'Frail cabins' and 'princely mansions': architecture and social hierarchy in early modern Munster

Summary

In the opening section of his Gaelic language text The history of Ireland (1632), the Munster cleric Geoffrey Keating took English writers to task for their misrepresentations of Ireland. Keating was particularly aggrieved by their conflation of the habits and material culture of the Irish nobility and the ‘inferior people’. His explicitly class conscious rebuttal of outsiders’ accounts of Ireland forms part of a broader discourse among the native Irish literati concerned with social hierarchy and its material expression. This paper seeks to explore the role of architecture in the expression and maintenance of elite Irish Catholic identities in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Munster, with a particular focus on how those identities were formed in opposition to an ignoble ‘other’. The paper draws together contemporary literary evidence with an archaeological case study from the Cork lordship of Pobul Uí Cheallacháin.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Cultural transformations in early modern Ireland, an archaeological perspective   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2013

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 288