Labour, Love and Prayer: Female Piety in Ulster Religious Literature, 1850–1914 by Andrea Ebel Brożyna (review)

Reviews: Leirmheasanna Labour, Love and Prayer: Female Piety in Ulster Religious Literature, 1850-1914, by Andrea Ebel Brozyna, pp. 296. Montreal: Magill-Queen's University Press, 1999. $65. In Labour, Love and Prayer, Andrea Ebel Brozyna examines the ideal of female piety propounded in the religious periodicals, pamphlets, and sermons that circulated in Ulster during the period when it became the Protestant and Unionist heartland of Ireland. While Brozyna reviews both Protestant and Roman Catholic literature, her study is based mainly on Protestant material because of the paucity of local Catholic sources. Much of the Protestant literature discussed was actually produced in Ulster, while practically all the Catholic sources were published in Dublin or London. Brozyna presents her main findings in seven detailed thematic chapters that discuss the cult of domesticity, the use of the Virgin Mary and the biblical women as models, the ideas of female education, roles for women in the church, and women in temperance and missionary literature. The fundamentally domestic and maternal ideal of female spirituality promulgated throughout this literature across denominational lines will be familiar to students of nineteenth century women's history. Written by and for middle-class men and women, this discourse barely admits the existence of single women outside of convents, let alone the fact and necessity of paid work for many women. Naturally both more pious and more liable to temptation than men, women are enjoined to obedience, humility, and acceptance ofGod's will. Awomen's primary task is to raise and educate her children in the Christian Way, and to support lovingly her husband and male relatives. It is by their own example, their domestic labor and their support for circumscribed church activities, rather than by their participation in the public sphere as preachers, politicians, or scholars that women make their greatest contribution to their churches and their communities. Overall, Brozyna provides sensitive and nuanced readings of the different shades of representation and occasional voices of dissent within this large body of literature. She proves conclusively that Ulster women shared an evangelical ideal of domestic female spirituality with their British sisters and middle-class women throughout the English-speaking world. Brozyna expresses surprise that Protestants and Catholics espoused similar ideas ofthe "womanlywoman;' despite their attempts to portray each other as unnatural and anti-female. Given their shared cultural context, however, it is difficult to conceive what alternative model Irish Christian women would have used in place of the dominant British bourgeois ideal. Reviews: Leirmheasanna Within this pious literature, the Other for the Protestant woman is the specter of the superstitious, priest-ridden or drunken Catholic "biddy." The Catholic literature, on the other hand, is rnore concerned with defining the larger secular and material British culture as the inferior, irreligious Other. Brozyna hints in Labour, Love and Prayer that there is a relationship between the construction of the ideal of female piety and political identity during this period of intense social and political change in Ireland. Because the narrative is thematically rather than chronologicallydriven, however, it is impossible to sort out and evaluate her rnost provocative and intriguing suggestions. "-' MICHELE O'NEILL Green English: Ireland's Influence on the English Language, by Loreto Todd, pp. 159. Dublin: The O'Brien Press, [Minneapolis: Irish Books and Medial, 1999. $25.95. "Green English is a grafted tongue, an English foliage on an Irish stern, still nourished by an Irish root;' writes Loreto Todd in her examination of how the language of Ireland's colonizers nearly succeeded in ousting Irish Gaelic-but not without being influenced by it. Todd's contention about the worldwide influence ofIrish English admittedly runs counter to the claims of scholars of the history of the English language that "outside of place names ... the influence of Celtic upon the English language is almost negligible." The settlement of Ireland by English speakers from Scotland and England produced a variety of Scots English known as Planter English, which takes two main forms: AngloIrish and a variety of Scots English known as Ulster Scots. Hiberno-English refers specifically to the English spoken by people whose ancestral mother tongue was Irish, and is strongest in the Gaetachtai, rural areas, and isolated mountain regions. Observing...

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