Discusses the reactions of seventeenth and eighteenth-century writers of Irish history to the unprecedented turbulence of the age. Ireland and the Irish, it is often argued, have been mired for centuries in mindsets which employ the past in order to trace and justify the enmities of the present. However, as Constructing the Past: Writing Irish History 1600-1800 seeks to underscore, the truth of such interactions with the Irish past is far more complex and dynamic. Spanning two hundred years of history, this book finds a relationship with the past which is as adaptive as it is rigid, as iconoclastic as it is reactionary. Beginning with an Introduction by Roy Foster, this innovative volume incorporates a wide range of perspectives on how history in Ireland has been written and perceived from the early-modern period onward. Drawing upon both key moments - including the Cromwellian invasion, the 1688 Revolution and 1798, to name a few - as well as forgotten incidents, each article discusses the ways in which the presentationof the past in Ireland has been forged by the circumstances of its writers and context of those memories. Drawing upon contributions by both highly accomplished and up-and-coming historians of Ireland, Britain and Europe, Constructing the Past seeks to illuminate how the Irish past has been constructed, torn down and again rebuilt by the Irish and historians of Ireland alike. STEPHEN PAUL FORREST serves as the Director of Operations forthe Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation; MARK WILLIAMS is currently reading for a Doctorate in Modern European History at Hertford College, Oxford.

This fascinating and innovative study explores the lives of people living in early modern Ireland through the books and printed ephemera which they bought, borrowed or stole from others. While the importance of books and printing in influencing the outlook of early modern people is well known, recent years have seen significant changes in our understanding of how writing and print shaped lives, and was in turn shaped by those who appropriated the written word. The author finds that a set of revolutions took place which transformed the lives of the Irish in unexpected ways, and that the rise of writing and the spread of print were central to an understanding of those changes which have previously only been understood to have been the result of conquest and colonisation. This is a book which will be read not only by those interested in the Irish past but by all those who are concerned with the impact of communications media on social change. -- .

Dublin: Renaissance city of literature interrogates the notion of a literary 'renaissance' in Dublin. Through detailed case studies of print and literature in Renaissance Dublin, the volume covers innovative new ground, including quantitative analysis of print production in Ireland, unique insight into the city's literary communities and considerations of literary genres that flourished in early modern Dublin. The volume's broad focus and extended timeline offer an unprecedented and comprehensive consideration of the features of renaissance that may be traced to the city from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. With contributions from leading scholars in the area of early modern Ireland, including Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield, students and academics will find the book an invaluable resource for fully appreciating those elements that contributed to the complex literary character of Dublin as a Renaissance city of literature. -- .

In this collection of essays, a range of established and early-career scholars explore a variety of different perspectives on Oliver Cromwell’s involvement with Ireland, in particular his military campaign of 1649-1650. In England and Wales Cromwell is regarded as a figure of national importance; in Ireland his reputation remains highly controversial. The essays gathered together here provide a fresh take on his Irish campaign, reassessing the backdrop and context of the prevailing siege warfare strategy and offering new insights into other major players such as Henry Ireton and the Marquis of Ormond. Other topics include, but are not limited to, the Cromwellian land settlement, deportation of prisoners and popular memory of Cromwell in Ireland. Overall, a picture emerges of a more moderate Cromwell than the version that has been passed down in Irish history, tradition and folklore. CONTRIBUTORS: Martyn Bennett, Heidi J. Coburn, Sarah Covington, John Cunningham, Eamon Darcy, David Farr, Padraig Lenihan, Alan Marshall, Nick Poyntz, Tom Reilly, James Scott Wheeler

In this collection of essays, a range of established and early-career scholars explore a variety of different perspectives on Oliver Cromwell's involvement with Ireland, in particular his military campaign of 1649-1650. In England and Wales Cromwell is regarded as a figure of national importance; in Ireland his reputation remains highly controversial. The essays gathered together here provide a fresh take on his Irish campaign, reassessing the backdrop and context of the prevailing siege warfare strategy and offering new insights into other major players such as Henry Ireton and the Marquis of Ormond. Other topics include, but are not limited to, the Cromwellian land settlement, deportation of prisoners and popular memory of Cromwell in Ireland. Overall, a picture emerges of a more moderate Cromwell than the version that has been passed down in Irish history, tradition and folklore. CONTRIBUTORS: Martyn Bennett, Heidi J. Coburn, Sarah Covington, John Cunningham, Eamon Darcy, David Farr, Padraig Lenihan, Alan Marshall, Nick Poyntz, Tom Reilly, James Scott Wheeler

The Oxford History of the Irish Book is a major new series that charts the development of the book in Ireland from its origins within an early medieval manuscript culture to its current incarnation alongside the rise of digital media in the twenty-first century.
Volume III: The Irish Book in English, 1550-1800 contains a series of groundbreaking essays that seek to explain the fortunes of printed word from the early Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century. The essays in section one explain the development of print culture in the period, from its first incarnation in the small area of the English Pale around Dublin, dominated by the interests of the English authorities, to the more widespread dispersal of the printing press at the close of the eighteenth century, when provincial presses developed their own character and style either alongside or as a challenge to the dominant intellectual culture. Section two explains the crucial developments in the structure and technical innovation of the print trade; the role played by private and public collections of books; and the evidence of changing reading practices throughout the period. The third and longest section explores the impact of the rise of print. Essays examine the effect that the printed book had on religious and political life in Ireland, providing a case study of the impact of the French Revolution on pamphlets and propaganda in Ireland; the transformations illustrated in the history of historical writing, as well as in literature and the theatre, through the publication of play texts for a wide audience. Others explore the impact that print had on the history of science and the production of foreign language books.The volume concludes with an authoritative bibliographical essay outlining the sources that exist for the study of the book in early modern Ireland. This is an authoritative volume with essays by key scholars that will be the standard guide for many years to come.

Biographical studies of the two Dukes of Ormonde illuminate aspects of the operation of political power in seventeenth-century Ireland, and, on a wider European stage, the predicaments facing the nobility. A valuable insight into the political and material world of Ireland's leading aristocratic family. HISTORY For much of their lives the two dukes of Ormonde dominated public events in Ireland, where they served the English sovereign as viceroy five times; they were also powerful presences in the Stuart court in England, and commanded armies both in Ireland and Europe. Later, they spent long periods on the continent as travellers and exiles. Yetdespite their importance in the public life of the age, neither duke has been the subject of a full modern biography, a gap which this collection of essays aims to fill, using key episodes and phases in the Ormondes' careers to investigate the larger picture. The dukes' lives as great nobles, landowners and converts to Protestantism raise problems specific to Ireland, but they also exemplify the predicament of nobles elsewhere in Europe. A particular focusis on the worlds that they and their wives created, often innovative and always dazzling, and on the clienteles who looked to them for preferment and on which a part of the Ormondes' political weight rested. Throughout, much newlight is cast on such vexed questions as the troubled and constantly changing relationship between Ireland and England, between public and private interests, and the roles of women. Dr TOBY BARNARD teaches at the University of Oxford. Contributors: G.E. AYLMER, T.C. BARNARD, EVELINE CRUICKSHANKS, DAVID EDWARDS, JANE FENLON, RAYMOND GILLESPIE, DAVID HAYTON, PATRICK LITTLE, RENE MOULINAS, EAMONN - CIARDHA, NATHALIE GENET ROUFFIAC

In this volume a group of distinguished moral and social thinkers address the urgent problem of terrorism. The essays define terrorism, discuss whether the assessment of terrorist violence should be based on its consequences (beneficial or otherwise), and explore what means may be used to combat those who use violence without justification. Among other questions raised by the volume are: What does it mean for a people to be innocent of the acts of their government? May there not be some justification in terrorists targeting certain victims but not others? May terrorist acts be attributed to groups or to states? The collection will be of particular interest to moral and political philosophers, political scientists, legal theorists, and students of international studies and conflict resolution.

The experience of the Irish abroad has been a vibrant and exciting area of scholarly research in recent years. Most of the research has chronicled the political, military, and religious experience of Irish men and women who left Ireland in the 17th and 18th centuries. This book complements that research by focusing on the experience of meeting new cultures as the emigrants ventured across Europe. Included in the themes covered are the impact of the new world that they discovered on their language, their ways of practicing scholarship, the impact of print on a predominantly oral culture, and their encounter with towns by those who came from an overwhelmingly rural background. Deploying a wide range of new evidence, these essays open up questions of cultural encounter that have not been explored hitherto. This is the fifth volume in the Irish in Europe series and, like its predecessors, opens new perspectives on the experience of the Irish abroad in the early modern world. (Series: Irish in Europe - Vol. 5)

Adrian Empey: The medieval parish: a school for laity Colm Lennon: The formation of a lay community in the Church of Ireland, 1580-1647 T.C. Barnard: Piety 'too masculine, too much governed by right reason'? Lay people and the Church of Ireland, 1647-1780 Patrick Comerford: A silent laity in the days of a silken prelacy and a slumbering priesthood? Lay people, 1780-1830 W.G. Neely: Reform and reorganisation: the laity and the Irish church, 1830-1870 Kenneth Milne: the laity in the twentieth century David Hayton: The development and limitations of Protestant ascendancy: the Church of Ireland laity in public life, 1660-1740 Jacqueline Hill: The Church of Ireland laity and the public sphere, 1740- 1869 Martin Maguire: 'Our people': the Church of Ireland laity and the language of community in Dublin since Disestablishment Raymond Gillespie: Lay spirituality and worship, 1558-1800 John Paterson: Lay spirituality and worship, 1800-1900 Stephen McBride: The laity in the church: church building, 1000-2000

In this book, 13 distinguished historians of early modern Ireland recreate the lost world of those who carved out a middle position between the aristocracy and the tenantry of provincial Ireland. These essays chart the sometimes uneasy relationships between local and wider worlds, consider the societies that those in provincial Ireland made for themselves, and document the material goods with which they adorned the places they occupied. The book considers aspects of the long 18th century, as diverse as music, wine consumption, buildings, paintings, plasterwork, and print, as well as the better-known subjects of the law, landlord improvement, and literary patronage. It builds a fascinating picture of a restless society trying to adapt itself to the needs of a complex and divided world. It provides new insights and perspectives on a world that is usually seen through the windows of the Parliament House or the Episcopal Palace. In doing so, the book reveals much about the texture of a world that is gradually coming to be understood as the fascinating and complex society in which the middling sort sought their own salvation in a vortex of political, economic, and religious change.