The beauty of virtue: Honor in early modern Ireland and England, 1541--1641

My dissertation explores notions of honor in early modern Anglo-Irish relations. Other studies have focused on points of English-Irish difference---religious, cultural, ethnic and political---in seeking to explicate this stormy colonial relationship. This study focuses instead on one of the few points of contact between colonist and colonizer, that provided by overlapping conceptions of honor and shame. Once Ireland was declared a kingdom under the English crown in 1541, the English government attempted to win the loyalty and encourage the assimilation of Irish lords by a process of integrating honor communities through the conversion of Gaelic titles to English-style ones. Yet less than one hundred years later an absolutist vice-regal government and its Irish enemies clashed over honor and dishonor and so helped throw Britain into civil war. What had initially served to help unify these two societies under one crown and executive over time helped to destabilize each of them and tear them further apart.;Honor provided the social glue for early modern English and Irish societies, as it did for all of Europe. In an age when access to the law was spotty and police forces non-existent, the social regulation provided by culturally ingrained, if unwritten, concepts of honorable behavior helped ensure order in these otherwise potentially chaotic societies. This study uses textual and material evidence, both in Irish Gaelic and English, to demonstrate that English and Irish honor codes overlapped, both bearing the mark of European-wide conceptions of chivalry. Thus an appeal to honor principles offered the best means by which to integrate the two societies in the sixteenth century and, as the contemporary parade of anglicized Irish lords reveals, proved quite successful in trumping potential allegiances to ethnicity and faith. These codes, however, were strained by the pressures of Reformation, colonialism and modernity, and by the seventeenth century were serving to undermine social stability in both kingdoms. In Ireland the defense of honor provided a language of resistance to crown centralization; in England the native nobility felt their honor challenged by the creation of Irish peers, which drove a wedge between them and the king.