The Mental Juggler
for Early Irish History at New College of California
Instructor: Daniel Cassidy
December 1998
EndNotes are linked within the text as they arise. They also appear at the end of this document, if you don't wish to jump back and forth.Also check out Molly Ní Dana's 1998 Annotated Medieval Irish History Bibliography
"Epistemology is defined as the study of the origin, nature, methods and limits of knowledge. The word knowledge derives from the Middle English knowen, meaning "to know as a fact". It is interesting to note the similarity of "to know" (Old English cnawen) and "to gnaw" (Middle English gnawen). We gnaw something until we get to the bone, the core. To gnaw something is to know it. We know by gnawing. We pry until the bare bones stand there before us, and then we accept what we see as knowledge - we acknowledge it.Of all the branches of philosophy, epistemology is the most closely linked to cognitive science, the study of the mind-brain. But how do we come to accept that something is knowledge? What are the methods by which we determine what is knowledge? How is Knowledge recognized? And how do we distinguish what is knowledge from what is not?"(1)
So here I am gnawing away at medieval Irish history, which seems, whether I will it or not, to necessarily involve every single aspect of the totality of Irish history, one way or another. I have enough bones collected to occupy me for several years, at the very least, and so I don’t yet know anything at all about it. But that’s never yet stopped me from getting into a conversation!
It is an essential fallacy to argue in any given case, that there is one simple answer, and one only. It seems to me just as fallacious to decide upon a lens or theory from which to evaluate events which cannot be adapted or added to along the way. Yet such is the common approach to Irish history, found everywhere and seldom even challenged. What people seem to reserve their critical energies for is the rightness or wrongness of "those other approaches", i.e. whomever uses a different lens than themselves.
I’ve now read quite a few books and articles focusing on the period roughly 1000-1400 CE in Ireland. I’ve expanded my view out to include some looks at the Angevin Empire, some historical work on the Normans as a self-conscious ethnic entity which does not take Ireland as it’s starting point, and of course I have never seemed to be able to avoid the prominent role of the Roman Church in European politics throughout the past 2 millennia. So in evaluating my progress towards a conception of ‘Gael, Gall and Church' in the 11th through 14th centuries of the Common Era, I noticed that I had in hand a great deal about the viewpoints and motivations of the ‘Gall’ (in this instance specifically Normans) as well as a wide variety of opinions on the political, social, religious and economic activities of the Church. What still seems to be missing from my bookshelf is much about the ‘Gael’, from the inside of Gaelic culture. There’s material, of course, though my misgivings about much of the ‘deep green’ material was given an interesting framework by Declan Kiberd, in Re-inventing Ireland.
"… what they (the rebels of 1916) sensed was their power to redirect its [the past]latent energies into new constellations. They therefore reserved the right to reinterpret the past in the light of their desired future, which they recruited against a despised present. So they implemented Nietzsche’s programme for all who have not been given a good father: they went out and invented a better one, a better past.History thereby became a form of science fiction: in order to get a fair hearing in a conservative society, the exponents of revolution had to present their intentions under the guise of a return to the idealized patterns of the past." (2)
So there it was. All those confusing glorifications of an unlikely Gaelic past, might, if we believe Mr. Kiberd, be considered as science fiction, or (I know this is pedantic of me, but I am a great fan of the genre) more precisely, as speculative fiction of a utopian and political nature. Nothing wrong with that, after all. I believe in the power of a good story to create reality. It’s not history, though, and where this becomes problematic is that my attempts to make a personal connection to the medieval Gaelic experience was in danger of being thwarted, both by the revolutionaries mentioned above, and their inevitable counterparts - the Anglo apologists. As I dug through my ever-increasing pile of books and articles for inspiration, I began to notice that there was a remarkable tendency to talk about the Gaelic Irish as if they were really just a wilder, less respectable form of Englishman, with awful bad luck and an obviously less effective social organization.
A few exceptions began to show themselves. For one, a remarkable article by Alan Bruford, connecting the ruling of Pope Gregory the Great that ‘less harmful’ elements of local pagan culture be adapted into Christian practice; the loss of improvisational skill among the filid as their lore was written down, and the eventually relegation of the older verse forms to "women and the lower orders of society".(3)
For another, a book by Joseph Falaky Nagy, Conversing with Angels and Ancients; which explores the medieval Irish experience of reconciling past and present through dialogue, and ‘dialogues amongst dialogues’. (4)He pointed out to me that while it is true that the framing of text in terms of conversation is pervasive in Western literary traditions generally, the Irish pre-Christian performance traditions of poetic composition and storytelling produced a resonance in Irish cultural life that persisted well past the medieval literary tradition itself. From this I draw the idea that producing a fractious conversation within which I am only one of the participants is a perfectly respectable Irish literary tradition. Call this paper my first venture at an Acallam of my own.
So I there I had a thread of an idea, but the mass of material was still not resolving into a paper!
Now, one difficulty that cannot be over looked here is that I am after all not a man, and any history by, for and about men is going to be missing something for me. No, things have not gone well in the bibliography from this standpoint. When I happened across an article by Aoife de Paor on the status of women , I was initially quite overjoyed, but disappointment awaited me. Her idea is that we should not look down on medieval women because, poor souls, they lacked a feminist vocabulary within which to articulate their oppressions, and that no matter where they turned, whether relying upon Gaelic law, English Common Law, or the Church courts, they were likely to lose out, being treated as property, and in the case of aristocratic women, pawns and weapons to be wielded by men.(5) This may well seem like no more than common sense, and perhaps even as inescapably true, but it is so contrary to my own experiences of how women experience their lives that I can’t help but think she entirely missed the point.
My subsequent explorations of two collections of historical articles; one on the medieval period (6) and one on the modern period of Irish women’s history (7) led me to a similar state of recurrent ‘knawing’. (Though I did feel I learned something helpful from Mary O’Dowd’s article "From Morgan to MacCurtin: Women Historians in Ireland from the 1790s to the 1990s, pp.38-58), namely the strong participation in women such as Alice Stopford Green, Eleanor Hull and Sophie Bryant in the creation of the "powerful and enduring belief in the high status accorded to women in Irish society before it was destroyed by the establishment of English Common Law."
So despite my cavails, there is surely a way in which 19th and 20th century Irish women also understood Irish history as science fiction… which is not to say that this use of their foremother’s names to advance a modern agenda necessarily increases any sense of those early women as participant in Gaelic society.
On the other hand, enter Miriam Robbins-Dexter into the conversation:
"Thus the laws, and the society which they reflected, were complex, on one level, some laws related to the cognate Indo-European belief systems: women were the property of their male relatives. On another level, women could inherit, and they could control their separate property; there was some latitude for a woman to have economic viability. This seems to provide the greatest difference between the women of ancient Ireland and most of the cognate Indo-European cultures. Again, perhaps the different strata of irish society - that is, the matrilineal, matrilocal, perhaps equalitarian pre-Indo-Europeans, and the patriachal, patrilineal, patrilocal Indo-Europeans - gained ascendancy at different times, and in different parts of Ireland. " (8)
This concept of variation over time and locale can be extended into the present day, actually, and is worth remembering. While we are busy asking ourselves what was True during a fairly lengthy span of time - I am reminded of how differently even traffic codes seem to manifest themselves from neighborhood to neighborhood in a single cross-town drive across San Francisco, let alone a similar ride on a public bus.
But to return to women - naturally we don’t know much about women historically in any period anywhere, let alone written-record-poor medieval Ireland, but wherever we have a colonial situation, as we do indeed here, one thing is undeniable. The "feminization" of the men of a colonially dominated land, their designation as more primitive, more wild, less rational and less intellectual, will consequently make much more obscure the women of that society. Their lives will sink even further below the radar of public discourse, and the only quality that will be valued is "strength", usually understood as an ability to withstand terrible pressure without going mad, or making a public fuss.
I watched a television science fiction movie recently, the final movie in a five year story arc I’ve followed with great interest.(9) Babylon Five, the series, seemed to me from the beginning to have unusually interesting characterizations of both women and men (to say nothing of well-realized aliens) under prolonged sieges, often violent, with highly volatile peace efforts that continually fall apart and have to be painstakingly rebuilt. The TV Guide commentator in ‘Hits & Misses’ dismissed this final movie with a low rating as "another parade of the same wooden women and emotional men". How on earth, you ask, does this relate to medieval Ireland as a colonized land?
Just so. Forget 19th century notions of sexy Queen Meabh, or heroic Cú Culainn for a moment, and think about the Anglicized, external conception of typical Irish women and men, clear back to the Norman Invasion. It’s transparent, I think, that when women become wooden in this manner, only recognized for their symbolic role, we’re unlikely to have much of a history for them. After all, their public value is in how much they don’t have a history except through the men they support. And the men aren’t going to have much personality either, really. We follow them through their battles, or failures to battle, the recounting of military campaigns and political intrigues, measuring their worth by how much they helped or hindered the causes set before them.
How helpful to our understanding of what happened during this watershed period in history will it be to recount the battles, or deconstruct the exact mutations in Irish aristocratic men’s understanding of regnal succession at the time of Diarmat mac Murchada? (10) What does it mean to write, as David Nicolle did of the period immediately prior to the arrival of the Norman Invasion forces: "[Ireland was] not yet feudalized, but no longer the tribal society of earlier centuries. Many small Irish courts imitated the fashions of the Anglo-Norman Court." (11)Are we to take it that the Gaelic mindset was ‘withering away’ under "modernizing influences"? Or is it simply "true" in some fashion, but without much relevance. Gnaw, gnaw, gnaw….
Still, I don’t intend to downplay facts entirely. It is a fact that something significant happened in Ireland during the 12th century, and that those events took place in a context of political and social transition for Europe as a whole. It also seem inarguable that the end result was eventually the end of Gaelic culture as it had been, and that those elements which have come down to us are as reified as those elements of pagan culture adopted by the Christians.
What seems starkly the case at this point in my understanding is how little room there is for anything that could be called "pure history" (if indeed such a thing exists) in books and articles on Ireland. Inevitably I was drawn into the huge project of attempting to understand not only the entirety of available Irish source material from the earliest times to the present, but also the effect upon interpretations of that material of historical location and political outlook of those interpreters themselves. (12)
One thing I am beginning to see even more clearly is how dramatically different "History" can look depending upon what it is defined to include. The "history" of papal authority vs the various European empires; the "history" of Ireland as a self-contained unit; the "history" of England, both as part of the Angevin Empire and on its own… and so on. I’ve cast my net very wide in this effort, and while I do believe a genuine understanding of the interplay between Normans, Gaelic Irish and the Church of Rome can arise, I certainly don’t have it yet. To steal the old canard: "More questions were asked than answered by his reply…" or in this case, by the stories told me by those I have been in dialog with during this process. The desired integration of the past into the present has not yet been fulfilled, let us say.
I had intended to address for this paper the attractions of Gaelic culture for the early Normans, and investigate the origin of the catch phrase that some of them became "more Irish than the Irish". When I ran across W.L. Warren’s article "Church and State in Angevin Ireland" (13) where he contends that Henry II and King John for most of his reign had no personal animus towards Irishmen, and that the royal policy in the formation of a lordship of Ireland was essentially conceived as 'a high-kingship made effective', I thought I was making some headway in supporting this thesis. He made a pretty strong case for the later development of a ‘colonial attitude’ on the part of the settlers, although I was a bit uneasy with his use of church records to do so. Then my copy of Marie Therese Flanagan’s Irish Society, Anglo-Norman Settlers, Angevin Kingship: Interactions in Ireland in the late 12th century (14)arrived in the mail and I was sunk again. She not only took a very different view, but specifically attacked Warren (and his idol Aubrey Gwynn) as having missed significant evidence which undercuts their thesis.
In argument with both of them is the voice of Fergus Kelly
"The fact that the Butlers, Burkes and Barrets employed native lawyers shows the extent to which Irish law was used by the Anglo-Norman lords of this period. The Statute of Kilkenny of 1366 prohibited the use by the colonists of the law of the march and of the brehon, the former apparently being an amalgam of Irish and English law. Such prohibitions were ineffective, however, and in some colonized areas English law seems to have been totally ousted" (15)
Though I have to wonder - does this reliance upon Irish law really mean that the Anglo-Normans entered into the mindset of the formerly dominant Irish society, or was it simply expedient for them to accept certain ways of doing things that made living with their neighbors easier? The employment of Irish lawyers, by itself, seems to me rather thin evidence for adoption of "Irishness".
Dr. Flanagan, she of the incredibly detailed descriptions of church intrigues, is really heavy going, at least in this, her "polished for publication" Ph.D. thesis. I truly enjoyed her introduction, since she gave such a lively view of the divide between early and medieval Irish historians, but it was difficult not to get bogged down in her examination of the minute details of Church infighting in England, and their ramifications for Irish events. She lays considerable emphasis on economic motivations in Irish church reform, and seems to take the position (though I’m not entirely confident of this yet) that increasing levels of church bureaucracy mandated from Rome led to a need for larger endowments, hence a desire for the kind of integrated relationship between church and state with regards to law and taxation that the English Church had enjoyed since Henry I. It’s true that if one accepts economic motivation as likely to be paramount, this is an obvious explanation for the permanent and far reaching re-organizations which the Irish church (not always unanimously, but consistently)initiated in the 11th and 12th centuries, and which have tendrils even into the modern era.
It still seems unlikely to me that greed alone will explain it, nor do I imagine much discussion along the lines of "Hey! Let’s encourage the destruction of our entire society’s cultural foundations in order to get more money coming in!", though modern history does have some examples of such thoughts. How much did the schisms and struggles between the Church of Rome and the new emperors of what became Germany, France and England have to do with it? Did they (in their totality, those 12th century Irish churchmen) truly imagine that a strong independent Church in Ireland, closely allied with Rome, was the best course for everyone? Perhaps they did. My eyes are too modern, here, to see very clearly.
I am, of course, circling around and around my central problem, that while any one analysis is as good as another viewed alone, there’s no way that a simplistic approach to any piece of the puzzle will make everything fit. Somewhere during contemplation of this difficulty, I discovered an old copy of Amy Kelly’s venerable book on Eleanor of Acquitaine (16) which a medievalist who used to live in our house had apparently abandoned years ago. It was so much fun to read that I was astonished to find it on the shelves at Barnes & Noble in a new reprint just the other day. I’m not sure if it was Dr. Kelly’s prose style (highly reminiscent of May Sarton, who of course shared her Seven Sisters women’s college milieu) or the lack of tension in reading about the dominant forces of my period rather than the underdogs. She was writing about Eleanor, of course, in a rather festive manner which gave the many grim events of 12th century Europe the feel of a historical romance.
Nonetheless, I got a great deal of perspective back from wherever I had mislaid it, especially in the extensive section on the Thomas á Becket affair. I was also considerably enlightened by the idea that Eleanor went back to Acquitaine and developed the Courts of Love concept as a prelude to fomenting the rebellion which brought Henry II back out of Ireland entirely as a result of Henry’s legendary affair with Rosamond Clifford.
It might well seem that I’m spending far too much attention on this aspect of the Irish experience, but I do think it’s as significant as (and inextricably intertwined with) the history of the Church of Rome, the impact of the Crusades upon medieval European society, and the fate of the Norman-Angevin Empire. It also seems to me that we can view Ireland as having been caught up in the furor of social upheaval consuming the known world at this time, and that it just never came to a conclusion (although we can hope that that’s beginning to happen now…)
There’s quite a few more books in my pile, and I have comments from each one, as well as expansions in all directions of the ideas I have briefly covered here. For now I will be content with this quote from Daniel Corkery:
"All those as well as their students will, of course, find numerous errors after me, if they care to look. There are, however, errors and errors. Lord Morley held history to be an epic art - and the propulsive course of epics is not to be hindered by even shoals of erros. And if this opinion be not cover and shield enough for me and my faults I add to it that saying of Goethe’s: ‘The best that history has to give us is the enthusiasm which it arouses.’" -The Hidden Ireland, p. 6
I'm including the endnotes here, for ease of reading if desired. There is also an annotated bibliography that I did as a separate process - click on the link below to see it.
I found this lecture quite full of food for thought about the role of historians, their moral responsibilities and potential shortcomings. Though I do not have the same Marxist analysis he does, it was thought-provoking and interesting to follow his logic.
Go to Bibliography for this paper
email Molly Ní Dana
The Mental Juggler