Historical revisit: Mythistory and the making of Ireland: Alice Stopford Green's undoing

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (166) ◽  
pp. 349-373
Author(s):  
Angus Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Transnational Networks ◽  
Collective Consciousness ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
National Tradition ◽  
United Front ◽  
Medieval Ireland ◽  
Historical Practice

AbstractThe publication in 1908 of The making of Ireland and its undoing, 1200–1600 by the London-based Irish historian, Alice Stopford Green, provoked a controversy that reveals much about the deepening political tensions at the heart of historical practice in the decade before 1916. Stopford Green took a deliberately controversial approach to the rewriting of medieval Ireland that triggered a bombardment of both positive and negative reactions. Supporters of Irish home rule applauded the work for its innovative analysis and contemporary relevance. But the book elicited a flurry of exasperation from a united front of ‘history men’, who dismissed Stopford Green and her work as ‘political’ and largely fictitious. Anticipating the reaction from a profession that was predominantly sympathetic to a unionist interpretation, Stopford Green had a well-prepared plan that harnessed both her gender and her transnational networks of influence to maximise the dissemination of her radical reimagining of the late medieval Gaelic world. By understanding these deeper strategies of defiance, Alice Stopford Green's history might be reclaimed as a key intervention in the structuring of both Ireland's national tradition and collective consciousness in preparation for independence.

scholarly journals Historical revisit: Edmund Curtis, A history of medieval Ireland (1923, 1938)

1999 ◽  
Vol 31 (124) ◽  
pp. 535-548 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Lydon
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Free State ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
History Of ◽  
Irish Free State ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Medieval Ireland

These verses were written by the Irish poet to express his grief at the impact of the Williamite victory at the battle of the Boyne and all that followed for Ireland. They were chosen two hundred years later by the historian Edmund Curtis to make clear his attitude towards Ireland’s past. In 1923, just after home rule was secured for what was officially known as Saorstát Éireann (Irish Free State), he published his history of medieval Ireland, and where a dedication would normally be printed he inserted ‘The Absentee Lordship’ and followed it with these verses. In doing this, Curtis left no doubt that in his view medieval Ireland was a lordship wrongfully attached to the English crown and that it should rightfully have been a kingdom under its own native dynastic ruler. For this he was subsequently denounced as unhistorical, and to this day, especially in the view of the so-called revisionists, he is commonly regarded as not only out of date, but dangerous as well. It was argued that Curtis used the medieval past to justify the emergence of a self-governing state in Ireland. To quote just one example, Steven Ellis, the best of the medieval revisionists, wrote in 1987 that ‘historians like Edmund Curtis concentrated on such topics as friction between the Westminster and Dublin governments, the Gaelic revival, the Great Earl uncrowned king of Ireland, the blended race and the fifteenth-century home rule movement’.

scholarly journals Select document: Exchequer malpractice in late medieval Ireland: a petition from Christopher Fleming, Lord Slane, 1438

2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (143) ◽  
pp. 407-417
Author(s):  
Malcolm Mercer
Keyword(s):  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Family ◽  
National Archives ◽  
Public Record ◽  
Medieval Ireland

Preserved amongst the Chancery masters’ exhibits at the National Archives of the U.K., formerly known as the Public Record Office, is a box of documents concerning the Fleming family, Lords Slane, in Ireland. These papers, dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, relate primarily to a protracted inheritance dispute between the heirs male and heirs general of Christopher Fleming, Lord Slane, who died in 1458. This case had been brought into the English Chancery because the family were also landowners in Devon and Cornwall, and it had then rumbled on for decades. Within this box, however, there is also a parchment roll containing a number of entries relating to their Irish lands. The eighth item on this roll is especially interesting.

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