The I.H.S. Monogram as a Symbol of Catholic Resistance in Seventeenth-Century Ireland
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The I.H.S. Monogram as a Symbol of Catholic Resistance in Seventeenth-Century Ireland Colm J. Donnelly1
It has been suggested that the presence of religious images and scenes in secular buildings of sixteenth-century date can be viewed as an expression of resistance by the native Irish to English colonial activity in the aftermath of the Munster Plantation (J. A. Delle, 1999, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 3: 11–35). Such images, however, may merely represent a continuation into the early modern period of a Medieval tradition of adorning secular houses with devotional images. If a religious symbol of native Catholic resistance to English colonization and Protestantism in Munster is to be sought then perhaps a more appropriate image would be the I.H.S. monogram—a symbol associated with the Counter Reformation and the Jesuits. The paper presents an example of the monogram located within a tower house at Gortnetubbrid in County Limerick, Ireland. KEY WORDS: seventheenth-century Ireland; I.H.S. monogram; Catholicism; Protestantism.
INTRODUCTION The Munster Plantation of the 1580s represented a major endeavor by the English Crown to increase state control over the southern province in Ireland. Following a failed rebellion by the Earl of Desmond, his land was confiscated, divided up, and distributed among new English Protestant undertakers, who were to populate their estates with English Protestant settlers. This process resulted in the division of the Munster landscape into a mosaic of estates owned by the New English, and the Catholic Old English and native Irish in a scheme that acted as a forerunner to the more successful Ulster Plantation of the early seventeenth century. James Delle (1999) has sought to identify evidence for collusion and resistance within the plantation process in Munster among the Old English and 1 Centre for Archaeological Fieldwork, School of Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queen’s University
Belfast, Belfast, Northern Ireland BT7 1NN; e-mail: [email protected]. 37 C 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 1092-7697/05/0300-0037/0
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native Irish by recourse to an examination of the architecture of the period. In this investigation buildings such as Mallow Castle, County Cork, represent the new spatial order introduced by the incoming planters (the New English), while in the decades to follow, colluding Old English and Irish lords “constructed houses to conform to or approximate the new spatial order” (Delle, 1999, p. 25). Delle further suggests that the continued construction by the native Irish of the tower house—a class of castle with its origins in the Late Medieval period—using a traditional spatial grammar during the late sixteenth century can be read as a form of resistance against the English colonizers (Delle, 1999, pp. 30–31). To support this argument he draws the reader’s attention to Ballynacarriga Castle, County Cork, as an example of a traditional Medieval tower house constructed or renovated in 1585, and with a series of religious scenes
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