THE Irish Conference of Historians (not a conference of Irish historians) has been held every other year since the 1950s at one university centre or another on this island. Papers are read and published. The twentieth such conference was held at university College, Dublin, in 1995, on the theme - broadly interpreted - Religion and Rebellion, and the 12 collected papers have now come from the welcome new University College Dublin Press.
Inevitably, in such a collection, even when a connecting theme is stated, the research interests of the convoked historians will pursue different hares in different directions. This collection, edited by Judith Devlin and Ronan Fanning of the Department of Modern History, University College, Dublin, hangs together surprisingly well in spite of the variety of topics touched on, from boredom in late-medieval English convents to the siege of Waco, Texas.
It opens with the Denis Bethell Memorial Lecture, given on this occasion by F. Donald Logan from Boston, Massachusetts. He is the author of a very good book on the Vikings, but here he deals with a topic which has brought him across the Atlantic for a number of summers past to English libraries and on which, too, he has recently published a book: professed monks and nuns who ran away from their religious communities in late medieval England, a crime, technically "apostasy," punishable by the secular authorities.
The historian's findings provide very little fodder for the frequently-published fantasies of Dr Paisley on this matter: most of the personal histories that led to this dereliction wouldn't make The Oprah Winfrey show. But they remain personal and lend themselves little, as Dr Logan points out, to generalisation.
Eamon Duffy provides a gem of detailed research on the varyingly stressful impact of the Reformation, under Henry, Edward, Mary and Elizabeth, on community life as well as psychic comfort in a parish on the edge of Exmoor and the evasions and ambiguities involved in relation to the Western Rebellion. Nicholas Canny, with accustomed skill, effects some necessary revision not only of perceptions of the 1641 rising in Ireland but, by extension, of the understanding of events in England as well. Jacqueline Hill brings out the religious (as distinct from the Enlightenment) stratum in the thinking of the "patriot" party among Irish Protestants in the eighteenth century. James Livesy tackles a central problem in the history of modern political thought in his paper The Sovereign as God? Theophilanthropy and the Politics of the Directory 1795-99. Fergus D'Arcy focuses on the remarkable and revealing career of Thaddeus O'Malley, a radical Irish priest of the middle nineteenth century who, as he points out, "should serve to remind us that there was an alternative possible history for Ireland..."
THREE papers, by David Blackhourn, Paul Bew and Ruth Harris deal with nineteenth-century Marian apparitions at Marpingen (in the Saarland), Knock and Lourdes, and in the process elucidate the politics and sociology of rural Catholicism of the time. Michael Laffan deals with the religious imagery and rhetoric of the Easter Rising and its fading significance in contemporary Ireland; C.A. Bayly endeavours to go behind the stereotypes of religious conflict in India, and Paul Boyer examines the huge shift in prophetic interpretation that has given rise to so much millennialist and apocalyptic preaching, teaching and organising in present-day America.
This is a fine collection of fresh historical work. Disparate as the papers may seem to be, there does emerge from them the common tendency to conclude that a glib positivism is very inadequate for understanding the function of religion and religious formation in modern society.