HISTORY
Hellfire Clubs in Eighteenth-Century Ireland
TERM 3: FOCUS ON HN 378
Thursdays
'Some asserted, that he dealt avec le diable; [and] established a hell-fire club at the Eagle tavern on Cork hill...'
John Carteret Pilkington, The Real Story of John Carteret Pilkington (1760)
What were the hellfire clubs of eighteenth-century Ireland? Were they really elite groups who engaged in obscene orgies, devil worship and the ritual murder of servants? These questions have intrigued virtually everyone who has visited the supposed hellfire club meeting place in the Dublin Mountains, or heard the lurid stories that are associated with it. Cutting through this veil of myth and legend, this 6-week course will reveal the truth about these mysterious societies.
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BELFIELD |
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5 Thursdays |
April 18, 25, May 2, 9, 16 |
7.30pm - 9.30pm |
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1 Saturday |
May 25 |
11.00am - 1.00pm |
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Fee €115 |
Print Open Learning Application Form 2012.13 or ring (01) 716-7123 for Laser/credit card payment |
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Tutor Bio:
David Ryan (MA History, NUI Galway) works as a television researcher and writer, specialising in historical documentaries. He is also a freelance historian and his first full-length work, Blasphemers & Blackguards: The Irish Hellfire Clubs, was published in May 2012. David has worked as a writer and researcher on a numerous RTE, TG4 and TV3 series, including Dead Money, Behind Bars, Death or Canada, The Ghosts of Duffy’s Cut, and Cromwell in Ireland, which won an IFTA Award in 2009 for Best Documentary.
Provisional list of key topics to be covered
Week 1: Masters or Puppets? This class will introduce the Protestant Ascendancy of eighteenth-century Ireland. It will consider their origins, and the position of unprecedented social, religious and political dominance that they occupied following the Williamite War. It will also focus on the crisis of confidence that the Protestant nobility and gentry suffered as a result of their dependence on their British co-religionists, and how such insecurities led many to engage in drunken, violent and excessive behaviour.
Week 2: The Rise of the Hellfire Clubs. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, advances in scientific knowledge and Enlightenment philosophy undermined the traditional Christian interpretation of existence. In the context of this, we will explore how the original London Hellfire Club (so called because its members did not believe in hellfire) emerged in 1720. We will move on to consider the impact of these developments on Ireland, and how the dissolute Earl of Rosse came to found the notorious Dublin Hellfire Club in the 1730s.
Week 3: The Dublin Hellfire Club. This class will explore the controversial and provocative activities of the Dublin Hellfire Club, including drinking, diabolism, sexual excess and blasphemy. It will also involve discussion of James Worsdale’s hellfire club paintings (two of which are held in the National Gallery of Ireland) and of the diabolic symbolism manifest in a range of putative hellfire club relics.
Week 4: Blasphemy and Murder. In this class we will focus on the scandal surrounding the attempted arrest of a member of the Dublin Hellfire Club for blasphemy and devil worship in 1738. We will also consider the violent and outrageous career of the Hellfire Club’s most infamous member, Lord Santry, his trial for murder in 1739, and the concomitant demise of the Club.
Week 5: Regional Hellfire Clubs. We will look at the emergence of a range of imitative hellfire clubs in regional areas during the mid-eighteenth century, and consider how they resembled and differed from their metropolitan predecessor. The diffusion of hellfire club ‘ideology’ to different parts of the country will be discussed. We will move on to explore the reasons behind the decline of the hellfire club phenomenon in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Week 6: Legacy. This class will consist of a field trip to the ‘Hellfire Club’ building in the Dublin Mountains, during which we will discuss the folkloric legacy of the hellfire clubs. We will explore the history of this building and how it attained a powerful status as a centre of diabolism, occult practice and sexual excess, a reputation that it retains up to the present day.
Provisional Reading List:
The following is a selection of recommended texts for those interested in reading further around the course content. We advise that you do not buy books in advance of the course as your tutor will discuss the list and suggest the most relevant reading for particular interests.
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An ample discovery of the damnable cabal, commonly known by the name of the Hell-fire Club, kept in this city, since the 17th of March last… (Dublin, n.d.)
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Geoffrey Ashe, The Hell-fire Clubs: sex, rakes and libertines (Revised edition, Stroud, 2005)
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Toby Barnard, The abduction of a Limerick heiress: social and political relations in mid-eighteenth century Ireland (Dublin, 1998)
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Norma Clarke, Queen of the wits: a life of Laetitia Pilkington (London, 2008)
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S.J. Connolly, Religion, law and power: the making of Protestant Ireland 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1992)
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Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin, Ireland’s painters 1600–1940 (New Haven, CT, 2002)
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Louis C. Jones, The clubs of the Georgian rakes (New York, 1942)
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James Kelly and Martyn J. Powell (eds), Clubs and societies in eighteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 2010)
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Evelyn Lord, The Hell-fire clubs: sex, satanism and secret societies (New Haven, CT, 2008)
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Ian McBride, Eighteenth-century Ireland: the isle of slaves (Dublin, 2009)
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J.L. McCracken, ‘The social structure and social life, 1714–60’ in T.W. Moody and W.E. Vaughan (eds), A new history of Ireland IV: eighteenth-century Ireland 1691–1800 (Oxford, 1986)
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Constantia Maxwell, Dublin under the Georges 1714–1850 (London, 1936)
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David Ryan, Blasphemers & blackguards: the Irish hellfire clubs (Dublin, 2012)
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J.E. Walsh, Ireland ninety years ago. Being a new and revised edition of Ireland sixty years ago (Dublin, 1876)
