‘And so began the Irish Nation’: Nationality, National Consciousness and Nationalism in Pre-modern Ireland by Brendan Bradshaw (review)

Abstract

Book Review ‘And so began the Irish Nation’: Nationality, National Consciousness and Nationalism in Pre-modern Ireland, Brendan Bradshaw (Surrey and Burlington: Ashgate, 2015), 318 pages. In the Irish parliament of 1536, legislation was passed which marked the introduction of the Reformation in Ireland, and the designation of the Church of Ireland as the Church ‘as by law established’. In 1969, almost fifty years ago, an article by Brendan Bradshaw on that parliament appeared. Thus began an academic output which has revolutionised our understanding of sixteenth century Ireland, largely by focusing on the political thought of those reformers from within the older colonial community, subsequently known as theAngloIrish . The high point of that local reform tradition, Bradshaw has shown in his book The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (1979), was the act for the kingly title of 1541. The constitutional status of Ireland changed from that of medieval lordship, effectively embracing the Pale and, in a much weaker sense, the great dynasties of Ormond and Desmond, to that of kingdom, covering the entire island, and including all the inhabitants as subjects of the English king. Almost as a by-product of that research, Bradshaw produced a groundbreaking study of one of the Reformation’s consequences, entitled The Dissolution of the Monasteries in Ireland under Henry VIII (1974). To these book-length studies may be added several seminal articles, including an exploration of the outbreak of the Kildare rebellion of 1534. This body of work, rooted in the approach of the Cambridge scholar G R Elton to the Tudor state, served to integrate the study of mid-sixteenth century Ireland into the mainstream of historical research and publication. As editor of five edited essay collections, Bradshaw contributed to the study of the emergence of the British state, leading to a reconfiguration of its early modern history by bringing the interplay between the constituent kingdoms into sharper focus. The year of Bradshaw’s first publication, 1969, marked the outbreak of the Northern troubles in Ireland. Among the groupings involved in the decades of violenceweretheIRA,drawingonahistoricsenseofnationalistgrievanceanda militarist republican genealogy. For professional historians, revulsion at the IRA campaign led to a questioning of the nationalist historical tradition. A process Studies • volume 106 • number 424 493 Book Review: Winter 2017/18 of deconstruction got underway. ‘Revisionism’ entered public discourse. In an article in 1989 (reproduced in this book), Bradshaw offered a wide-ranging critique of the ‘revisionist’trend in recent Irish historiography. Thus, in addition tohisspecialistworkontheTudorworld,asecondstrandemerged:thearticulation and defence of a nationalist view of Irish history. The present volume reflects both of these fields of interest. Of the fourteen essays (twelve already published, and two new pieces), nine are articles on particular historical topics, while the remaining five are reflections on the writing of Irish history. The locus classicus of Bradshaw’s case against the revisionists is in his article published in the professional journal Irish Historical Studies in 1989. While acknowledging the achievements arising from the professionalising of Irish history since the 1930s, Bradshaw challenged some dimensions which he detected in the direction this professionalisation had taken. Specifically, the tacit assumption of neutrality on the part of the historian: while enjoining objectivity, Bradshaw disputes that real neutrality is possible; the pursuit of neutrality (ultimately futile on his account) leads to an anodyne presentation which deepens the cleavage between the professional historian and the public who are interested in the story of their community. He noted a tendency to ignore or downplay catastrophe (for the early modern period he mentions land expropriation, large-scale violence against indigenous people, religious and ethnic discrimination), and a corresponding propensity to normalise disasters (for example, the Famine). In response to this deconstruction of the Irish nationalist tradition, Bradshaw seekstoassertitshistoricalcontinuity,anditsemergenceinthepoliticalthought of local reformers in the sixteenth century. These drew on classical notions of love of patria or homeland, current in the Renaissance, and built on a form of proto-nationalism among the colonial political group in the late middle ages. Bradshaw sees the integration into a single Irish nation of the descendants of the Anglo-Normans with the older Gaelic community as the fruit of shared dislocation at the hands of the new Elizabethan colonial elite...