Irish townspeople

The early modern urban experience, c.1400–c.1640

Colm Lennon

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781526193421
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526193414
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Through a series of innovative perspectives, this book examines how early modern Irish townspeople experienced the urban world through a range of family and associational ties. Migrants inducted through town citizenship and marriage bonded more closely as sisters or brothers of confraternities and guilds, consolidating parish membership. Civic religion saw the integration of religion with town politics and councils, and monastic charity of the friars' hospitals preceded the era of modern municipal welfare. In circumstances of the alienation of the long-settled Catholic townspeople from the state's religious and political Reformation in the seventeenth century, they drew sustenance from the continuity of institutions such as colleges, fraternities and hospitals and forms of coexistence with Protestant fellow-citizens.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Series editors’ preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Environment: buildings and boundaries, 1400–c.1550
• 2 Integration: forging communal ties through marriage and migration, c.1400–c.1600
• 3 Association: the social kinship of religious confraternities, 1400–c.1550
• 4 Civic religion: symbiosis of sacred and secular, 1400–c.1550
• 5 Charity: from private mercy to municipal welfare, c.1500–c.1640
• 6 Recusancy and the defence of secular and religious institutions, c.1600–c.1640
• 7 Urban culture and identity: consciousness of the civic past
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index