BOOK OF THE DAY: Dáire Keoghreviews Knock: The Virgin's Apparition in Nineteenth-Century IrelandBy Eugene Hynes, Cork University Press, 368 pp, € 49
ON A wet night in August 1879, 15 locals witnessed an apparition against the gable wall of their parish church in Knock, Co Mayo. A subsequent clerical investigation identified the supernatural visitors as the Virgin, St Joseph and John the Evangelist. Today, Knock is numbered among the world's pre-eminent Marian sanctuaries, attracting 1½ million pilgrims annually. Few of the devotees, however, are aware of the turbulent setting in which the apparition occurred or the sense in which it challenged so much of what is accepted as traditional Irish Catholicism.
Lourdes is the Marian shrine par excellence and established patterns of piety replicated at Knock. In her acclaimed study, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (1999), Ruth Harris demolished representations of the French shrine as a cultural manifestation of a "remote, impoverished and illiterate world". She offered instead a dynamic analysis of the modern and cosmopolitan dimensions of the Lourdes phenomenon. The same is true of Eugene Hynes's Knock, the first scholarly book about the Irish apparitions.
As a sociologist, Hynes is instinctively sceptical of academic assumptions about Irish Catholicism, especially Emmet Larkin's magisterial Devotional Revolution thesis which has coloured scholarship since the 1970s. Larkin attributed a sea change in Irish Catholicism to Cardinal Cullen (1803-78), which saw a "top-down" Romanisation of the church and the erosion of native devotion and piety.
Larkin's thesis is appealing, but Hynes's Knock is less dogmatic in its definitions and broader in its chronology. He rejects crude distinctions between the "natural" and "supernatural", and concludes that the changes were less about the substitution of a native faith with new devotions, than a synthesis of the two.
This is evident in the pragmatic faith of Mayo, manifest not just in the decision of the fairy-woman to have her child baptised, but in the readiness of priests to curse recalcitrant parishioners.
Change was ubiquitous for the apparition witnesses. Their world was disturbed to the extent that Hynes employs the concept of anomie used by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim to describe cultural fragility.
Mayo had endured the Famine and its consequences, proselytism and emigration, but the Land War shattered traditional allegiances and wrong-footed the clergy in the summer of 1879.
Archbishop MacHale, who had enjoyed messianic status, produced dismay when he condemned tenant agitation, while an angry crowd of 20,000 marched in protest at the defence of feudalism by the parish priest of Knock. This "Monster Indignation Meeting demonstrated not just local tension, but the extent to which clerical discipline could be imposed from the "bottom-up".
The interpretation of the apparition is equally engaging and reflects a synthesis between what was seen and clerical expectations of such phenomena.
What had influenced the "seers" accounts? Was it the annual pattern at Ballyhaunis? Could the stained glass window there, depicting the Virgin and St Augustine, have influenced the vision of Mary and "the bishop" at Knock? And how was it decided that "the bishop" was St John and not their own bishop, John MacHale, or St Patrick who had local associations?
And what of the uncanny similarities between the artwork on contemporary temperance medals and the Agnus Dei scene described by the Knock witnesses?
The subsequent record of events was filtered by the clerics who formed a commission of inquiry; it was recast and socially constructed in ways which ignored the anti-clericalism associated with apparitions in Irish folklore in which Mary had traditionally stepped in to compensate or correct an indolent clergy.
It is difficult to do justice to this wonderful book. Those expecting a simple narrative of the apparition might be disappointed, but readers seeking to understand "why Knock?" and "why 1879?" will be enthralled by this landmark volume.
• Dáire Keogh lectures in the history department at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra