 510, 518, 520; Raymond Geuss, ‘Kultur, Bildung, Geist’, in Geuss, Morality, Culture and History: Essays on German Philosophy (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 29–50. 55 J. G. Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, ed. F. E. Manuel (Chicago, 1968), p. 50; Herder, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 13, p. 310. 56 J. G. Herder, Philosophical Writings, ed. M. N. Forster (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 296–7; ‘wer kann die verschiedene Befriedigung verschiedner Sinne in verschiedenen Welten vergleichen? Den Hirten und Vater des Orients, den Ackermann und Künstler, den Schiffer, Wettläufer, Überwinder der Welt – wer vergleichen? Im Lorbeerkranze, oder am Anblicke der gesegneten Heerde, am Waarenschiffe und erbeuteten Feldzeichen liegt nights – aber an der Seele, die das brauchte, darnach strebte, das nun erreicht hat, und nichts anderes als das erreichen wollte – jede Nation hat ihren Mittelpunkt der Glückseligkeit in sich, wie jede kugel ihren Schwerpunkt!’ Herder, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 509. 57 Berlin, Vico and Herder, pp. 196–7.

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relationships between human societies was a powerful innovation. It appears to have first become prominent in Ireland in the early nineteenth century, as during the 1830s the Dublin University Magazine published a wealth of material (biographies, introductions, translations) on the German proto-Romantics and Romantics. The ideology of the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s, led by Thomas Davis, was densely Herderian.58 Irish Enlightenment and the body It is when one turns from eighteenth-century changes in ways of speaking about human societies to the changes in ways of speaking about human bodies that the symmetry of the argument maintained so far in this study begins to break down. It is quite clear that the Enlightenment did change the way that the European elite spoke about human bodies, but it does not seem that this change was important to Ireland. Africans were the primary objects of the Enlightenment’s new physical racism, a racism deeply intertwined with the transatlantic slave trade. Although the new physical racism certainly inflected popular insult among Europeans during the nineteenth century, it was not widely applied to the Irish or other Europeans with the institutionalised rigour characteristic of antiAfrican racism.59 Nevertheless, in charting the development of that new physical racism, a few remarks by Sir William Petty in an unfinished work of his called the Scale of Creatures, composed in Dublin between 1676 and 1678, are suggestive. Petty, educated at Caen, Amsterdam, Leiden, Utrecht, and Oxford, had acted as Hobbes’s amanuensis in Paris in 1646, and moved among radical scientists for the rest of his life. Petty first arrived in Ireland in 1652 as an army physician. Before long his talent, careerism, and determination to apply qualitative methods to the understanding of humanity earned him work for the Parliamentarian regime as a surveyor: it was under his Down Survey that over eight million acres were transferred from Catholics to new Protestant owners. By 1676 Petty was already a wealthy landowner and judge and registrar of the Admiralty Court in Dublin; it was after addressing the Royal College of Physicians in 58 H. F. Mulvey, Thomas Davis and Ireland: A Biographical Study (Washington, D. C., 2003), pp. 37–40. 59 Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford, 2000), pp. 49–54.

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Dublin in that year that he began work on his Scale of Creatures.60 The Scale’s fifth chapter, its appendix, and some additional pages are now held in the British Library and were printed in 1927; a copy consisting of five chapters and an appendix held at Yale University has now been edited by Rhodri Lewis.61 It would be easy to label Petty a Hobbesian. Human reason, for Petty, was very limited. It was a power of ratiocination alone, and could perceive neither form, final cause, nor essence.The latter point was of central importance to anthropology. Aristotelians held that matter was divided into essence and accidents; the essence of a thing made it what it was, whereas the accidents could be changed without changing the nature of the thing. This essentialism was vital to Aristotelian anthropology: the essence of man was his rational soul. A man’s physical appearance, skin colour, hair type, and so on, was a merely accidental quality. In fact, basic introductions to university philosophy, like Richard Stanihurst’s Harmonia, printed in 1570, often used the blackness of an Ethiopian’s skin as an example of an inseparable accidental characteristic.62 All early Enlightenment science was anti-essentialist: the most distinguished statement of the position was John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, printed in 1689, which argued not just that human reason could not perceive final causes, but that it could not perceive essences either.63 Similarly, Petty’s reason applied itself to number, weight, and measure only.64 He ignored natural law almost completely: positive law was simply the agreement of the people with their representatives (he leaned towards democracy), and the law of peoples was 60 Ted McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford, 2009), pp. 36–8, 95–103; Quentin Skinner, ‘Hobbes’s disciples in France and England’, in Skinner, Visions of Politics (3 vols, Cambridge, 2002), vol. 3, pp. 308–23, at 311, 318, 319–20, 323; Sir William Petty, The PettySouthwell Correspondence 1670–1687, ed. H. E. W. Petty-Fitzmaurice, marquis of Lansdowne (London, 1928), items 1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 13–16, 18, 19, 21– 4, 26–9, 34. 61 Sir William Petty, ‘The Scale of Creatures (1677)’ and ‘The Scale of Animals (a fragment)’, in The Petty Papers: Some Unpublished Writings of Sir William Petty, ed. H. E. W. Petty-Fitzmaurice, marquis of Lansdowne (2 vols, London, 1927), vol. 2, pp. 21–5, 25–34; Sir William Petty, William Petty on the Order of Nature: An Unpublished Manuscript Treatise, ed. Rhodri Lewis (Tempe, Arizona, 2012). 62 Richard Stanihurst, Harmonia seu Catena Dialectica in Porphyrianos Institutiones (London, 1570), p. 156. 63 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, pp. 417–18. 64 Sir William Petty, Political Arithmetick (London, 1690), preface.

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what states agreed it to be.65 His manuscripts contain schemes of politics, ethics, and empire which accept completely an Epicurean or Hobbesian foundation.66 Nevertheless, despite contemporary accusations of Epicurean atheism, Petty’s Christianity seems to have been sincere, and he was particularly firm on the immortality of the soul.67 The tension between Petty’s new quantitative science and his religion is apparent in what survives of his Scale of Creatures. Petty meant this work to confute the ‘Libertine Scepticks’, uncertain about God’s existence, by illustrating the gradations between the lowest animates and humanity, and inferring from this another scale between humanity and God.68 God himself was not at all accessible to human ratiocination, so Petty hoped to prove his existence from this process of inference.69 This project led Petty into grave difficulties. Man was said to be made in the image of God (Genesis 1: 6–7), which Aristotelians understood to mean God made humanity rational. This point must be emphasised. Petty’s contemporary, Sir Matthew Hale, had grave reservations about the old Aristotelianism, and especially about the distinction between matter and form. But Hale nevertheless maintained an essentialist anthropology: he insisted that man was made in the image of God with respect to his intellect and will (two of the components of reason along with memory). Hale’s understanding of natural law was consequently a traditional Christian Aristotelian one.70 Petty did not share this Aristotelianism with Hale, and in this Rhodri Lewis and Ted McCormick appear to have underestimated 65 Sir William Petty, ‘A dialogue between A and B’, in Petty Papers, vol. 1, pp. 152–62, at 155, 157, 159–60, 161; Petty, William Petty on the Order of Nature, p. 104. 66 Sir William Petty, ‘Of Civil & Spiritual Power’, in Petty Papers, vol. 1, pp. 134– 7; Petty, ‘On Hobbes’ theory of monarchy’, in Petty Papers, vol. 2, pp. 35–9; Petty, ‘Of Civility and a Gentleman’, in Petty Papers, vol. 2, pp. 186–9; David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 122–4, 151–2. 67 Petty, ‘A dialogue between A and B’, pp. 153–4; Petty, ‘The explication of 12 theological words’, in Petty Papers, vol. 1, pp. 162–6, at 163; McCormick, William Petty, pp. 224–5, 241–58. 68 Petty to Southwell, 30 October 1676, in Petty, Petty-Southwell Correspondence, pp. 6–7. 69 Petty, William Petty on the Order of Nature, pp. 95, 96. 70 Sir Matthew Hale, The Primitive Origination of Mankind, Considered and Examined According to the Light of Nature (London, 1677), pp. 9–10, 16, 24, 27–8, 49–50, 61, 64, 311–12, 318, 353.

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Petty’s radicalism.71 The Genesis text referred just to Christ’s incarnation, Petty wrote, insisting ‘we must by Image mean figure only’.72 Thus, the biblical text did not establish a relationship between divine and human reason. Petty’s downgrading of human reason eroded the distinction between human and animal. Elephants, apes, parrots, and bees all, according to Petty, possessed powers close to those of humans. Bees in particular impressed him. The art of government was man’s most considerable faculty and the same was visible in bees, so ‘I say that if what is reported concerning the policy and Government of bees be true . . . I say their souls seem as like the souls of men as their bodies are unlike’.73 Place on Petty’s scale of being was to be assigned only on the basis of concrete achievement, not on the basis of some unknowable potential or essence. While closing the distance between humans and animals, this increased the distance between Europeans and non-Europeans who lived primitive lives: I say that the Europeans do not only differ from the aforementioned affricans in Collour, which is as much as white differs from black, but also in their haire . . . thay differ also in the shape of their noses, lipps & cheek bones, as also in the very out line of their faces & the Mold of their sculls, Thay differ also in their Naturall Maners, & in the Internall qualityes of their Minds.74

Petty did not distinguish between essence and accident, rational soul and body. Petty’s new science could not allow the old argument that humankind had been made in the image of God, which meant that the essence of each human was reason. McCormick and Lewis were correct to argue that this is not a full-grown physical racism: Petty did not take the last step and state bluntly that Africans, Lapps, and other peoples were inferior to Europeans.75 Clearly though, aspects of these arguments alarmed Petty. He kept his friend Sir Robert Southwell informed of his progress on the Scale of Creatures between October 1676 and February 1679. In September 1677 he wrote that ‘There will be many things in it which the World cannot 71 Rhodri Lewis, ‘William Petty’s anthropology: religion, colonialism, and the problem of human diversity’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 74 (2011), 261–88; McCormick, William Petty, pp. 224–30. 72 Petty, William Petty on the Order of Nature, p. 98. 73 Ibid., pp. 117–21. 74 Ibid., pp. 124–5. 75 Lewis, ‘William Petty’s anthropology’; McCormick, William Petty, p. 229; M. T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia, 1964), pp. 419–22.

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beare, and for which I will suffer’, and in November 1677 he promised it would be an extraordinary work, but by February 1679 he seems to have decided not to have the Scale of Creatures printed and put it aside.76 The Swedish taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus faced the same problems as Petty, with the same tools, and did not shy away from the obvious solutions. Indeed Linnaeus and Petty had a great deal in common. Lisbet Koerner has argued that Linnaeus can be regarded as a cameralist; these were originally seventeenth-century German fiscal theoreticians employed as princely financial advisors, who meant to preserve their states by means of economic protectionism and technological innovation. Classical economists (like Adam Smith) advocated ‘one single, ungoverned, yet self-regulating global modernity’, whereas proto-Romantic and Romantic antimodernists (like Herder) ‘hoped for an infinitude of customgoverned, local, traditional communities’; in contrast the cameralists ‘strove for rationalistically governed autarkies’.77 Petty shared both Linnaeus’s object and many of his methods.78 Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, printed in a series of ever more elaborate editions between the 1730s and the 1750s was intended to serve the Swedish state and proved to be the crucial site for the elaboration of the new physical racism. In the 1758 edition, Linnaeus divided the human species into a number of races (European, American, Asian, African) on a clearly anti-Aristotelian basis.79 Linnaeus too believed that essences were unknowable, and the distinction between essence and accident useless. The introduction to his Genera Plantarum of 1737 has rightly been portrayed by Staffan Müller-Wille as an anti-essentialist’s manifesto, and Mary Winsor has insisted that most natural scientists between Linnaeus and Charles Darwin were anti-essentialist, this being the characteristic mode of the scientific revolution and Enlightenment.80 Linnaeus’s approach was what modern analysis has 76 Petty to Southwell, 29 September 1677, in Petty, Petty-Southwell Correspondence, pp. 36–7; Petty to Southwell, 18 November 1677, ibid., pp. 40–2; Petty to Southwell, February 1679, ibid., pp. 67–8. 77 Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), p. 1. 78 McCormick, William Petty, pp. 97, 145–6, 303. 79 Carolus Linnaeus, Systema Naturae per Regna Tria Naturae, Secundum Classes, Ordines, Genera, Species, cum Characteribus, Differentiis, Synonymis, Locis (2 vols, Stockholm, 10th edn, 1758), vol. 1, pp. 20–4; Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore, 1996), pp. 203–4. 80 Staffan Müller-Wille, ‘Collection and collation: theory and practice of Linnaean botany’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical

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labelled polytypic; that is, the practice of allowing a list or cluster of properties to count as a definition without insisting that any particular property be always present. So among the words defining the European, ‘white, sanguine, muscular’, none of those terms were essential – all together added up to a working definition. Similarly, in the definition of African, ‘black, phlegmatic . . . cunning, slothful, slovenly . . . ruled by caprice’, the physical description ‘black’ was placed among other physical, mental, and moral descriptors without any being regarded as essential.81 Again, the Aristotelian definition of man as a rational animal was entirely absent. Linnaeus teased out the implications of his anti-Aristotelianism in a series of long footnotes to his new human taxonomy. These footnotes were a series of little essays on different aspects of human life, physiological, pathological, moral, and political. Linnaeus addressed human political life in this way: In public affairs not right but error holds you, which puts the mask of custom on you without a struggle, nourishes, educates, sustains, controls you, according to how honourable, brave, wise, moral you are considered; since you are governed by opinion, you live according to custom, and not according to reason.82

All of Linnaeus’s remarks on man’s social, ethical, and political life were in this same vein, and most of them cited Roman Stoics like Seneca and Pliny the Elder.This Stoic tradition was anti-Aristotelian and anti-Ciceronian, highly sceptical about the value of political life, the conceptualisation of man as a political animal, and the primacy of reason in the human mind. In his main text, Linnaeus omitted to mention human reason; in his footnotes he challenged it directly. His main text undermined the Aristotelian tradition from without, with new Enlightenment method; his footnotes attacked the Aristotelian tradition from a position within traditional humanism. Linnaeus was thus a transitional figure in the development of a new Sciences, 38 (2007), 541–62; M. P. Windsor, ‘Non-essentialist methods in preDarwinian taxonomy’, Biology and Philosophy, 18 (2003), 387–400. I have consulted Carolus Linnaeus, Genera Plantarum Eorumque Characteres Naturales (Leiden, 1737), sig. **2r. 81 ‘albus, sanguineus, torosus’, ‘niger, phlegmaticus . . . Vafer, segnis, negligens . . . Regitur Arbitrio’, Linnaeus, Systema Naturae, vol. 1, pp. 20–4. 82 ‘Te recti loco tenere errorem publicum factum, qui te vix enixum consuetudinis larva induit, nutrit, educat, alit, regit, secundum quam honestus, fortis, sapiens, moratus, pius existimaris; Cum gubernatus Opinione vivas ad Consuetudinem, nec ad Rationem.’ Linnaeus, Systema Naturae, vol. 1, p. 21.

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European discourse of peoples in the eighteenth century, and he frankly and purposefully turned his back on the Aristotelian past. Key figures in the German and Scottish Enlightenments, like David Hume and Immanuel Kant, were anti-essentialists like Linnaeus, and racists like Linnaeus. There is now a substantial literature on Kant’s racism in particular.83 In his essay ‘Of National Characters’ of 1753–54, Hume went out of his way to insist on the inferiority of ‘Negroes’ to ‘whites’ which rested on an ‘original distinction’ made by nature. Hume argued that there was no evidence of skilful manufacture among them, no arts, no sciences; that even when transported as slaves to Europe or the Caribbean they showed no ability to learn above that of a parrot.84 Kant, in his Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime) of 1764, cited Hume approvingly on the inferiority of Africans and concluded ‘so fundamental is the difference between the two nations of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in colour’.85 Kant was deeply interested in both anthropology and physical geography (in which he included the study of humanity in the landscape) and offered seventy-two lecture courses on those subjects to his undergraduates at Königsberg between 1756 and his retirement in 1796, compared to only fifty-four on logic.86 Kant’s commitment to the separation of mankind into races and the superiority of Europeans to all others permeated these lectures. Kant’s Physische Geographie, prepared from the text of his undergraduate lectures, stated starkly: 83 Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 42–68. 84 David Hume, ‘Of national characters’, in Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis, revised edn, 1987), pp. 197–215, at 208; E. C. Eze, ‘Hume, race and human nature’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 61 (2000), 691–8. 85 ‘So wesentlich ist der Unterschied zwischen diesen zwei Menschengeschlechtern, und er scheint eben so groß in Unsehung der Gemüthsf ähigkeiten, als der Farbe nach zu sein’, Immanuel Kant, Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, ed. Preußishen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin, 1900–), vol. 2, p. 253; Immanuel Kant, ‘Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime (1764)’, tr. Paul Guyer, in Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Günter Zöller and R. B. Louden (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 18–62, at 59–60. 86 E. C. Eze, ‘The color of reason: the idea of “race” in Kant’s anthropology’, in Eze (ed.), Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader (Oxford, 1997), pp. 103–40.

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Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites. The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent. The Negroes are far beneath them and at the lowest point are a part of the American peoples.87

Furthermore, Kant advised his undergraduates to beat Moors and others from tropical or sub-tropical latitudes with split canes rather than rods, in order to prevent the blood suppurating under their especially thick skins.88 Herder had developed his new theory of human societies, his theory of culture, partly in opposition to his old teacher’s racism.89 Although there is no doubt that these innovations did become relevant to the uniquely unhappy relationship between European Christians and Jews, nevertheless Africans were the primary targets of this new Enlightenment racism. Over ten million Africans were shipped as slaves to the Americas before 1820, and over two million between 1820 and 1880.90 The racism which Americans of European descent such as Thomas Jefferson used to justify this massive enslavement was unquestionably identical to that of Hume and Kant. Jefferson’s racist Notes on the State of Virginia, drafted first in 1781, analysed African Americans on the basis of stadialist natural law theory and anti-essentialist physical racism.91 Nineteenthcentury justifications of slavery in the United States, such as those composed by James Henry Hammond in the 1840s and 1850s, replaced that Enlightenment stadialism with Herderian concepts of culture to construct ideologies which were widely employed well into the second half of the twentieth century as part of an apparatus of racist domination.92 Many scholars have assumed that the crucial movement in the development of physical racism should have been the invention of a 87 ‘Die Menschheit ist in ihrer größten Vollkommenheit in der Race der Weißen. Die gelben Indianer haben schon ein geringeres Talent. Die Neger sind weit tiefer, und am tieften steht ein Theil der amerikanischen Völkerschaften’, Kant, Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, vol. 9, p. 316. 88 Kant, Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, vol. 9, p. 313. 89 John Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago, 2002). 90 David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford, 2006), p. 80. 91 Thomas Jefferson, ‘Notes on the state of Virginia’ in Jefferson, Writings, ed. M. D. Peterson (New York, 1984), pp. 123–25. 92 Davis, Inhuman Bondage, pp. 188–91; D. G. Faust, A Sacred Circle:The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840–1860 (Baltimore, 1977), pp. 61–86, 112–31.

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strong doctrine of human heredity.93 This is a reasonable assumption: we have seen that although sixteenth- and seventeenth-century universities taught Ciceronian and Aristotelian theories of human society which were often employed as ideologies of domination, nevertheless authorities on nobility, genealogy, medicine, and theology could not develop a strong doctrine of heredity without also adopting unorthodox positions on the origin of the human soul. But the new scientists like Linnaeus did not underpin their racism with a strong doctrine of heredity: strong doctrines of heredity were not widely accepted until the end of the eighteenth century at the earliest.94 Rather Petty, Linnaeus and their Enlightened colleagues declined to inquire into the soul, essence, or human potential at all. The Enlightenment was overtly antiAristotelian; not overtly anti-Christian. As Alasdair MacIntyre put it, referring to Immanuel Kant: Reason for him, as much as for Hume, discerns no essential natures and no teleological features in the objective universe available for study by physics. Thus their disagreements on human nature coexist with striking and important agreements . . . All reject any teleological view of human nature, any view of man as having an essence which defines his true end.95

In judging peoples then, demonstrable achievement mattered: indemonstrable talk of essence or potential did not. And what one observed of the achievements of members of another race could be all too easily distorted by one’s need to dominate, enslave, or colonise them, as Timothy Sweet has observed of Jefferson’s allegedly empirical racism.96 It was in this respect that the decline of Aristotelian humanism, the Aristotelianism which animated ethnic discourse throughout the Spanish and British Atlantic worlds until the 1650s, and the rise of the new ideology of race were most closely related. 93 Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac and Joseph Ziegler, ‘Introduction’, in Eliav-Feldon, Isaac and Ziegler (eds), The Origins of Racism in the West (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 1–31, at 12; Lewis, ‘William Petty’s anthropology’. 94 Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinburger (eds), Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870 (Cambridge, Mass., 2007). 95 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London, 2nd edn, 1985), p. 54. 96 Timothy Sweet, ‘Jefferson, science, and the Enlightenment’, in Frank Shuffelton, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Jefferson (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 101–13.

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Conclusion This book has made a primary argument about Irish history and also raised a secondary question about the wider history of race. The primary argument is that elite discourse about peoples and their relationships in Ireland between about 1570 and 1660 or later was grounded firmly in Renaissance humanism. More precisely, that discourse was grounded in a particular type of humanism: the Aristotelianism which dominated the European universities between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. This Aristotelianism might be expressed in a forthright and technical manner, as when David Rothe defined the barbarian in his Analecta or John Bramhall defended the natural law, or it might be cloaked in more elegant language borrowed from Cicero, as in Richard Stanihurst’s English and Latin histories. A fundamental Aristotelianism could also be obscured by a surface radicalism, as with the Paracelsian Dermot O’Meara, or more importantly tempered by theological constraints, as with Peter Pippard, Thomas Medus, or John Punch. Aristotelianism could be used to attack Gaelic Ireland, or to attack English Ireland; it could be learned in Oxford, Salamanca, Paris, or Pisa. But all of these authors and interest groups believed that reason was the essence of each human being and believed also that human reason could perceive final causes, the purposes of things. These two positions were what made an Aristotelian. These beliefs were evident not just in theories of human society employed in Ireland, but also in Irish theories of the human body and human heredity. In all this, the first argument of this book reinforces the researches of Anthony Pagden into the Spanish empire, and of David Armitage and Andrew Fitzmaurice into the early British empire in North America. Renaissance humanism, in the form of Aristotelianism, provided the main ideological resource for Western European elites as they theorised both relationships among themselves and with extra-European peoples during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Part of this primary argument is that while all these Irish Aristotelians had deep and rich resources at their disposal for speaking about human societies, no Irish Aristotelian, and probably no European Aristotelian, ever developed a truly coherent and complete theory of human heredity. The demands of Christian orthodoxy obstructed the making of such a theory. This causes the ethnic ideologies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to look rather different to the racial ideologies of the nineteenth and

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twentieth centuries. But there is a sense in which heredity is a red herring. The attack on Christian Aristotelian anthropology, when it came, struck the Aristotelianism (essence, accident, final cause) rather than the Christianity. This last chapter has offered a preliminary exploration of a further problem. What was the relationship between the decay of the old Aristotelianism at the end of the seventeenth century, and the development of the new ideology of race in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century? As mentioned above, all Irish and European Aristotelians believed that humans were created in the image of God in that reason was their essence, and that this human reason, because divinely created, could see the ends or purposes of things. The Enlightenment science and anthropology which began to displace this Aristotelianism at the end of the seventeenth century was antiessentialist, and also refused to accept that human reason could perceive final causes. Sir William Petty and Carolus Linnaeus provide important instances of the importance of these developments to anthropology, and especially for the supposed superiority of Europeans over Africans. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to claim that the Enlightenment invented race. Any monocausal explanation for the wider change in the discourse of peoples over the course of the eighteenth century will prove inadequate, and most of those changes in European characterisations of other peoples must surely be ascribed to non-ideological, instrumental matters concerned with commerce and colonial government. The opportunities provided by empire and the desire to legitimate those opportunities were surely the main factors in the development of the new racial discourse. It would also be a mistake to imagine too profound a disjuncture between Aristotelian and Enlightenment learning: as argued above, both Enlightened theories of human societies (Molyneux and Locke) and of human bodies (Petty and Linnaeus) developed aspects of earlier Aristotelian theories. The rupture was not total. Finally, there is no doubt that Aristotelian anthropology and Enlightenment anthropology offered both resources for the dehumanisation of other peoples and for resistance to that dehumanisation. One sort of Aristotelian could argue that a particular people were natural slaves; Enlightenment figures like Adam Smith or those belonging to the Counter-Enlightenment tendency like Edmund Burke or J. G. Herder could oppose the enslavement or cruel exploitation of nonEuropeans. The most important objection to the charge that the

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Enlightenment invented race has been rehearsed in this book’s introduction. The modern ideology of race is concerned not only with human bodies but also with human societies. The theory of human society which is locked into the modern ideology of race is the one developed by the German Counter-Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century. This book has labelled that theory of society, originated by Herder, the theory of culture, but it is a theory common to modern nationalism. No historian of modern Europe could deny that the ideologies of race and of nation (ideologies capable of mobilising whole populations) often marched closely together. The modern ideology of race seems thus to have been a product not just of Enlightenment, but also of CounterEnlightenment. Describing the moment in the early nineteenth century when Enlightenment physical anthropology fused with a CounterEnlightenment or Romantic theory of society to provide the first true expression of modern racial ideology must be left to another study; though the excellent essays collected by Sarah Eigen and Mark Larrimore certainly lay the foundations for such a study.97 Nevertheless, an example of this fusion from the end of the nineteenth century might be instructive; an example which acknowledges both the importance of those Africans transported across the Atlantic and also the importance of German theory to the history of race. The great African American intellectual and political activist W. E. B. Du Bois was a racialist: he believed that while humanity was divided into races one should not speak of the superiority of one race over another. By the time Du Bois was pursuing his graduate studies at Harvard University in the 1890s he was already fascinated by Germany and German learning; a fascination consolidated by his three semesters at the University of Berlin and summers travelling around the Reich. Du Bois not only read Herder and the other proto-Romantics and Romantics in the original, but attended the lectures of charismatic scholars like Heinrich von Treitschke, who preached a fervent, racialised, and anti-Semitic German nationalism.98 97 Sarah Eigen and Mark Larrimore (eds), The German Invention of Race (New York, 2006). 98 David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race 1868–1919 (New York, 1993), pp. 127–49, 165, 168–74, 199, 281–2; R. A. Berman, ‘Du Bois and Wagner: race, nation and culture between the United States and Germany’, The German Quarterly, 70 (1997), 123–35; Hannaford, Race, pp. 306–10.

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In a programmatic essay first published in 1897, Du Bois admitted that the physical characteristics of the different races were exasperatingly intermingled – many of the dark-skinned peoples had straight, rather than woolly, hair, and ‘the yellow Tartar has a broader head than the German’. Nevertheless, he thought, on the basis of this physical anthropology, that there were certainly two and possibly three important races: ‘the whites and Negroes, possibly the yellow race’. Nevertheless, these simple physical differences of ‘color, hair and bone’ only went a short way to explaining the roles played by different groups in the progress of humanity. There were other differences, ‘subtle, delicate and elusive’, which were even more important in separating humanity into groups. It was when one considered these non-physical attributes that it became clear that the race idea was ‘the central thought of all history’: The deeper differences are spiritual, psychical, differences – undoubtedly based on the physical, but infinitely transcending them. The forces that bind together the Teuton nations are, then, first, their race identity and common blood; secondly, and more important, a common history, common laws and religion, similar habits of thought and a conscious striving together for certain ideals of life.99

When one considered the interaction of the physical with the cultural it became clear that one could speak of many more than just three races. Du Bois here pointed to eight: Slav, Teuton, English, Romance, Negro, Semite, Hindu, and Mongolian. All these different races had their own contribution to make to a common humanity. The English contributed constitutional liberty and commercial freedom; the Germans science and philosophy; and the Romance nations literature and art. The Negro race, Du Bois believed, was gifted with song, pathos, and humour; qualities vital to the American project.100 Du Bois’s racialism was of a humane and cosmopolitan kind. Each race worth the name was composed of both physical and cultural elements; each had its role to play in humanity’s onward progress.101 Here indeed was the modern ideology of race in flower.

99 W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘The conservation of races’, in Robert Bernasconi and T. L. Lott, eds., The Idea of Race (Indianapolis, 2000), pp. 108–117, at p. 111. 100 Ibid., p. 114; Tommy Lott, ‘Du Bois’s anthropological notion of race’, in Robert Bernasconi (ed.), Race (Oxford, 2001), pp. 59–83. 101 P. C. Taylor, ‘Appiah’s uncontested argument: W. E. B. Du Bois and the reality of race’, Social Theory and Practice, 26 (2000), 103–28.

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Manuscript primary sources Brussels: Archives Générales du Royaume Secrétaire d’Etat et de Guerre, Correspondance des Gouverneurs, reg. 197: Philip IV to the Infanta Isabella, 27 December 1627, fols 410–22. Dublin: Marsh’s Library MS Z3. 5. 16: Thomas Compendium’.

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Dublin: National Library of Ireland MS 345: Nicholas Plunkett of Dunsoghly, ‘A Treatise or Account of the war & Rebellion in Ireland since 1641’. MS 476–7: [Colonel Nicholas Plunkett?], ‘A Light to the Blind whereby they may see the Dethronement of James the Second King of England . . . anno 1711’. MS 634: English translation of David Rothe’s Analecta. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy MS 24. I. 5 (1140): John Lynch’s Latin translation of Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, with ‘Interpres ad Lectorem’. MS 24. G. 16: 1668 copy of Michael Kearney’s 1635 English translation of Foras Feasa ar Éirinn. MS 3. B. 40: Book of philosophy and genealogy. MS 439 (formerly 3 c 19): Irish translation of Bernard of Gordon’s Lilium Medicinae.

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Dublin: Trinity College Library MS 437: Peter Pippard, ‘In Libros Aristotelis De Anima’. MS 580: ‘A Briefe Relation of Ireland and the diversity of Irish in the same’, fols 95r–98r. MS 589: James Ussher’s MS of Spenser’s ‘View’. MSS 778, 782, 786, 790: James Ussher’s student notebooks. London: British Library Additional MS 30512: Irish-language vellum manuscript, fifteenthsixteenth century. Additional MS 33744: O’Ferrall’s 1658 report to Propaganda. Additional Mss 4781: Papers relating to Ireland, 1642–1648. London, National Archives SP 63/31/32: Rowland White’s ‘Discors touching Ireland’, fols 73–117. SP 63/85/39: Andrew Trollope to Walsingham, 12 September 1585, fols 96–102r. Maynooth, Russell Library Salamanca Archive, MS S.52.7/40: ‘Breve Relation de Irlanda y de los tres differentias de Irlandeses que ay en ella’. Rome: Archivio della sacra Congregatio di Propaganda Fide Fondo di Vienna, vol. 15: relatio of the diocese of Leighlin, fols 41r–44v. Rome: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Barberini Latini, vol. 2853: relatio of the diocese of Leighlin by Bishop Edmund Dempsey, presented by Richard O’Ferrall, no date, fols 11r–15r. Troyes: Bibliothèque Municipale MS 919: Lynch’s Latin translation of FFÉ, owned by O’Ferrall.

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Branca, V. (ed.), Lauro Quirini Umanista (Florence, 1977). Bryskett, Lodowick, A Discourse of Civill Life: Containing the Ethicke part of Morall Philosophie (London, 1606). Cambrensis, Giraldus, Expugnatio Hibernica: The Conquest of Ireland, ed. A. Scott and F. X. Martin (Dublin, 1978). Camden, William, Britannia, sive Florentissimorum Regnorum Angliae, Scotiae, Hiberniae . . . Chorographica Descriptio (London, 1607). Canny, Nicholas, ‘Rowland White’s “Discors touching Ireland”, c. 1569’, Irish Historical Studies, 20 (1977), 439–63. —— ‘Rowland White’s “The dysorders of the Irisshery” 1571’, Studia Hibernica, 29 (1979), 147–60. Carney, James (ed.), Poems on the Butlers of Ormond, Cahir, and Dunboyne (A.D. 1400–1650) (Dublin, 1945). Case, John, Speculum Moralium Questionum in Universam Ethicen Aristotelis (Oxford, 1585). —— Sphaera Civitatis (Oxford, 1588). Cicero, De Oratore ad Quintum fratem Dialogi Tres. Iacobi Lodoici Strebaei, Leodegarij a Quercu, & cuiusdam Incerti Authoris Commentariis, itemque Scholiis Philippi Melanchthonis quam Eruditissimis Illustrati (Paris, 1562). —— Opera Omnia, ed. Janus Gulielmius and Janus Gruterus (4 toms in 2 vols, Hamburg, 1618–19). —— De Oratore Books I–II, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass., 1948). Clichtrove, Josse, ‘On true nobility: selections’, ed. Alison Holcroft, in Jill Kraye (ed.), Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts Volume II: Political Philosophy (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 247–57. Conry, Florence, Tractatus de Augustini Sensu circa Beatae Mariae Virginis Conceptionem (Antwerp, 1619). —— Peregrinus Jerichuntinus, hoc est, De Natura Humana Feliciter Instituta, Infeliciter Lapsa, Miserabiliter Vulnerata, Misericorditer Restaurata (Paris, 1641). —— ‘Un Memorial de la parte del Collegio de Salamanca que ha dado el Conde Odonel, a 22 de Mays del año 1602’, in Meehan, The Fate and Fortunes of Hugh O’Neill, pp. 526-30. —— Desiderius otherwise called Sgáthán an Chrábhaidh, ed. T. F. O’Rahilly (Dublin, 1975). Darcy, Patrick, An Argument Delivered by Patricke Darcy, Esquire, by the Expresse Order of the House of Commons in the Parliament of Ireland, 9 Junii, 1641 (Waterford, 1643). —— ‘An argument’, ed. C. E. J. Caldicott, Camden Miscellany, 31 (1992), 191–320.

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Davies, Sir John, Nosce Teipsum. This Oracle Expounded in Two Elegies. 1. Of Humane Knowledge. 2. Of the Soule of Man, and the Immortalie thereof. (London, 1599). Demoustier, Adrien, Dominique Julia, Léon Albrieux, Dolorès Pralon-Julia, and Marie-Madelaine Compère (eds), Ratio studiorum: Plan raisonné et institution de études dans la Compagnie de Jésus (Paris, 1997). Duffy, Charles Gavan, Young Ireland: A Fragment of Irish History, 1840–45 (2 vols, Dublin, 1896). [Espina, Alonso de], Fortalitium Fidei contra Judeos Sarracenos aliosque Christiane Fidei Imimicos (Lyons, [1464?]). Fernel, Jean, The Physiologia of Jean Fernel (1567), ed. J. M. Forrester (Philadelphia, 2003). FitzGibbon, A. ‘Unpublished Geraldine documents: the Whyte Knight’, The Journal of the Royal Historical and Archaeological Association of Ireland, 4th series, 5 (1882), 640–715, 717–30. Fortescue, Sir John, A Learned Commendation of the Politique Lawes of England, trans. Robert Mulcaster (London, 1599). —— On the Laws and Governance of England, ed. Shelley Lockwood (Cambridge, 1997). Freeman, A. M. (ed.), Annála Connacht: The Annals of Connacht (A.D. 1224–1544) (Dublin, 1970). Galen, De Semine, in C. G. Kühn (ed.), Medicorum Graecorum Opera Quae Exstant (20 vols, Leipzig, 1821–33), vol. 4, pp. 512–651. —— Quod Animi Mores Corporis Temperamenta Sequantur, in Kühn (ed.), Medicorum Graecorum, vol. 4, pp. 767–822. Giblin, Cathaldus (ed.), Liber Lovaniensis: A Collection of Irish Franciscan Documents 1629–1717 (Dublin, 1956). Gibson, Strickland (ed.), Statuta Antiqua Universitatis Oxoniensis (Oxford, 1931). Gilbert, J. T. (ed.), A Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland from 1641 to 1652 (3 vols, Dublin, 1879). —— (ed.), History of the Irish Confederation and the War in Ireland (7 vols, Dublin, 1882–91). Graves, James, ‘Unpublished Geraldine documents (continued)’, The Journal of the Royal Historical and Archaeological Association of Ireland, 4th series, 1 (1871), 591–616. Grimald, Nicholas, Marcus Tullius Ciceroes Thre Bokes of Duties, ed. Gerald O’Gorman (London, 1990). Grotius, Hugo, De Iure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres (Amsterdam, 1631). —— The Rights of War and Peace, ed. Richard Tuck (3 vols, Indianapolis, 2005).

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Hagan, J.,‘Relationes status’, Archivium Hibernicum, 5 (1916), 74–156. Hale, Sir Matthew, The Primitive Origination of Mankind, Considered and Examined According to the Light of Nature (London, 1677). Hardiman, James (ed.), ‘A briefe relation of Ireland and the diversity of Irish in the same [and] Priests of Ireland and Gentlemen gone abroad’, in W. J. [Battersby] (ed.), The Complete Catholic Directory, Almanack and Registry for the Year of our Lord 1841 (Dublin, 1841), pp. 362–73. Harvey, William, Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium (London, 1651). —— Anatomical Exercitations Concerning the Generation of Living Creatures (London, 1653). —— Disputations Touching the Generation of Animals, trans. Gweneth Whitteridge (Oxford, 1981). Hayman, Samuel, ‘Unpublished Geraldine documents’, The Journal of the Historical and Archaeological Association of Ireland, 3rd series, 1 (1869), 356–416. Haywood, Eric, ‘Humanism’s priorities and empire’s prerogatives: Polydore Vergil’s description of Ireland’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 109, section C (2009), 195–237. Hennessy, W. M. (ed.), The Annals of Loch Cé: a Chronicle of Irish Affairs from A.D. 1014 to A.D. 1590 (2 vols, London, 1871). —— (ed.), Annala Uladh Annals of Ulster, otherwise, Annala Senait, Annals of Senat; A Chronicle of Irish affairs from A.D. 431, to A.D. 1540 (4 vols, Dublin, 1887–1901). Herbert, Sir William, Croftus sive de Hibernia Liber, ed. Arthur Keaveney and J. A. Madden (Dublin, 1992). Herder, J. G., Sämtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan et al. (33 vols, Berlin, 1877–1913; 3rd reprint, Hildesheim, 1994–95). —— Reflections of the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, ed. F. E. Manuel (Chicago, 1968). —— Philosophical Writings, ed. M. N. Forster (Cambridge, 2002). Hippocrates and Galen, Hippocratis et Claudii Galeni Opera, ed. Renatus Charterius (13 vols in 9, Paris, 1679). Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde . . . New Series, Volume II (London, 1903). ——— Report on Franciscan Manuscripts Preserved at the Convent, Merchants Quay, Dublin (Dublin, 1906). Hitler, Adolf, Speeches and Proclamations 1932–1945, ed. Max Domarus (3 vols, London, 1990). —— Mein Kampf, ed. Ralph Manheim and D. C. Watt (London, 1992).

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Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, of the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civill (London, 1651). Hooker, Richard The Works of that Learned and Judicious Divine, Mr Richard Hooker, in Eight Books of Ecclesiastical Polity (London, 1676). Hotman, François, Francogallia, ed. Ralph Giesey and J. H. M. Salmon (Cambridge, 1972). Hume, David, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis, revised edn, 1987). Jansen, Cornelius, Augustinus, seu Doctrina Sancti Augustini de Humanae Naturae Sanitate . . . accessit huic editioni Tractatus F. Florentij Conrij Archiepiscopi Thuamensis de Statu Parvulorum sine Baptismo Decedentium iuxta Sensum B. Augustini (3 vols in 1, Rouen, 1643). Jefferson, Thomas, Writings, ed. M. D. Peterson (New York, 1984). Jennings, Brendan (ed.), Wadding Papers 1614–38 (Dublin, 1953). —— (ed.), Wild Geese in Spanish Flanders, 1582–1700: Documents Relating Chiefly to Irish Regiments, from the Archives Générales du Royaume, Bruxelles, and Other Sources (Dublin, 1964). —— (ed.), Louvain Papers 1606–1827 (Dublin, 1968). Jerome, Adversus Vigilantivm, ed. Jean-Louis Feiertag (Corpus Christianorum 79c, Turnhout, 2005). Kant, Immanuel, Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, ed. Preußishen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin, 1900–). —— Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Günter Zöller and R. B. Louden (Cambridge, 2007). Keating, Geoffrey, Dánta, Amhráin is Caointe Shreathrúin Céitinn, ed. E. Mac Goilla Eáin (Dublin, 1900). —— Foras Feasa ar Éirinn: The History of Ireland, ed. David Comyn and P. S. Dinneen (4 vols, London, 1902–14). Kerns, Lin (ed.), The Secret of Secrets (Secreta Secretorum): A Modern Translation with Introduction of the Governance of Princes (Lewiston, 2008). [King, William], The State of the Protestants of Ireland under the Late King James’s Government (London, 1691). Las Casas, Bartolomé de, Aquí se contiene una disputa o controversía, entre el Obispo don fray Bartolomé de Las Casas o Casaus y el doctor Ginés de Sepúlveda (Seville, 1552). —— ‘Aqui se contiene una disputa o controversia entre el obispo don fray Bartolomé de las Casas o Casaus, obispo que fue de la Ciudad Real de Chiapa, que es, en las Indias, parte de la Nueva España, y el doctor Ginés de Sepúlveda, coronista del Emperador . . . 1552’, in Obra indigenista, ed. José Alcina Franch (Madrid, 1985), pp. 163–280.

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Melanchthon, Philip, Loci Communes Theologici Recens Collecti & Nouissime Recogniti (no place, 1536). —— Philosophiae Moralis Epitomes Libri Duo . . . Enarratio Aliquot Librorum Ethicorum Aristotelis (Strasbourg, 1546). —— De Anima, in Opera quae Supersunt Omnia, ed. C. G. Bretschneider and H. E. Bindseil (28 vols, Halle-Braunschweig, 1834–60), vol. 13, cols 2–178. —— Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine: Loci Communes 1555, ed. C. L. Manschreck (New York, 1965). Miller, Liam and Eileen Power (eds), Holinshed’s Irish Chronicle (Dublin, 1979). [Milton, John?], Articles of Peace, Made and Concluded with the Irish Rebels, and Papists, by James Earle of Ormond . . . Upon All which Are Added Observations (London, 1649). Molyneux, William Six Metaphysical Meditations (London, 1680). —— Sciothericum Telescopicum (Dublin, 1686). —— Dioptrica Nova (London, 1692). —— The Case of Ireland’s Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated (Dublin, 1698). Moulin, Pierre du, The Anatomy of Arminianisme (London, 1620). Nicholls, Kenneth, ‘Some documents on Irish law and custom in the sixteenth century’, Analecta Hibernica, 26 (1970), 103–29. Ockham, William of, Quodlibetal Questions, trans. A. J. Freddoso and F. E. Kelley (2 vols, New Haven, 1991). Ó Cianáin, Tadhg, Turas no dTaoiseach nUltach tar Sáile: from Ráth Maoláin to Rome, ed. Nollaig Ó Muraíle (Rome, 2007). Ó Cléirigh, Lughaidh, Beatha Aodha Ruaidh Uí Dhomhnaill, ed. Paul Walsh (2 vols, Dublin, 1948). O’Daly, Daniel (Dominic of the Rosary), Initium, Incrementum et Excitus Familiae Geraldinorum Desmondiae (Lisbon, 1655). O’Ferrall, Richard and Robert O’Connell, Commentarius Rinuccinianus, de Sedis Apostolicae Legatione ad Foederatos Hiberniae Catholicos per Annos 1645–9, ed. Stanislaus Kavanagh (6 vols, Dublin, 1932–49). O’Kelly, Charles, Macariae Excidium, or The Destruction of Cyprus; Being a Secret History of the War of the Revolution in Ireland, ed. J. C. O’Callaghan (Dublin, 1850). O’Mahony, Conor (Constantius Marullus, C. M.), Disputatio Apologetica de Iure Regni Hiberniae pro Catholicis Hibernis adversus Haereticos Anglos (Lisbon, 1645; repr. Dublin, 1826). —— An Argument Defending the Right of the Kingdom of Ireland, trans. John Minahane (Aubane, 2010).

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O’Meara, Dermot (Dermitius Meara), Pathologia Haereditaria Generalis, sive de Morbis Haereditarijs Tractatus Spagyrico-Dogmaticus (Dublin, 1619). Osorio da Fonseca, Jeronimo, De Nobilitate Civili Libri II . . . De Nobilitate Christiana Libri III (Florence, 1552). —— The Five Bookes of the Famous, Learned, and Eloquent Man, Hieronimus Osorius, contayninge a Discourse of Civill, and Christian Nobilitie, trans. William Blandie (London, 1576). O’Sullivan, Anne, and Pádraig Ó Riain (eds), Poems on Marcher Lords from a Sixteenth-Century Tipperary Manuscript (London, 1987). O’Sullivan Beare, Philip, Historiae Catholicae Iberniae Compendium (Lisbon, 1621). —— Ireland under Elizabeth: Chapters Towards a History of Ireland in the Reign of Elizabeth, trans. Matthew J. Byrne (Dublin, 1903). —— Selections from the Zoilomastix of Philip O’Sullivan Beare, ed. Thomas J. O’Donnell (Dublin, 1960). Parker, Henry, Observations upon Some of his Majesties Late Answers and Expresses ([London], [1642]). Pavonius, Franciscus, Summa Ethicae, sive Introductio in Aristotelis, et Theologorum Doctrinem Moralem (Lyons, 1620). Petty, Sir William, Political Arithmetick (London, 1690). —— The Political Anatomy of Ireland (London, 1691). —— The Petty Papers: Some Unpublished Writings of Sir William Petty, ed. H. E. W. Petty-Fitzmaurice, marquis of Lansdowne (2 vols, London, 1927). —— The Petty-Southwell Correspondence 1670–1687, ed. H. E. W. Petty-Fitzmaurice, marquis of Lansdowne (London, 1928). —— William Petty on the Order of Nature: An Unpublished Manuscript Treatise, ed. Rhodri Lewis (Tempe, Arizona, 2009). Possevino, Antonio, Bibliotheca Selecta qua Agitur de Ratione Studiorum in Historia, in Disciplinis, in Salute Omnium Procuranda (2 vols, Rome, 1593). Price (Prise), Sir John, Historiae Brytannicae Defensio (London, 1573). Punch, John (Poncius, Ponce), Theologiae Cursus Integer ad Mentem Scoti, Editio Novissima Indicibus (Lyons, 1671). —— Philosophiae ad Mentem Scoti Cursus Integer (Lyons, 1672). Quehen, Hugh de (ed.), Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation of Lucretius: De Rerum Natura (London, 1996). Quinn, E. G., ‘Truagh truagh an mhuc’, Hermathena, 101 (1965), 27–37. Rabil, Albert Jr. (ed.), Knowledge, Goodness, and Power:The Debate over Nobility among Quattrocento Italian Humanists (Binghamton, 1991).

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Index 

Africans 22, 143, 163, 180–7, 191–2 Agriculture 49–51 Ancient Constitution 83, 88–9, 107 Annesley, Arthur, earl of Angelsey 168 Aquinas, Thomas 30–1, 34, 36, 67, 74, 78, 97, 147, 148–52, 153 Aristotle and Aristotelianism 11–12, 16, 19, 40, 54–5, 130, 133, 134–5, 138, 158, 182 essence, accident, and causation 181, 140–1 eudaimonia (happiness, human flourishing) 32, 65 generation 142 Hobbes against 169 Hooker and 175–6 importance to European ethnic discourse 189 ius politicum 77–9 Linnaeus against 184

Luther against 155 matter and form 166 physiognomics 128–9 psychology 148 theory of natural slavery 66–8, 119 theory of politics 29–30 virtue 97–8 see also habits and customs; natural inclinations Augustine 85, 98, 152, 160–4 Averroes 142 Bacon, Francis 173 Bacon, Roger 152 Bagno, Giovanni Francesco Guidi Di, archbishop of Patras 100–1 barbarians and barbarism 65, 70–2, 74, 76, 80 definition 34–7 natural slaves and 66–70 Barclay, John 44, 72 Barnewall family 115

232

 Index 

Baronius, Caesare, cardinal 109 Barry family 95, 115 Bathe, John 87 Beacon, Richard 81 Bellarmine, Robert, cardinal 162 Bellings, Richard 23, 162 Bermingham family 115, 117, 123, 137 Bernard of Gordon 136–7 Blake, Sir Richard 41, 114, 118 Blandie, William 119 Boate, Arnold and Gerald 166–8 Bodin, Jean 11, 171 Boemus, Joannes 10 Bolton, Sir Richard 41, 110 Boyle, Richard, earl of Cork 25 Boyle, Robert 167 Boyle, Roger, earl of Orrery 169, 172 Bracciolini, Poggio 118 Bramhall, John, bishop of Derry 38–40, 81–2, 170, 174, 189 Bryskett, Ludowick 98–9, 157–8 Burke, Edmund 190 Burke, Edmund ‘na Féasoige’ 45 Burke family 91, 104, 115, 117, 123 Burke, Ulick, earl of Clanricarde 114 Butler, Edmund,Viscount Mountgarret 137 Butler family 28–9, 42, 45, 57, 80, 91, 95, 104, 115, 117, 123, 127, 137, 139 Butler, James, Baron of Dunboyne 49

Butler, James, earl, marquis, and duke of Ormond 85–6, 106, 108, 117, 139 Butler, Thomas, Baron of Cahir 49 Butler, Thomas, earl of Ormond 138 Butler, Walter, earl of Ormond 139 Caen 26, 180 Callaghan, John 162 Calvin, John, and Calvinism 37–8, 39, 92, 97, 112, 164, 175 Cambridge 14, 26, 97, 147, 157 Camden, William 71, 76, 82, 117 Campion, Edmund 57 Case, John 67, 69–70, 74, 78, 98, 140 Cecil, Robert, earl of Salisbury 81 Cecil, William, Lord Burghley 76, 96, 118 Charles I, king of England 86, 130 Chesne, Joseph du, 143 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 12, 16, 19, 25, 58–60, 61–2, 66, 99–100, 116, 119, 122, 169, 185, 189 definition of virtue 98 theory of politics 58–60 Circe 64, 92 Clichtove 118 Coimbra 26, 158 Conry, Florence, archbishop of Tuam 26–7, 84, 87, 89, 94, 95, 101–3, 104, 161–4

 Index  Cooper, Anthony Ashley, earl of Shaftesbury 174 Cork 76, 87, 121, 154 Cremonini, Cesare 142 Cromer, George, archbishop of Armagh 53–4 culture, concept of 4–5, 7, 23–4, 55, 64, 178–80 Cusack family 115 Darcy family 115 Darcy, Patrick 40–1 Darwin, Charles 184 Davies, Sir John 157, 159–60, 171 Davis, Thomas 180 degeneration 53–4, 64 Descartes, René 173 Diderot, Denis 138 Dominican Order 24, 30, 35, 37, 70, 147, 152, 154 Douai 26, 27, 37, 70, 103, 106, 114 Drogheda 24, 25, 151 Dublin 11, 24–7, 51, 55, 95, 106, 121, 128, 138, 147, 166, 173, 180 Du Bois, W. E. B. 191–2 Edward the Confessor, king of England 79 Elizabeth I, queen of England 37, 76, 88, 91, 111–12, 118 empire, concept of 43, 70, 177, 178, 182, 190

233

Enlightenment 6, 17, 168–9, 181, 185 anti-Aristotelian character 188 Espina, Alonso de 100 Ferguson, Adam 6, 178 Fernel, Jean 143–5 Fitzgerald family 28–9, 45, 51, 57, 91, 95, 104, 109, 115, 117, 123, 127, 137 Fitzgerald, Gerald, earl of Kildare 53 Fitzgerald, James Fitzmaurice 93 Fitzgerald, ‘Silken’ Thomas, earl of Kildare 53–4 Fleming family 115 Florence 26, 83, 106, 115 Fortescue, Sir John 40–1 Franciscan Order 24, 25, 31, 93, 102–3, 131, 152, 153–4, 155, 161 French, Nicolas, bishop of Ferns 106 Galen of Pergamum 137–8, 141–5, 150, 151 Galway 24, 114, 115, 123, 130, 171 Gassendi, Pierre 173 genocide 1–5 Gerald of Wales 18, 74, 89 Germany and Nazism 5 Glasgow 26 grammar schools 11, 14–15, 24–5, 173

234

 Index 

Grey, Arthur, Baron Grey de Wilton 76 Grotius, Hugo 169, 170–3 habits and customs 96–9, 100, 104–5, 108, 112, 132 Hale, Sir Matthew 182–3 Hamilton, James,Viscount Clandeboye 25 Hammond, James Henry 187 Harvey, William 146–7, 151 Henry II, king of England 62, 84, 90, 95, 107, 132 Henry VIII, king of England 66, 90, 108, 109–11 Herbert, Sir William 65, 76, 82 Herder, Johann Gottfried 6–7, 12, 17, 178–80, 184, 187, 190, 191 heredity 11, 118–23, 125–6, 136–65, 187–8, 189–90 heresy 80, 83, 85, 90–1, 92, 105, 110, 116 Hickey, Anthony 154 Hippocrates 62 Hobbes, Thomas 39, 169–70, 173, 175, 180, 181 Holinshed, Raphael 55, 57 Homer 64, 67, 92, 120–1 Hooker, Richard 175–7 Hume, David 186, 188 Hutchinson, Lucy 168 Innocent X, pope 104, 132 Inns of Court 26, 40

Irish language 53–4, 57–8, 60–1 James I, king of England 86, 97, 159 James II, king of England 85, 172 Jansen, Cornelius, and Jansenism 85, 95, 98, 161–4 Jefferson, Thomas 178, 187, 188 Jesuits (Society of Jesus) 24–5, 27, 31, 33, 41, 78, 86, 103, 114, 130, 130–2, 151, 152–3, 162 Jews 6, 7, 28, 93–4, 99–100 Juvenal 116 Kant, Immanuel 7, 178, 186–7, 88 Kearney, David, archbishop of Cashel 87 Kearney, Michael 80 Keating, Geoffrey 42, 80, 84, 107, 127 Kilkenny 11, 24, 25, 28, 50, 51, 55, 85, 130 King, William, archbishop of Dublin 169, 172 Las Casas, Bartolomé de 35–7 Laudabiliter 62, 84, 90 law Brady on 13 English common (and relationship to other laws) 40–1, 45–6, 61, 63, 65, 79, 81 land 46–8

 Index  martial 75–6 natural 28–33, 83, 90, 159, 169–78, 181–2 Spenser on 76–80 Lebor Gabála Érenn 88–9, 127 Leiden 15, 55, 166, 180 Lemkin, Raphael 1, 3–5 Leslie, Charles 172–3 Leuven, 20, 26, 94, 102–3, 105, 154, 161–2 Limerick 24, 54, 121 limpieza de sangre 8, 94, 99–100 Linnaeus, Carolus 6, 169, 184–6, 188, 190 Lipsius, Justus 79 Lombard, Peter, archbishop of Armagh 44, 100, 103, 161 Lombard, Peter (twelfth-century theologian) 31, 153 London 26, 41, 53, 55, 138, 147, 152, 157, 173 Locke, John 169, 173–8, 181, 190 Louis XIII and Louis XIV, kings of France 145 Louvain see Leuven; St Anthony of Padua, college of Lucretius and Epicurianism, 167–9, 170, 173, 182 Luther, Martin 37, 155 Lynch, John, archdeacon of Tuam 20, 21, 34, 41–2, 43–4, 74, 84, 85–6, 105, 106, 113–23, 169, 171–2, 178 Lyonnet, Robert 145–6 Lyons 70, 153, 154

235

Mac an Bhaird, Eoghan Rua 104 MacCarthy, Donough,Viscount Muskerry 162 MacCarthy family 49, 91, 105 MacEgan, Boethius, bishop of Ross 105–6, 133 MacEgan family 50, 105, 123, 133 Mac Fhirbhisigh, Dubhaltach 21, 123–30 Mac Giollapadraig, Brian, Baron of Upper Ossory 137 Machiavelli, Niccolò 79, 81 MacMahon, Heber, bishop of Clogher 105–6, 133 Madrid 4, 56, 87, 94, 102 Maginus, Joannes Antonius 71 Mary, queen of England 111 Medus, Thomas 151, 158, 189 Melanchthon, Philip 37–8, 155–7, 158 Milesians 88–9, 95, 107, 109, 125, 127, 128 Milton, John 72 Molyneux, William 169, 173–8, 190 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de 6 Moulin, Pierre du 97 Muslims 93–4, 104 nationalism 17–18, 191 natural inclinations 71, 95–9, 100, 158, 163, 164 Nine Years War 45, 91–2 Nugent family 57, 114, 115

236

 Index 

Nugent, Richard, earl of Westmeath 114 Nugent, Sir Thomas 114 O’Brien family 49 O’Callaghan family 47 Ó Cléirigh, Lughaidh 103 Ó Cléirigh, Míchéal 123 Ó Conchubhair, Risteard 136–8 O’Connell, Robert 83–4, 106–12, 131 O’Daly, Daniel 84 O’Dempsey, Edmund, bishop of Leighlin 133 O’Devany, Cornelius, bishop of Down and Connor 93 O’Donnell, Hugh 103 O’Donnell, Rory, earl of Tyrconnell 103 O’Ferrall family 122 O’Ferrall, Richard 21, 44, 83–4, 102, 106–12, 113–23, 132, 133 Ó hUiginn, Tadhg Óg 45 O Magher family 50 O’Mahony, Conor 84, 86, 102, 107 O’Meara, Dermot 21, 138–46, 151, 189 O’Meara, Edmund 139 O’More, Rory 23–4, 33 O Moloye family 46–7 O’Mulrian, Cornelius, bishop of Killaloe 93 O’Neill, Henry 103 O’Neill, Hugh, earl of Tyrone 45, 88, 103

O’Neill, John, earl of Tyrone 102 O’Neill, Owen Roe 102, 104, 105 O’Neill, Sir Phelim 45 Osorio da Fonseca, Jeronimo 118–23 Ostmen 115, 121–2 O’Sullivan Beare, Domhnall, conde de Bearhaven 87 O’Sullivan Beare, Philip, 20, 33, 81, 84, 87–96, 101, 102, 104, 106, 107, 116, 132 O’Sullivan family 47 Ovid 80 Oxford 11, 14, 26, 27, 33, 54, 55, 60, 67, 78, 98, 138, 157, 173, 180, 189 Pale, English 20, 23, 24, 45, 46, 51, 56–8, 60, 91, 95, 110, 128, 137 Paracelsus 139–40 Paris 26, 150, 154, 162, 166, 170, 180, 189 Parker, Henry 39, 81–2 Pavone, Francesco 33, 78 Peckham, Sir George 12 Petty, Sir William 22, 48–9, 169, 180–4, 188, 190 Philip III, king of Spain 101 Philip IV, king of Spain 87, 102 physiognomics 8, 126–33 Pippard, Peter 151, 153, 189 pirates see Ostmen Pisa 130, 189 Plato 13, 27, 58, 168 Plunkett family 115

 Index  Plutarch 117 Pole, Reginald, cardinal 111 Polemo of Laodicea 128 Porphyry 55 Poynings’ Law 110–11 Preston family 45, 115 Preston, Jenico,Viscount Gormanston 87 Preston, Thomas 45 Price, Sir John 116 Propaganda Fide, papal congregation 106, 115, 133, 172 providence 176–7 Punch, John 31–2, 97, 154–5, 189 Purcell family 115 Quirini, Lauro 134–5, 151 race, modern ideology of 1–9, 190–2 Raconis, Charles François d’Abra de 29, 32–3 Ramus, Petrus 11–12 reason 59–60, 63, 64–5, 66–7, 96–7, 149, 169, 171, 181, 182–3, 185 Renaissance humanism 10–11, 13–17, 18, 51–2 Riche, Barnaby 71, 82, 96, 118 Rinuccini, Giovanni Battista 20, 84, 104–12, 130–3, 171–2 Romanticism 17–18, 55, 180, 184, 191 Rome 31, 73, 93, 95, 100, 103, 106–7, 130, 132, 153, 172 Rothe, David, bishop of Ossory 27,

237

34–7, 42–3, 74, 79, 80, 85–6, 87, 88, 89, 92, 189 Rouen 26, 114, 162 St Anthony of Padua, college of, Leuven 102–3, 105, 161–2 St Leger, Sir Anthony 111 St Patrick 89, 90, 56–7, 114, 126 Salamanca 26, 70, 94, 95, 98, 102, 103, 189 Santiago de Compostella 26, 87, 95, 103 Sartre, Jean-Paul 9 Scaliger, Julius Caesar 167 Scarampi, PierFrancesco 105 Scotus, John Duns 31, 147, 153–4 Seneca 116, 185 Simancas, Diego de 99 Sinnich, John 162 Soto, Domingo de 98 soul 21, 129, 133–5, 147–65, 166–8, 175, 188 South Africa and Apartheid 5, 9 slavery 30, 66–70, 93, 187 Smith, Adam 178, 184, 190 Spenser, Edmund 11–12, 20, 74–82, 157–8 Springham, Mathias 25 stadialism 178, 187 Stanihurst, Richard 19–20, 27, 33, 41–2, 53–74, 76, 79, 82, 83, 89, 92, 93, 112, 138, 173, 181, 189 Starkey, Thomas 12, 28 Taaf family 115

238

 Index 

Talbot family 115 Temple, Sir John 72, 74, 82, 164, 176 Tertullian 160 Thomas, William 71 traducianism 159–61 Treitschke, Heinrich von 191 Trinity College Dublin 25, 26, 27, 60, 173 Trollope, Andrew 71, 82 tyrants 57, 62 universities 14–15, 25–7 Ussher, James, archbishop of Armagh 27, 38–9, 60, 75, 94, 95, 166 Vásquez, Gabriel 162 Vergil, Polydore 44, 66, 73, 74 vice 98, 144, 146, 149, 165

Vico, Giambattista 6, 12 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 73 virtue 61, 73, 79, 81, 97–8, 101, 118, 120, 122, 144, 146, 149, 165 Wadding, Luke 153–4 Walsh, Sir Nicholas 40 Walshe family 28 Ware, Sir James 75, 80 White family, 115 White, Peter 55 White, Rowland 64–5, 72, 82, 96, 99 William of Ockham 152–3, 155–7 William the Conqueror, king of England 79 William III, king of England 172 Yonge, James 128