Religion and politics in urban Ireland, c.1500–c.1750

Essays in honour of Colm Lennon

Salvador Ryan & Clodagh Tait, editors

This collection celebrates the career of Colm Lennon, one of Ireland's most respected early modern historians. It examines the interplay between politics and religion in early modern Ireland, with a particular focus on its urban communities. Topics include the Reformation in sixteenth-century Cork; the often turbulent lives of nuns in early modern Galway; relations between various Protestant groupings in early modern Belfast; the career of an Old English Catholic physician in seventeenth-century Dublin and Limerick; the tale of how migrant Dublin textile workers found themselves before the Spanish Inquisition; and the hagiography of an eighteenth-century Dublin priest. It also features an edition of a dispute in 1600 between Henry Fitzsimon and James Ussher on whether the pope should be considered the antichrist.

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Contributors: Toby Barnard (U Oxford), Ciarán Brady (TCD), Gael Chenard (Archives Departmentales des Hautes-Alpes), Mary Clark (Dublin City Archives), Bernadette Cunningham (RIA), Steven G. Ellis (NUIG), Alan Ford (U Nottingham), Raymond Gillespie (MU), Jacqueline Hill (MU), Henry Jefferies (Thornhill College, Derry), Mary Ann Lyons (MU), Neasa Malone (ind.), Rory Masterson (Coláiste Choilm, Tullamore),  Thomas O’Connor (MU).

Salvador Ryan is professor of ecclesiastical history at St Patrick's College, Maynooth. Clodagh Tait is a lecturer in the Department of History at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick.