Architecture and Identity: The Houses of Plantation-era Miunster, c.1580 - c.1650 (2010)
Sinéad Quirke
Supervisor: Professor Tadhg O’Keeffe
Funded by: The Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Abstract
This thesis is a study of the architecture of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century houses in Munster. Archaeologists usually describe the buildings in question as ‘fortified houses’, ‘semi-fortified houses’, ‘defended houses’ or ‘castellated house’. These buildings are of considerable interest because they represent a shift in thinking about the aesthetic of architecture and the design of architectural space at a critical phase in the settlement and political histories of Ireland: the Plantation. Munster is an exceptionally good area for their study because it possesses the largest number of examples but also the most diverse selection of them.
Of all the ‘types’ of castle in Ireland, however, the castellated house – the type at the tail-end of the castle-building tradition – remains the least studied and probably the most misunderstood. Studies of individual castles within this tradition have been published over the past century, and they usually include useful descriptions and reasonable, though brief, comparative analyses. However, the overall ‘shape’ of this tradition, its stylistic origins and indeed idiosyncrasies, and its ‘meaning’ within its contemporary cultural-political milieu, have yet to be the subject of in-depth investigation. Instead, there remains a simplistic, deterministic, view of these buildings as simply devolved castles, where the medieval need for defence has been overtaken by a desire for domesticity, with the degree of defensibility reduced accordingly.
The principal concern of my research is to understand these buildings as cultural products and identity-indicators. For example, the occurrence side-by-side of indigenous-design doorways (of tower-house type) and neo-Classicist Renaissance doorways in some of these buildings (such as Kanturk, Cork), or the apparent survival of medieval domestic arrangements in some of the latest houses (such as Ightermurragh, Cork), raise obvious questions about the movements and meanings of architectural ideas in the Plantation era.
Moreover, given that most of the houses are associated with planters, but that some were built by native Irish families (Kanturk, Co. Cork) and others by Old English Catholic families (Burncourt, Co. Tipperary), how does the architecture of these buildings, individually and collectively, articulate contemporary ethnic, religious, and political identities? And, do these buildings, individually or collectively, represent a transformation of the castle-building tradition that already existed in Ireland, or should we see them as manifestations in Ireland of a wider, essentially Renaissance, building tradition?
Additional Information
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