Dr Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin. Early modern Catholicism in the northern Netherlands, England and Ireland by History Hub

Recording of a paper by Dr Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin (University College Dublin) at the 2014 Tudor and Stuart Ireland Conference.

About the paper: Early modern Catholicism in the northern Netherlands, England and Ireland: some points of comparison and contrast.

This paper offers a brief investigation of the evolution of Catholicism in three societies, England, where by the end of Elizabeth's reign it retained significant numbers of adherents among the aristocracy but had largely lost the battle for the hearts and minds of the general population; Ireland, the only area of the Atlantic archipelago where Catholicism survived the sixteenth century and beyond as the majority confession, and the Netherlands where a significant Catholic population, reorganized in the course of 1590s and the first decades of the seventeenth century, was in existence at the end of the great Spanish-Dutch conflict in 1648. In addition to their geographical location on the western margins of Catholic Europe, the principal factor linking these three areas is their shared inheritance of state hostility and the existence of a favoured non-Catholic church establishment which posed a considerable challenge to the possibilities of survival and growth of Catholicism. However, despite this basic commonality, the difference in the self-understanding of the favoured confession and the varying extents of state power in enforcing programmes of coercion were critical factors in the differing evolution of Catholicism in the three areas.

The 2014 Tudor and Stuart Ireland conference was generously supported by UCD School of History and Archives, UCD Research, Marsh's Library, Graduate Studies at NUI Maynooth, and the Department of History at NUI Maynooth.

Recorded for podcasting by Real Smart Media (https://soundcloud.com/real-smart-media) for History Hub.