“Mere Irish?”: The lordship of the Mac Carthaigh Riabhach, 1366-1649

My dissertation examines the processes by which the structure and character of lordship were developed by the Mac Carthaigh Riabhach, a Gaelic Irish lordship in southwestern Ireland. For the Mac Carthaigh Riabhach, a comparatively new lordship that had emerged in the late thirteenth century, the construction of lordship was also a process of identity formation in response both to the continual influx of English settlers and to the growth of their neighboring Irish lordships. These processes were further complicated by the location of the Mac Carthaigh Riabhach in a borderland region, filled with tensions, divisions, and power differentials, but also open to negotiation and exchange. Through a case study of the Mac Carthaigh Riabhach, I will analyze the mechanisms by which late medieval and early modern Irish lordships, as both bodies politic and kinship groups, constructed the basis of their authority and communal identity and how those mechanisms were adapted to the volatile environment of the medieval Irish borderlands.

Not only does the development of the Mac Carthaigh Riabhach lordship serve as a lens for understanding the forces that shaped Irish society in this transitional and transformative period, but this study also intersects with broader discourses on frontiers and borderlands, cultural hybridity, and communal identity in late medieval and early modern Europe. Gaelic Ireland is particularly well-suited for examining questions of identity formation in the borderlands. Following the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland, both the native Irish and their Anglo-Irish neighbors lived in a culturally hybrid society, built upon frequent intermarriage, cultural exchange, and linguistic borrowing. This hybridity has been downplayed in scholarship, largely as a result of nationalist historiography that has privileged a strict binary conception of ethnicity. My own research seeks to problematize that understanding and to understand the multivalent manifestations of identity and ethnicity in this society both fraught with tensions and yet primed for cooperation and transculturation.

In order to bring together both the political and socio-cultural aspects of lordship and identity, my dissertation is divided into two sections. The first is a narrative history of the lordship, detailing its growth and decline over the course of three centuries. This section is primarily concerned with the lordship itself and how its members built authority and legitimacy in the region in cooperation and competition with their neighbors, both Gaelic and Anglo-Irish. It uses traditional sources like annals, administrative documents, and letters. The second section builds upon this narrative and examines several modes of identity formation, including social networks, products of cultural patronage, and material culture, and military expansion. This diverse set of questions is complemented by an equally broad array of sources, including genealogies, bardic poetry, and archaeological site reports. By bringing together a traditional narrative history with these more granular questions, my dissertation offers deeper insights into the social, cultural, and political milieu of Gaelic Ireland.