The Cooper's Wife Is Missing: The Trials Of Bridget Cleary
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
On March 15, 1895, twenty-eight year old Bridget Cleary, a cooper's wife, disappeared from her cottage in rural County Tipperary. Immediately, strange and lurid rumors began circulating the neighborhood about what had happened. Some said she ran off with an egg seller; others supposed it was an aristocratic foxhunter who had taken young Bridget away. Swirling amid rumors was the barely whispered, but widely held, belief that Bridget had gone with no mortal man; rather, she had gone off with the fairies. The mystery deepened when seven days later her body was discovered, bent, broken and badly burned in a shallow grave. Within a few days, the unimaginable truth came to light: for almost a week before her death Bridget had been confined, ritually starved, threatened, physically and verbally abused, exorcised, and, finally, burned to death by her husband, Michael Cleary, her father, and extended family who confused bronchitis with a "fairy dart." They had all become convinced that "their Bridgie" had been taken from them and her fairy-possessed body left behind to deceive them. In The Cooper's Wife Is Missing, Joan Hoff and Marian Yeates make sense of this ancient, rarely publicized, ritual exorcism and explain how the incident went on to become a national and international incident. Set against a backdrop of renewed Irish nationalism, a Church crackdown on lingering pagan practices and the ongoing British humiliation of Catholic Ireland, the authors deftly map the dislocating anxieties that beset the rural peasantry in late nineteenth-century Ireland. Bewildered and frightened by the changes occurring all around them, pulled in all directions by their politicians, priests, landlords and English overlords, the Clearys were not alone in retreating to the relative comfort of pagan ritual. Drawing on first-hand accounts, contemporary newspaper reports, police records, trial testimony and a rich wealth of folklore, the authors weave a mesmerizing tale that touches upon magic, madness and mystery as it details, day by day, Bridget's ordeal and the resulting investigation. This is narrative history at its evocative best. It fascinates as it illuminates.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One of two books this season on the legendary death in 1895 of an Irish country woman, this account illuminates more broadly "how Ireland suffered, how she struggled and what she faced in her fight to win her freedom." In contrast to linguist Angela Bourke's The Burning of Bridget Cleary (see below), historians Hoff (of the University of Toledo and author of Nixon Reconsidered) and Yeates (an independent scholar with a Ph.D. from Indiana University) use Cleary's death to reconstruct a primarily political history. They begin by describing the "rebellious South Tipperary" of 1895. Still reeling from the Great Famine and the bloody Land Wars of the 1880s, Tipperary was tightly structured, on one side, by the landlords and the British government and, on the other, by the Catholic Church and a poor, nationalistic and fairy-believing peasantry. Against this backdrop lived the cooper Michael Cleary and his wife, Bridget. A pretty and independent woman, Bridget was "a bit queer." She had her own income and, after almost eight years of marriage, she was childless. When she fell ill, her husband, convinced his real wife had been abducted by a fairy and that a changeling remained in her place, began a grueling ritual meant to exorcise the changeling--but which, instead, led to Bridget's death by burning. Placing the testimony from Michael Cleary's murder trial at the center of their account, Hoff and Yeates meticulously dissect the days leading up to Bridget's death--and present a subtle account of the interpersonal, economic, political and sociological tensions that surrounded it. Meanwhile, they deliver a series of wonderful profiles of "testy" nationalists like the archbishop of Cashel, Thomas William Croke, and the revolutionary politician Charles Stewart Parnell. (And their outstanding first chapter contains an excellent analysis of Irish history and the Catholic Church 1858-1895.) Heavily footnoted--but lively--this volume brings new clarity and perspective to an important moment in Irish history.