Voices for Tolerance |
on exhibit June 9 - October 30, 2004 |
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Ireland: Ethnic Conflict and Sectarian BigotryThe intolerance of the age of religious wars was also prevalent
in Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Added to
the volatile mix of sectarian animosity between Protestants and
Catholics was, at times, an intense ethnic conflict that sharpened
with the brutal Elizabethan conquest of Ireland in 1603. Though
Irish Catholics experienced land confiscations and underwent intermittent
religious persecution during the reigns of James I and Charles I,
the outbreak of violent rebellion in 1641 and a large-scale massacre
of English Protestant settlers in Ulster sealed the fate of Ireland's
Catholics. As traitors they were brutally suppressed under Oliver
Cromwell. The defeat and dispossession of Catholic Ireland and ongoing
discrimination ensured that religious and ethnic tensions would
last into the modern period. |
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James Cranford's graphic Teares of Ireland was one of the many accounts that poured off the presses in London and luridly related the alleged massacre of 100,000 to 200,000 Protestants in Ulster. Though the numbers and details were grossly exaggerated, the myth of a Jesuit instigated plan to exterminate all the Protestants in the British Isles contributed to a legacy of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bias. |
Richard Verstegan's Theatre of Cruelties depicts the fate of Dermot Hurley, Catholic Archbishop and formerly Dean of Law at Louvain University, who was captured on his return to Ireland, tortured in Dublin Castle, and executed on 20 June 1584. |
Voices for Tolerance in an Age of Persecution
Exhibition HighlightsHumanists for Peace | The Reformation | The Struggle for Religious Toleration | The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day | Jews in Early Modern Europe | The Miseries of Religious War | Ambivalence towards Islam | Encountering Africans | Catholics in England | James I and Religious Toleration | The Puritan Revolution | Ireland | Debating Toleration in the Restoration | "Acts" of Toleration | Voices for Tolerance Amidst Acts of Hate
This page updated September 29, 2004