Abstract
Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales), c. 1143–c. 1223, has been described as ‘a harbinger of the anthropology of more recent times’ (dib.ie), and his main writings on Ireland, Topographia Hiberniae and Expugnatio Hibernica, composed in the late twelfth century, are recognised as foundational texts giving expression to the idea of the Irish as barbarous in contrast to the civility of the inhabitants of the neighbouring island. These informative and entertaining, if occasionally scurrilous, works had lasting appeal and circulated widely in the manuscript through to Tudor times. The Topographia eventually found its way into print as an appendix to Dubliner Richard Stanihurst's De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis (Antwerp, 1584) while William Camden's Anglica, Hibernica, Normannica, Cambrica, a veteribus scripta published at Frankfurt in 1602 made the writings of Giraldus even more widely available to European readers. Extensive use is made of the ideas of Giraldus Cambrensis in Carla Ellen Lessing's book about ‘English civility’ in the sixteenth century, in a way that sometimes disregards the reality that he was not ‘English’ and had been dead for 300 years, even if his influence was still significant.
Promoting ‘English Civility’ in Tudor Ireland seeks to explore power relationships between Tudor England and Ireland by investigating expressions of English social, political and cultural superiority over the Gaelic Irish in the sixteenth century. This topic was first addressed in some detail in D. B. Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish in 1966, but Lessing considers a somewhat wider range of Tudor writers, and pays particular attention to the early sixteenth-century texts in the ‘Hatfield compendium’ edited by Christopher Maginn and Steven Ellis in The Tudor Discovery of Ireland (2015). Lessing's thesis places special emphasis on the ‘rhetoric of difference’ of government officials who were keen to legitimise their role in Ireland and who sought to justify their status, ambitions and achievements by contrasting English ‘civility’ with native Irish ‘barbarism’. She draws on Hayden White's anthropological concept of ‘self-definition by negation’ (pp. 62, 117) in this regard. Lessing stresses that she is concerned with ‘imagined or presented reality’ (p. 31) as found in the Tudor documents and that commentators were sometimes merely reiterating earlier rhetoric of difference. In that context, the shadow of Giraldus still loomed large.
Yet, the discussion often strays from the Tudor era, and insufficient attention is paid to chronology and evidence of change over time. Thus, while issues such as warfare, language, education and religion are all discussed in the context of perceptions of civility, the eras before and after the onset of the Protestant Reformation in Britain and Ireland are not contrasted so that the influence of the emergence of confessional differences on perceptions of civility is not sufficiently explored.
There is a general tendency to gloss over the motivations for writing and the precise background context of the various individual English and Irish-English writers whose observations on civility are discussed in this study, perhaps on the assumption that these commentators will be well-known to today's readers. It means, however, that men such as Dublin-born Richard Stanihurst or Dublin resident Rowland White are not sufficiently distinguished from non-Irish writers such as Richard Beacon, Fynes Moryson, Barnaby Rich and Edmund Spenser.
Unsurprisingly, Lessing engages with the publications of historian Steven Ellis, whose writings on the nature of the relationship between Ireland and England in the Tudor period are widely known. Despite her reluctance to see the Tudor English–Irish relationship as a colonial one, Lessing also finds inspiration in the work of John Patrick Montaño, not least for his interpretation of changing styles of architecture and agriculture as manifestations of improvement in early modern Ireland. (Incidentally, Montaño's thoroughly researched monograph on The Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland (Cambridge, 2011), seems to have escaped the notice of reviews editors in some key Irish academic journals where it merited attention.) Lessing also draws on the insights of medievalists John Gillingham and Rees Davies, as well as Ian Campbell's work on ethnicity in seventeenth-century Ireland, but she seems less inclined to engage with the publications of Clare Carroll, Andrew Hadfield and Hiram Morgan, amongst others, who have previously addressed the concepts of ‘civility’ and ‘barbarism’ specifically in relation to sixteenth-century Ireland.
The book's theoretical approach to Tudor Ireland marks it out as unusual, but this methodology needs to be subservient to the documentary and topographical evidence. The suggestion that ‘the concept of Ireland itself can be seen as an English invention, a mode of identifying the out-group in terms familiar to in-group logic’ (p. 140), discounts plentiful contrary evidence from medieval Irish language sources.
An original aspect of Lessing's book is its Scandinavian dimension designed to offer a comparative perspective on Tudor relationships in sixteenth-century Ireland by looking for parallels in the experience of the territories now known as Finland which had been under Swedish influence since the twelfth century. England and Sweden were deemed comparable as being on the topographical periphery of Europe and with an unequal relationship with a smaller neighbour. The Denmark/Norway relationship would have been another case study to consider, but Sweden/Finland was chosen as offering a closer parallel. This is a relatively minor strand of the study but successfully makes the case that English assertions of ethnic superiority were not exceptional among policy makers in a broader European context and that Anglo-Irish relations in the pre-modern world had parallels in other European jurisdictions.