‘The Rebels Turkish Tyranny’: Understanding Sexual Violence in Ireland during the 1640s

Abstract

This article analyses gendered violence both in the testimonies of English Protestant settlers displaced during the 1641 Irish rebellion and in the pamphlets written shortly afterwards. It argues that, given the settlers’ anxiety to highlight their vulnerability and innocence in the face of perceived native Irish barbarism, sexual violence with its suggestions of possible female acquiescence or complicity had an insecure place in their testimonies. Yet contemporary pamphlet writers described the rape of Protestant women as widespread and indiscriminate, using such narratives to question the masculinity of Catholic Irish men. By investigating personal testimonies of the sexual violence suffered by women, as well as the subsequent use of such information in narratives sensationalising the ordeal of Protestants in Ireland in 1641, the complex meanings attached to sexual violence during the mid‐seventeenth century can be better appreciated.

A new age or just the same old cycle of extirpation? Massacre and the 1798 Irish rebellion

“…As a consequence thousands of Protestant men, women and children were massacred. 23 During the 1790s Irish Protestants thought they knew a great deal about what had happened to their ancestors in 1641, for, while the rebellion was still in progress, the authorities began collecting large numbers of sworn witness statements describing, often graphically, the cruel sufferings of the Protestant community. 24 These depositions informed a substantial account of the rebellion published in London in 1646, entitled The Irish Rebellion, and written by John Temple, an Irish Protestant lawyer and MP.…”

Lexico-grammatical portraits of vulnerable women in war

“…The 1641 rebellion, like other catastrophic events of the seventeenth century (e.g. the Gunpowder Plot), "generated anti-Catholic texts that were part of a developing narrative of English history" (Marotti 2005: 132), and a key component of this anti-Catholicism, particularly in political texts, was the construction of Catholicism as conflated with barbarity and inhumanity (Hall and Malcolm 2010). Thus, it could be argued that the tendency to place such emphasis on representations of violence against women and children in the contemporary texts is a recognisable propaganda tool by which the rising Irish were portrayed as particularly cruel and barbaric (McAreavey 2010), thereby producing more persuasive grounds for support of the radical suppression of the rebellion.…”

Progress, challenges and opportunities in early modern gender history, c.1550–1720

“…61 Reluctance on the part of victims to speak about rape mean it is difficult to recover the extent of sexual violence, and narratives of rape are sometimes 'about' men rather than womenemblematic of the extremity of the violence suffered, or used 'to impugn the masculinity of Irish men'. 62 The 'dispersed archive' that can allow us to explore violence against women and its personal impact is being combed by Valerie McGowan Doyle, Elizabeth Malcolm and Dianne Hall. 63 Some horrific stories survive.…”