nuns

The Oxford Companion to Irish History | 2007 | 700+ words | Copyright

nuns. Though consecrated virgins were present in the Irish church from the time of St Patrick little can be said about their way of life. Secular law tracts indicate that nuns enjoyed a privileged status in society of which some details can be gleaned from the hagiographies. Reluctance to alienate land into the hands of women may have led to a system of small communities, gathered around a foundress, which disbanded when the land reverted to her kin group on her death, so that few survived into the later medieval period.

Those which survived generally became houses of Arroasian Augustinian canonesses whose chief house at Clonard, Co. Meath, was founded c.1144. This is listed as having thirteen daughter houses in 1195 but went into decline in the 14th century and by 1383 the abbacy had been transferred to Odra, Co. Meath. In 1223–4 the convent at Kilcreevanty, Co. Galway, emerged as head of the canonesses in Connacht and a number of the Clonard houses were transferred to its jurisdiction. Other important houses were the O'Brien foundation at Killone, Co. Clare, and those of St Mary de Hogges (founded c.1146) and Grace Dieu (c.1190) in Dublin. It is difficult to ascertain when monastic life ceased in many of these houses; some of those in the Pale continued to the Reformation with the superiors and small communities receiving pensions at the dissolution of the monasteries; others, particularly in Gaelic areas, had ceased to be conventual at an earlier period.

There were Cistercian nunneries at Derry and Ballymore (Co. Westmeath) and the presence of nuns at the male houses of Mellifont, Jerpoint, and Inislounaght was criticized by Stephen of Lexington (see mellifont, conspiracy of) in 1228. Of the mendicants only the Franciscans seem to have had any impact on female religious life in the late medieval period. In 1316 six houses of the order of St Clare were listed in Ireland; a list of 1384–5 gives three which have been tentatively identified as Youghal (Co. Cork), Fooran (Co. Westmeath), and Carrick‐on‐Suir (Co. Tipperary). There are 15th‐century references to male and female members of the Franciscan Third Order and it is possible that the communities at Court (founded 1454) and Killeenbrenan (founded c.1426) were mixed. The community of Franciscan nuns in Galway in 1511 were also probably Third Order.

The Reformation brought the suppression of all religious orders, male and female. As the Irish Counter‐Reformation gained pace there are occasional references to revived or newly established congregations of women living together under a religious rule, but overall numbers remained small: a nationwide inquiry in 1731 reported only nine ‘nunneries’. From the early 19th century, on the other hand, the number of nuns expanded enormously, as the religious life became the career choice of growing numbers of women. In 1851 there were 1,160 nuns in Ireland; by 1911, despite a decline in the overall Catholic population, this had risen to 8,887. By 1961, nuns made up 4.6 per cent of the female workforce, and one‐third of all women in ‘professional and technical’ occupations.

This expansion was largely due to the new wave of active female congregations that developed in Ireland from the late 18th century. Nano Nagle's Presentation congregation (1776) was, in its original form, modelled on the French Daughters of Charity (1633). The development of the Brigidines (1809), the Irish Sisters of Charity (1815), the Loreto nuns (1821), and the Sisters of Mercy (1828) owed more to the zeal and buoyancy of Irish Catholicism in the early 19th century than to continental influences. Meanwhile older established congregations like the Poor Clares, Carmelites, and Dominicans sometimes took on activities like schoolteaching and orphanage care. Confident and able upper middle‐class women like Mary Aikenhead, Catherine McAuley, and Frances Ball (founder of the Loreto nuns) were in regular contact with dynamic bishops like Daniel Murray, and all were part of a lively social scene where Catholic philanthropy had a strong nationalist dimension. These foundresses and their companions dealt with bishops and priests on a level of equality. Later, as numbers expanded and the church gained in self‐confidence and central authority, relationships became less personal and more authoritarian.

The Presentation and Mercy nuns made up over half of all the convents in Ireland in 1850, but other congregations also grew. Foreign congregations like the Ursulines and the Sisters of St Louis (to name but two) established many convents. Houses of religious depended upon a concentration of local, wealthy Catholics for support for their ongoing projects, so there was a much higher concentration of convents in cities, in large towns, and in the east and south of the country.

A substantial minority of nuns ran exclusive fee‐paying boarding‐schools, but most Catholics would have encountered nuns as they worked with the poor and working class in educational, refugial, or custodial institutions, or in outreach work. Nuns were also important agents of the expanding state, as they taught in national schools, ran industrial schools and reformatories, and nursed in poor law hospitals.

Most women entering convents brought substantial dowries with them. Working‐class women could enter most congregations as lay sisters, the religious who performed mainly manual and service work. They had inferior ecclesiastical status, did menial household and garden work, and often dressed in a distinctive way. This distinction between ranks of religious, which also operated in most male religious orders, was not abolished until the second Vatican Council.