Dudley Loftus’ Annals in Marsh’s Library: A Window into Religious Change in Renaissance Ireland

• In Event: Print and Manuscript Cultures in Early Modern Dublin

Abstract

The ‘Annals of Ireland’, one of Dudley Loftus’ manuscripts collected by Archbishop Marsh, are frequently utilised by historians of religion in Renaissance Ireland, and have been analysed within the context of seventeenth-century historical scholarship. Although entries from Loftus’ annals have become interwoven into the fabric of Reformation scholarship, a more holistic assessment of what the manuscript reveals about near-contemporary understanding of religious change remains neglected. Born in 1618, Dudley Loftus spent his formative years in Ireland during a period when confessional identities were becoming increasingly rigid, and returned to Ireland from Oxford at the outbreak of sectarian and political upheaval in 1641. As a historian, antiquarian, and Protestant, what did Dudley Loftus consider seminal events in the emergence of Ireland’s contemporary confessional landscape? This paper evaluates entries in the Annals of Ireland from 1537 to 1620 to assess Loftus’ own interpretation of the trajectory of religious change.

Author

• Jeffrey Richard Cox, University College Dublin