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Nationalism is a particularly slippery subject to define and
understand, particularly when applied to early modern Europe. In
this collection of essays, Brendan Bradshaw provides an insight
into how concepts of 'nationalism' and 'national identity' can be
understood and applied to pre-modern Ireland. Drawing upon a
selection of his most provocative and pioneering essays, together
with three entirely new pieces, the limits and contexts of Irish
nationalism are explored and its impact on both early modern
society and later generations, examined. The collection reflects
especially upon the emergence of national consciousness in Ireland
during a calamitous period when the late-medieval, undeveloped
sense of a collective identity became suffused with patriotic
sentiment and acquired a political edge bound up with notions of
national sovereignty and representative self-government. The volume
opens with a discussion of the historical methods employed, and an
extended introductory essay tracing the history of national
consciousness in Ireland from its first beginnings as recorded in
the poetry of the early Christian Church to its early-modern
flowering, which provides the context for the case studies
addressed in the subsequent chapters. These range across a wealth
of subjects, including comparisons of Tudor Wales and Ireland,
Irish reactions to the 'Westward Enterprise', the Ulster Rising of
1641, the Elizabethans and the Irish, and the two sieges of
Limerick. The volume concludes with a transcription and discussion
of 'A Treatise for the Reformation of Ireland, 1554-5'. The result
of a lifetime's study, this volume offers a rich and rewarding
journey through a turbulent yet fascinating period of Irish
history, not only illuminating political and religious developments
within Ireland, but also how these affected events across the
British Isles and beyond.
This collection makes a special contribution to the development of the "new British history"--which seeks to explore in a comparative framework the history of the national entities that constitute the two islands of the Atlantic Archipelago. The contributors represent the four constituent national communities, and their essays provide a further corrective to the Anglocentric bias of traditional British history. Generally the book sheds light on current debates concerning "the Union" and devolution as well as on Britain's historic and continuing "Irish problem."
In this volume of essays a group of historians and literary critics
debate the representation of early modern Ireland by English
Renaissance authors. The contributions deal both with modes of
representation - aesthetic, geographic, literary, political, visual
- and with the biographies of representative individuals. Thus
historical commentary and textual analysis go hand-in-hand with
biography and chronology. The essays are interdisciplinary,
combining traditional methods of literary and historical enquiry
with a range of new theoretical approaches to texts and their
authors. There are discussions of the work of major writers
including John Bale, Gabriel Harvey, Barnaby Googe, Edmund Spenser,
John Milton and Geoffrey Keating in the context of Irish politics
from the Reformation to the Restoration.
This book assembles ten special studies, each devoted to an aspect
of Fisher's multifaceted career or to exploring the intellectual
and religious outlook of someone who was at the same time a
moderniser, a reformer and an opponent of the Reformation. John
Fisher's career provides an illuminating perspective on English
religious and intellectual history in a crucial phase of
development. As a churchman he became the foremost preacher in
England, issuing a call to ecclesiastical reform and personal
repentance that echoed the call of Savonarola at Florence. At the
same time he provides an early example of the pastoral bishop that
was to become the ideal of both the Reformation and the Counter
Reformation. Finally in the crisis that paved the way for the
English Reformation, he became the leading defender of Queen
Catherine against the divorce suit of Henry VIII. He was among the
small band who were executed in 1535 as conscientious objectors to
the oaths of Succession and Royal Ecclesiastical Supremacy. He has
been venerated as a Catholic martyr ever since.
Historiography has highlighted Ireland's sixteenth-century
rebellions and ignored its revolution. The transformation of the
island's political personality in the course of the middle Tudor
period must be the last remarked-upon change in its whole history.
Yet it might be claimed to be the most remarkable. It provided
Ireland with its first sovereign constitution, gave it for the
first time an ideology of nationalism, and proposed a practical
political objective which has inspired and eluded a host of
political movements ever since: the unification of the island's
pluralistic community into a coherent political entity. The reason
for the neglect lies partly in another remarkable feature of the
revolution itself, the circumstances of its accomplishment. it was
engineered by Anglo-Irish politicians, in collaboration with an
English head of government in Ireland, and by constitutional means,
in particular by parliamentary statute.
Father Bradshaw examines the dissolution of the religious orders in
Ireland as an episode of Irish ecclesiastical and political
history, and of the English Reformation. He also analyses its
relationship to Henry VIII's Irish policy as a whole and to the
beginnings of English colonialism. He discusses in detail the state
of the religious orders on the eve of suppression, the extent of
opposition to the implementation of the suppression policy in all
its stages, the secularisation of monastic lands and the results of
dissolution for Irish society and for subsequent Irish history.
Despite the sensitive issues involved, Catholic, Protestant and
academic historians have shown remarkable unanimity in the
interpretation of the episode of the dissolution in Ireland. A
thorough knowledge of both primary and secondary sources enables
Father Bradshaw to challenge many of the conventional assumptions.
This collection makes a special contribution to the development of the "new British history"--which seeks to explore in a comparative framework the history of the national entities that constitute the two islands of the Atlantic Archipelago. The contributors represent the four constituent national communities, and their essays provide a further corrective to the Anglocentric bias of traditional British history. Generally the book sheds light on current debates concerning "the Union" and devolution as well as on Britain's historic and continuing "Irish problem."
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