Faith and Patronage: The Political Career of Flaithri O Maolchonaire c. 1560-1629.

Morrill, John

Faith and Patronage: The Political Career of Flaithri O Maolchonaire c. 1560-1629. By Benjamin Hazard. New Directions in Irish History 4. Dublin: Irish Academic, 2010. xvi + 222 pp. $69.95.

This is a demanding book. It uses the Irish forms of all names so that even its hero is disguised from most of us. Flaithri O Maolchonaire may not be known to readers; Florence Conry should be. The bibliography takes up more than 10 percent of the book, and the notes half of the rest. There is an appendix of twenty-four key documents printed (untranslated) in Latin and Castilian. Hazard has scoured the archives in five countries and six languages. Confidant and confessor of Ui O Neill and Ui O Domhnaill (O'Neills and O'Donnells), founder of the great Franciscan seminary in Louvain (Leuven) and of chaplaincies to the emigre Irish regiments in the Spanish service, absentee Archbishop of Tuam, organizer of insurrection and international action to overthrow the heretical and tyrannical rule of Protestant kings in Ireland, O Maolchonaire was at the eye of many ecclesiastical storms for thirty years. A Franciscan who distasted (to put it mildly) Jesuits and Jesuit political theology, a courtier who won and lost battles at the courts of Philip III and Philip IV, he is an extraordinary story told with a daunting authority. Raised in the family of the seanchaidh chroniclers and genealogists to the Ui Chonchobhair (O'Connor) kings of Connacht, O Maolchonaire's absorption into the new thinking of Rome, Madrid, and Flanders made him a great Counter-Reformation figure. This pithy book profoundly affects how we see the Catholic world in the early seventeenth century and is well worth the effort of reading.

doi: 10.1017/S0009640711000229

John Morrill

Selwyn College Cambridge