C103
Article
Catholicism and material
culture in Ireland 1840 - 1880
Ireland changed utterly in
the nineteenth century. Some of those changes can be traced
through religious material culture Lisa Godson illuminates.
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two
consecutive pages from the Irish Catholic Directory,
1836/37; courtesy Central Catholic Library, Dublin
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As a specific field of enquiry,
material culture studies is predicated on the belief that
artefacts are not only significant in the sense that they
in some way 'reflect' social worlds, but that they constitute
them. In an Irish context, one of the areas that seems
most ripe for investigation in this context is Catholicism,
particularly in the hundred years or so from the 1850s
to the transformations that occurred after the Second
Vatican Council.
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page
from the Irish Catholic
Directory, 1850; courtesy
Central Catholic Library, Dublin
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Although the transformations in
devotional practice in the post-Famine era have been widely
studied and written about, the role of objects in the
so-called 'devotional revolution' has not been the subject
of any sustained enquiry. Emmet Larkin characterised a
shift to a 'Romanised' form of devotion from about 1850
as "manifested in jubilees, triduums, pilgrimages, shrines,
processions and retreats." Larkin mentions that these
devotions were reinforced by "beads, scapulars, medals,
missals, prayer books, catechisms, holy pictures and Agnes
Dei."1 And
so these changes had specific material forms in terms
of both the devotional artefacts that Larkin mentions
- an artefactually based ceremonial material culture -
and in the interior fittings of the thousands of Catholic
churches that were erected between 1850 and the turn of
the twentieth-century.
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left:page
from the Irish Catholic Directory, 1847;
right: page
from the Irish Catholic Directory, 1848;
courtesy Central Catholic Library, Dublin
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The role of material culture
must have been important in implementing and sustaining
the widespread adoption of new devotional practices. This
is the case with both objects that were consumed publicly,
such as banners and furnishings, and those that were subject
to more private piety, such as medals, prayer cards and
other printed material. With the supposed standardisation
of Irish religious practice in the second half of the
nineteenth-century, standardised mass-produced objects
imported from continental Europe are likely to have played
a highly significant role in encouraging acceptably orthodox
pieties, and in weaning Irish Catholics away from localised
devotions in their immediate landscape, and towards the
institutional church.
Luke Gibbons has remarked that
the devotional revolution was part of the first phase
of modernisation in Irish culture, and a response to the
pressures placed on Irish society by its integration into
the world economy.2 It
was also a phase that saw the mass consumption of mass-produced
religious objects in Ireland, and the growth of wholesale
and retail businesses dedicated to selling these objects.
As such, the modernisation of Irish culture that the devotional
revolution was part of saw a very modern form of production,
distribution and consumption of the objects that accompanied
this upheaval.
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page
from the Irish Catholic
Directory, 1847; courtesy Central
Catholic Library, Dublin
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This aspect of commodity culture
is not one that has received much attention from design
historians, who have tended to treat religion as 'tradition'
and as such outside the narrowly defined 'modern' era
that is their typical focus. Religious objects are also
difficult to categorise as commodities, as the relationship
between their use value and their exchange value is conceptually
so complex. However, the scale of consumption of religious
objects in Ireland in the second half of the nineteenth
century was nothing short of a consumer revolution, albeit
one that does not conform (in terms of the types of objects
consumed) to more typical definitions of consumerism.
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two
consecutive pages from the Irish Catholic Directory,
1860; courtesy Central Catholic Library, Dublin
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An indication of the course of
this revolution might be gleaned from the pages of the
Irish Catholic Directory, an almanac and registry
that has been published since the early nineteenth-century.
The advertisements carried in the directory are particularly
useful for any study of Catholic material culture from
the 1830s onwards, as in addition to providing the names
and locations of various 'Ecclesiastical Warehouses' they
give listings, descriptions and the prices of the objects
for sale in the warehouses. They also describe the origins
of the objects.
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page
from the Irish Catholic
Directory, 1860; courtesy Central
Catholic Library, Dublin
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From these advertisements, it
is possible to begin to map the popularity of particular
devotions - for example, 'Lourdes' medals were advertised
within a couple of years of Bernadette's visions. The
advertisements are also useful in indicating the nature
of the religious imagery that was consumed at this time,
with prints tending to be based on named paintings, usually
the work of Italian Counter-Reformation artists renowned
for the orthodoxy of their iconography.
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two
consecutive pages from the Irish Catholic Directory,
1860; courtesy Central Catholic Library, Dublin
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The origin of particular object
types that were advertised in the Irish Catholic Directory
is predictable - vestments, prints and medals tended to
come from France, statuary from France and Italy, stained
glass from Germany and altar plate from Birmingham. The
language of the advertisements tended to be particularly
celebratory about the artefacts purchased in France, and
also the orthodoxy of the form of the objects. For example,
in the advertisement for the 'French Vestment, Gold and
Silver Lace and Church Ornament Warehouse at 67 Bride-street
in Dublin', the proprietress Miss Dowling emphasises that
of the statues she has imported "from the style in which
they are executed, they have received the approbation
of the Archbishop of Paris."3
As well as Miss Dowling's establishment, many more used
the appellation 'French' in their title, and in the 1870s
a 'French House' under the directorship of Monsieur L.
Gueret of the Rue Duguay-Trouin was in business at Wellington
Quay in Dublin, and was advertised as 'Le Seule Maison
Francaise à Dublin'.
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image
from the Irish Catholic
Directory, 1878; courtesy Central
Catholic Library, Dublin
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The development of the mass production
of popular religious art in France in the second half
of the nineteenth-century has been well documented elsewhere,
but the influence of such objects on Irish Catholics rather
less so.4 Such a study
is likely to throw light on a number of fascinating aspects
of Irish life in the nineteenth-century. One of the most
fascinating is the nature of the apparitions at Knock
in 1879, where the seers consistently compared the figures
they saw to statues and objects in churches. Although
the younger visionaries saw a lamb on an altar surrounded
by angels - an image that would have appeared in the popular
religious prints of this time - the older ones did not.
Perhaps they were insufficiently acculturated to the changes
in devotional and material culture that had been transforming
both the physical realm in which they lived and worshipped,
and their mental and spiritual landscapes.
Lisa Godson, currently
researching her PhD at the Royal College of Art, is a
lecturer at the Dublin Institute of Technology.
