James Kelly and Ciaran Mac Murchaidh (editors), Irish and English: Essays on the Irish Linguistic and Cultural Frontier, 1600-1900.

Markey, Anne

James Kelly and Ciaran Mac Murchaidh (editors), Irish and English: Essays on the Irish Linguistic and Cultural Frontier, 1600-1900. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012. 288 pages. [euro] 55.00 EUR (hardback)

Irish and English: Essays on the Irish Linguistic and Cultural Frontier, 1600-1900 explores some of the causes and implications of the decline of Irish and the anglicization of Ireland over the centuries. The subtitle suggests that the contents of the collection will examine linguistic and cultural change and interchange in Ireland from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. However, the prefatorial acknowledgments, which refer to the transformation of Ireland from a primarily Irish-speaking country to a primarily English-speaking country 'between the early sixteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries' (p.11), significantly alter the timeframe specified in the subtitle. This confusion about the period under review leads to a disconcerting lack of attention to the second half of the nineteenth century throughout the volume, with the result that the Famine features only twice in passing, while the Gaelic League is not mentioned at all. Nevertheless, the editorial introduction and ten chapters that follow collectively offer provocative revaluations of issues ranging from Daniel Corkery's 1921 construction of a hidden, hermetically sealed Gaelic Ireland, through Maureen Wall's 1969 cogent critique of the popular perception that Daniel O'Connell, the Catholic clergy and the National schools together killed the Irish language, to Joep Leerssen's 2002 claim that Gaelic Ireland was a culture without a public sphere because it was cut off from print.

In their contextualising introduction, the editors, James Kelly and Ciaran Mac Murchaidh, trace the varying fortunes of Irish and English from the twelfth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, arguing convincingly that the decline of Irish can be traced back to the 'linguistic roots put down by the English in Ireland between the Anglo-Norman intervention in the late twelfth century and the Tudor conquest' (pp.23-4). English was emerging as the mass vernacular by the 1630s, but did not achieve primacy until the end of the eighteenth century. Policies of coercion undoubtedly contributed to that outcome, but so too did the pragmatic desire of Irish-speakers to learn English, which was seen as a language of opportunity. Accepted estimates suggest that only 32.6% of the population spoke Irish in 1851, and most of those raised in Irish-speaking areas were bilingual. From the seventeenth century onwards, English-speaking individuals and groups, including antiquarians and Anglican clergymen, acquired a working knowledge of Irish. As a result, speakers of either and both languages during the considerable, albeit curtailed, period under review inhabited 'a linguistic world in which exchange and interchange were normative' (p.40).

In the first essay dealing with religion and linguistic exchange, Marc Caball traces the career of the Essex-born, Cambridge-educated, Anglican clergyman, William Bedell (1571-1642) who came to Ireland in 1827. Committed to evangelizing the Gaelic-speaking population, he went to great lengths to familiarize himself with indigenous language and culture, most famously sponsoring the translation of the Old Testament into Irish. Caball persuasively argues that Bedell's atypical capacity for linguistic exchange at a time when English Protestants generally viewed Irish with suspicious disdain was rooted in his service from 1607 to 1610 as chaplain to Sir Henry Wotton in Venice. There, he not only learned Italian but also engaged with Jewish scholars to improve his knowledge of Hebrew, while hoping, unsuccessfully, to convert them to Christianity. James Kelly, meanwhile, examines an amelioration in Protestant attitudes towards the Irish language beginning in the 1720s and extending over the course of the eighteenth century. This dispositional change, Kelly argues, was the result of the increasingly active interest by elements of the Protestant elite in Irish history and antiquity. Nevertheless, by the 1790s, 'few Protestants sought, and still fewer succeeded, in achieving conversational or literary proficiency in Irish' (p.190). By contrast, Catholics were becoming proficient in the use of English. The anglicization of the clergy, as Ciaran Mac Murchaidh reveals, is largely attributable to the effects of the penal laws, which meant that candidates for the priesthood were obliged to study in continental colleges, where most lost the ability to speak Irish. Amongst the laity, poorer, uneducated Catholics remained largely monolithic Irish speakers, while the emerging middle-class faithful became increasingly bilingual. For pragmatic social and economic reasons, education in English became the goal of lower-class Catholics. Mac Murchaidh claims that the Catholic Church followed the people in using English, and so became 'part of the anglicized voice that shaped and defined Ireland' (p.188). Niall O Ciosain concurs, in a comparative study of the publishing history of Tadhg O'Sullivan's Pious Miscellany, a collection of Irish-language devotional songs, and two similar collections in Scottish Gaelic. First published in 1802, Pious Miscellany ran to 18 editions by 1850 but was only re-issued on four further occasions by 1880. O Ciosain concludes that while Protestant evangelization in Scotland proceeded through Gaelic, the Irish Catholic revival of the mid-nineteenth century was 'very much an anglicizing and romanizing process' (p.282). It would have been interesting to see O Ciosain's claim that the resurgence of printing in Irish after 1890 was essentially a revivalist project--and other equally significant revivalist projects--examined elsewhere in the volume.

Contributors do, however, explore the vexed but sometimes symbiotic relationship between manuscript and print culture in Ireland. Bernadette Cunningham and Raymond Gillespie's comprehensive chapter reveals that the undermining of the hereditary Gaelic class in the 1620s and 1630s gave rise to a market in manuscripts that extended through and beyond Ireland. Gaelic scholars and scribes were familiar not only with Irish-language manuscripts but also with printed material in English and Latin. Their contacts with English-speaking antiquarians, anxious for various reasons to acquire Irish-language manuscripts, were frequent and mutually advantageous. By the early eighteenth century, the public sphere of Irish-language scholarship transcended perceived dichotomies between Irish and English; Catholic and Protestant; and manuscript and print. In her exploration of bilingualism and Irish print culture, 1700-C.1830, Lesa Ni Mhungaile argues that that a similar situation pertained for the rest of the long-eighteenth century. Ni Mhungaile points, inter alia, to the cooperation between members of the Protestant and Catholic intelligentsia which characterized such projects as Joseph Cooper Walker's Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786) and Charlotte Brooke's Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789), and which enabled native scholars and scribes to enter the public sphere. Deirdre Nic Mhathuna, meanwhile, charts the transmission in manuscript and print of an elegy by the seventeenth-century, Kerry poet, Piaras Feiritear. Ach ni scaoth breac, and the focus on one single poem, despite the somewhat over-zealous provision of detail, undermines Nic Mhathuna's attempt 'to illustrate the interaction of the literary and cultural forces that shaped Ireland' (p.243) over a period of some two hundred years. By contrast, Vincent Morley's engaging account of the distribution and popular influence of Foras Feasa ar Eirinn from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century successfully illuminates shifting literary and cultural frontiers. Demonstrating that manuscript circulation of Keating's text had peaked by 1725, Morley argues that Irish literary culture underwent a process of popularization beginning in the early eighteenth century. As a result, Foras Feasa remained known by reputation but seldom read in its entirety, even by scholars and antiquarians.

The remaining two essays deal with the effects of language change on Irish-language poetry. Liam Mac Mathuna examines how Gaelic poets exploited the creative potential of increasing bilingualism by means of linguistic code mixing in macaronic love-songs and warrant poems, in which English was employed in an ancillary role to Irish. He concludes that the social interaction between Irish-and English-speaking communities presented and embodied in these texts challenges perceptions of a monoglot English-language public sphere in Ireland during the eighteenth century. Charles Dillon, meanwhile, outlines poetic responses to the encroachment of the English language in south Ulster between the time of Seamus Dall Mac Cuarta (1647-1732), Peadar O Doirnin (1704-69), and Art Mac Cumhaigh (1715-73), before describing attempts by mid-nineteenth-century scholars to rescue their work from obscurity, sometimes by translating it into English. Given Dillon's focus on poetic antipathy to anglicization, some reference to the 'Rhyming Weavers', the late-eighteenth-century group of generally working-class poets who wrote in Ulster Scots, would have enhanced the comprehensiveness of his exploration of the linguistic landscape of eighteenth-century Ulster.

The greatest strength of Irish and English is that it makes a wealth of contemporary Irish-language scholarship accessible to English-language readers. By so doing, it reveals that the linguistic and cultural frontier identified in the subtitle is still operative in the twenty-first century. Therein, however, also lies its greatest weakness, as the volume's investigation of that frontier is partial, in both senses of being less than comprehensive and of being biased towards one language--Irish. For example, while two essays investigate the effects of increasing anglicization on Irish-language poetry, no reference is made to Andrew Carpenter's identification of two types of Hiberno-English, natural and contrived, found in verse in English from eighteenth-century Ireland. Perhaps even more disturbingly, no attention is paid at all to the development of Hiberno-English over the centuries, as examined by scholars including Brian Inglis, Terence Dolan, Kevin McCafferty, and Raymond Hickey. The substantial body of recent work on the ways in which early Irish fiction in English drew on Gaelic idioms, sources, and traditions is similarly disregarded.

Despite these criticisms, this review should not end without acknowledgement of the successes of both editors and contributors in revealing fruitful ways of approaching the language issue in Ireland. The volume will prove a rich resource for scholars interested in this topic and a source of fascinating information for all readers.

DOI: 10.3366/iur.2014.0114

ANNE MARKEY

Trinity College Dublin