Sources for Early Modern Irish History 1534-1641

1987 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 74
Author(s):  
Hereward Senior ◽  
R. W. Dudley Edwards ◽  
Mary O'Dowd
Keyword(s):  
2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-169
Author(s):  
Bradford A. Anderson

Abstract In spite of Ireland’s rich and complex religious history, the influence of the Old Testament in the shaping of the island is often overlooked. This study traces the use and reception of the Old Testament in Ireland through the centuries, focusing on stories of transmission, translation, and unexpected influence. In early Christian and medieval Ireland, the transmission of the Old Testament in diverse contexts points to an important role for the Old Testament in relation to social formation and notions of Irish history. Moving to early modern Ireland, the story of the translation of the Old Testament into Irish demonstrates how this collection contributed to contested issues of identity in this highly-charged era. Finally, we encounter stories of unexpected influence relating to Ireland and the Old Testament in James Ussher and John Nelson Darby. In both cases, ideas concerning the Old Testament that took shape in Ireland would go on to have impact on a global scale, even if this subsequent influence was a matter of accidence. Taken together, it is argued that the Old Testament has played a much more prominent role in the shaping of the social, cultural, and religious landscape of Ireland than is often assumed.


2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 723-747 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICHOLAS CANNY

The professionalization of history in Ireland resulted from the 1930s effort of T. W. Moody and R. Dudley Edwards to fuse writing on Irish history with a received version of the history of early modern England. This enterprise enhanced the academic standing of work on early modern Ireland, but it also insulated professional history in Ireland from the debates that enlivened historical discourse in England and continental Europe. Those who broke from this restriction, notably D. B. Quinn, Hugh Kearney, and Aidan Clarke, made significant contributions to the conceptualization of the histories of colonial British America, early modern England, and Scotland. These achievements were challenged by the New British History turn which, for the early modern period, has transpired to be no more than traditional English political history in mufti. None the less, writing on the histories of Ireland, Scotland, and colonial British America has endured and even flourished. Such endeavour has succeeded where the focus has been on people rather than places, where authors have been alert to cross-cultural encounters, where they have identified their subject as part of European or global history, and where they have rejected the compartmentalization of political from social and economic history. The success of such authors should encourage practitioners of both English history and the New British History to follow their examples for the benefit of endeavours which will always be complementary.


1994 ◽  
Vol 29 (114) ◽  
pp. 174-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Caball

The depth of change which the country experienced in the reign of James I has become an axiom of early modern Irish historiography. The extension of crown government throughout the island, the flight of the northern earls, the subsequent plantation in Ulster and the putative religious reformation of the indigenous inhabitants contributed to a climate of flux and tension. The burgeoning scholarly interest in this phase of Irish history has resulted in a more detailed understanding of administrative, political, regional and religious trends in the period. Progress has also been made in the study of contemporary mentalities. An interesting development has been the use of sources in the Irish language for the reconstruction of previously obscure intellectual currents amongst the Gaelic élite. The recent appearance of Michelle O Riordan’s monograph on the Gaelic reaction to the collapse of traditional society represents the fullest exposition yet of an interpretation which has characterised the early modern Gaelic ideological response to conquest and social change as fundamentally passive and backward-looking. O Riordan has, in effect, elaborated upon the conclusions of preceding commentators, notably Tom Dunne and Bernadette Cunningham, in portraying the Gaelic understanding of socio-political transformation as lacking in critical perception. This essay is intended as a further contribution to the elucidation of the mental climate of the time. More particularly, it will focus on two themes which figured prominently in the separate, but in this instance similar, communal reactions of the Gaelic Irish and the New English settlers to their respective political and social environments.


2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (139) ◽  
pp. 365-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan J. Fletcher

The purpose of this article is to make generally available for the first time a document whose content and context introduce their peculiar leaven to our understanding of a pivotal moment of early modern Irish history, the eve of the collapse of the authority of the ruling peace faction within the Kilkenny-based Confederation of Irish Catholics. The occasion of the document was the official visit to Kilkenny of James Butler, marquis of Ormond, some time near the end of August 1646. This took place at a time when rivalries within the Confederation were running high and the struggle to determine the Confederation’s effective political constituency was coming to a head. While a good case could be made for publication of the document on other grounds — in comprising Ireland’s earliest known surviving example of a speech of civic welcome addressed to a visiting dignitary, it is of special interest to the department of Irish social history concerned with civic performance, pageantry and public display — this is not the aspect chiefly pursued here. Rather, in addition to publishing the speech, this article attempts to reconstruct the circumstances of its delivery and some of the elements of the larger event in which it centrally participated, before considering the construction that the speech and its circumstances strove to put upon a volatile political situation in the hope — vain, as it proved — of containing it. As an adjunct to its interest in the Confederation’s large-scale public dimensionings of party policy, the article also presents in an appendix another document similarly hitherto unpublished, a set of verses posted upon the gates of Kilkenny at a time when the General Assembly was sitting. The assembly in question, probably the seventh, ran from January to April 1647. The city-gate verses appear with the civic entry speech in the unique manuscript in which it has been preserved.


2000 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-586
Author(s):  
KARL BOTTIGHEIMER

The Irish Reformation remains a troubled subject, and not from lack of recent scholarly attention. It has attracted an abundance of high-quality work, but its vexed nature as a topic is illuminated by a long, authoritative essay published in 1998 by Brendan Bradshaw, one of the foremost students of early-modern Irish history. The essay is entitled ‘The English Reformation and identity formation in Ireland and Wales’, as befits the volume in which it appeared: British consciousness and identity: the making of Britain, 1533–1707. But the pageheads of the sixty-nine-page article call it ‘The Reformation in Ireland’, and this is a much more accurate description of its contents, as even its author might agree.Whether denominated ‘The Irish Reformation’ or ‘The Reformation in Ireland’, the event lacks the familiarity of historical chestnuts like the Congress of Vienna or The Thirty-Years War, well-worn, frequently-taught subjects (at least in the old canon of European history) about which there was a modicum of consensus, sufficient at least to allow them to be discussed. But in order for events to be debated, there needs to be agreement that they happened, and in that respect the Irish Reformation is something of a non-starter.


Author(s):  
Crawford Gribben

The Irish history of religious nonconformity, dissent, and toleration is distinctive. Protestant nonconformity and dissent in early modern Ireland was both energized and enervated by its relationships to the Established Church, the majority Catholic population, and the changing political environments of the neighbouring island and the religious loyalties of its governments and royal families. In securing the rights of the Church by law established, bishops were unable to prohibit the worship of the most important groups of Protestant nonconformists, who seemed continually to grow in numbers, wealth, and influence. The English Toleration Act (1689) made little difference to the circumstances of Irish Protestant Dissenters, and although they benefited from James’s Declaration of Indulgence (1687) and the granting of limited rights for Dissenters under the Irish Toleration Act (1719), their access to the opportunities of public service was only guaranteed with the removal of the sacramental test in 1780.


2010 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 762-768
Author(s):  
Andrew Hadfield
Keyword(s):  

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