The Cooper's Wife Is Missing: The Trials Of Bridget Cleary - Softcover

Hoff, Joan; Yates, Marian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0465030882 ISBN 13: 9780465030880

Publisher: Basic Books, 2001

Synopsis

In 1895 twenty-six-year-old Bridget Cleary disappeared from her cottage in rural County Tipperary and remained missing for several days. At last her body was discovered, bent, broken, and badly burned in a shallow grave. Within a few days, her unimaginable story came to light: for almost a week before her death she had been confined, starved, threatened, physically and verbally abused, exorcised, and finally burned to death by her husband, father, aunt, cousins, and neighbors, who had collectively confused a simple flu with possession by the fairies. In The Cooper's Wife Is Missing, Joan Hoff and Marian Yeates try to make sense of this outlandish, unfathomable, medieval "trial" and murder. Drawing on firsthand accounts, contemporary newspaper reports, police records, trial testimony, and a rich wealth of folklore, they weave a mesmerizing fireside tale of magic, madness, and mystery. This is narrative history at its evocative best.

About this title

About the Author:

Joan Hoff is Director of the Contemporary History Institute of the University of Ohio, Athens. She is the author of Nixon Reconsidered and Law, Gender, and Injustice.

Marian Yeates has a Ph.D. in American History from Indiana University. She writes from her home in Island Park, Idaho.

From 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 changelingAbut 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 deathAand 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 footnotedAbut livelyAthis volume brings new clarity and perspective to an important moment in Irish history. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0465030882
• ISBN 13: 9780465030880
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464