ABSTRACT
In the absence of a native university before 1592 and a developed printing industry until after 1600, it is perhaps understandable that sixteenth-century Ireland did not foster an indigenous intellectual and cultural ferment as did the Renaissance elsewhere. Yet even before the Reformation and Counter-Reformation brought fresh thinking, humanist and religious strains of the European revival of learning were influencing sections of the island’s population. Resort by Irish students to the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and other academies in Europe as well as the Inns of Court in London may have given rise to the strand of civic humanism detected in their engagement with political and social reform in the earlier Tudor period. Signs of religious renewal inspired by northern Renaissance spirituality may be seen in pre-Reformation lay devotional practice among the older English community, while the upsurge of observant mendicantism in the Gaelic regions from about 1450 bore the hallmarks of the reformed piety and culture of the late medieval Italian city-states.
