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‘Holding up a lamp to the Sun’: Hiberno-Papal Relations and the Construction of Irish Orthodoxy in John Lynch’s Cambrensis Eversus (1662)

Competing confessional claims to the early church played a hugely significant part in the revival of the writing of ecclesiastical history during the period of the European Reformations. This question of Christian origins led rival religious groups to contest vigorously the right to claim to be the early church’s legitimate heirs. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works of ecclesiastical history would, moreover, strive to attain and preserve the rigorous standards set by Renaissance humanist scholarship and, in turn, exploit any perceived weaknesses in the work of their opponents in this regard. This essay examines a seventeenth-century Irish example of such ecclesiastical history-writing: Cambrensis Eversus (‘Cambrensis Refuted’), written in Latin, largely for a continental audience, by a County Galway priest-scholar, John Lynch (1599/1600–73), and published in St Malo in 1662. The work is ostensibly a reply to the twelfth-century works of Giraldus Cambrensis (c.1146–1223) on Ireland, which had attained a new importance in the confessional controversies of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cited afresh by scholars as evidence of the depraved nature of the medieval Irish (and, by extension, of medieval Irish Catholicism) and the need for their moral and religious reform. This had a particular resonance in the Reformation period: if medieval Catholicism could be proved to have been in a state of decay, then this would further legitimize the argument that it was in need of reform and would underscore the correctness of the Protestant return to a purer and more authentic early Christianity.