Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods and Perspectives, ed. Sarah Covington, Vincent P. Carey and Valerie McGowan Doyle

Abstract

During the last quarter of the twentieth century, research into early modern Irish history underwent something of a renaissance. Due in good part (but hardly exclusively) to the pioneering studies of Nicholas Canny and the late Brendan Bradshaw, and also in part to their frequent controversies, research into Irish history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became the subject of successive interpretative currents, loosely (and often lazily) characterised as revisionist, anti-revisionist, post-revisionist and the like. The present collection of essays is an assurance that this febrile flow has not been diminished. But it is distinctive in important ways. First, notwithstanding the dedication to Nicholas Canny and an entertaining and revealing autobiographical foreword by the dedicatee, it is not a Festschrift. Nor is it a testament by a new interpretative school. It is best described as an exhibition, a demonstration, as the subtitle declares, of the way in which the...