The harp restrung: the United Irishmen and the rise of Irish literary nationalism

The history of Irish republicanism has always suffered from an excessive concentration on its later phases. But much light can be thrown on its essential characteristics by a closer examination of its origins. A full understanding of such a contradictory movement would require an investigation of the mutations in public consciousness during the last three centuries. But most historians agree in tracing its origins to the United Irish Society of the 1790's, when the attitudes and conditions which were to dictate the future course of republicanism and loyalism were crystallised. In the light of recent events in Ireland interest in the United Irishmen has revived. However, even recent research has failed to explain satisfactorily the swift transformation of the United Irishmen's secular republicanism by the traditional fears and aspirations of the Catholic population. Nor has anyone attempted to answer the very basic question of how large sections of a non-political and essentially loyal peasantry could in the short period of the 1790's have acquired many of the fundamental traits of later separatist movements. Already by the turn of the century popular oral culture, latterly dominated by themes taken from Gaelic mythology, speaks instead of dead rebel heroes, of the English oppressor and the Protestant enemy. This new anti-English flavour in popular culture is particularly significant; English rule in Ireland had not been seriously questioned since the twelfth century, and the failure of the Bruce invasion in the fourteenth century was an indication of general Irish indifference to the nature of central government, provided life's daily routine remained undisturbed. This attitude characterised Irish thinking for the next four centuries, and like peasant communities elsewhere, the Irish remained essentially apolitical and parochial in outlook. They were scarcely the material from which a movement of national liberation could be fashioned.

Dublin Castle was for centuries the headquarters of British rule in Ireland - both literally and symbolically - and through it, much of Ireland's national history was enacted. There, the Viceroy - chief representative of the Crown in Ireland - presided, with little political influence or power of his own, but as a conduit and image of that power. Around him gathered a small, privileged minority, whose presence represented the apex of Irish high society for over 200 years. Their colourful lives, role and rituals, lent shape to what became known as the Viceregal Court. This work examines the social and ceremonial life of that court, and looks at the individual players, entourage and rulers who performed at the Castle during the onset of English administration after the Williamite wars, until its demise and withdrawl in 1922 when power was transferred to Michael Collins and to the government of the Irish Free State: No trumpets, no courtiers, no drinks on the sideboard, having withstood the attacks of successive generations of Irish rebels over seven centuries, Dublin Castle was quietly handed over to eight gentlemen in three taxicabs.

An analysis of ca.200 secondary school history textbooks regarding their portrayal of British rule in Ireland and the history of the Kingdom of Hungary show many similar nationally biased narratives. Textbooks used in England, Austria and Hungary share certain patterns of ‘oppressor’ narratives, while Irish, (Czech)Slovak and Romanian textbooks can be compared for their storytelling from an ‘oppressed’ perspective. Attachment to national foundational myths is common across all countries analysed. This article analyses examples for 16 different types of bias. It is also remarkable that specific events which do not fit into either narrative are sometimes mutually omitted. Textbooks from communities with shared heritage (e.g. Northern Ireland) can be more inclusive, indicating that collaboration can reduce national bias. Textbooks should include a healthy historic balance of contents, where the ‘other’, the historic neighbour, was not to blame, but ‘our side’ did something wrong, so that past conflicts are not perpetuated among young people. Readers’ comments surrounding news on Brexit and the recent rise of the far-right both in the UK and the EU indicate that this task remains relevant in twenty-first century Europe.

Ireland’s long and contested status as an internal colony of Britain has been important in the historical development of how the Irish remember their past. This article analyzes the historic relationship between religion and politics in Ireland by focusing on the impact of British rule in Ireland and its aftermath on the formation and evolution of Irish identity. My research suggests that one cannot appreciate the role of religion in Irish politics without taking into consideration the impact of British rule in Ireland.

As we evaluate issues of gender and sexuality through the twentieth century, one fundamental problem faced by Irish feminism was its difficult relationship to nationalism. There were many women participants in the Irish Nationalist and Republican agitations of the Revival period, most famously Maud Gonne, Countess Markievicz and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. There were highly divergent views as to whether nationalism and feminism shared the same emancipatory agenda, whether feminism was an equalizing pre-requisite to nationalism, or whether national liberation must come first and then facilitate the emancipation of women once the national question had been resolved. Sheehy-Skeffington was clear that feminism had both the priority and the means to transform society more broadly in advance of national freedom. Her sense of the disempowerment of women did not just include British rule in Ireland — hence, she asks of female subjection: ■ The result of Anglicization? This is partly true; much of the evil is, however, inherent in latter-day Irish life. Nor will the evil disappear, as we are assured, when Ireland comes to her own again, whenever that may be. For until the women of Ireland are free, the men will not achieve emancipation.1 □ KeywordsIrish WomanLiterary FormWoman WriterOppressed GroupNational QuestionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Reviewed by: Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration David Gleeson Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration by Kerby A. Miller, pp. 411. Dublin: Field Day, 2008. $35.00. Field Day has given Kerby Miller the opportunity to compile his most important articles and essays in one volume, with which he says he hopes to pay tribute "to the Whiteboys, the Steelboys, and others," who "strove with gods against their world's destruction." Established scholars and students alike will be glad [End Page 145] that Miller's work has been gathered in such a way. No longer will they have to search out the scattered and diverse sources, although reading his seminal Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (1985), remains compulsory for anyone interested in Irish emigration. Miller introduces the book by stating that he hopes it not only outlines the story but also provides an "understanding" of Ireland and Irish America. Miller divides his fifteen chapters into three sections, and he adds a substantial epilogue, the latter being the most original element of the book. Section one is titled "Culture, Class, and Emigration in Irish Society."Here, he reiterates the thesis outlined so forcefully in Emigrants and Exiles, that the Irish migration experience was in general a very harsh one. The poorer Catholic Irish retained communal premodern values, which emigration destroyed. In Ireland and America these Irish were uncomfortable with the individualism of modern capitalism, and expressed their unease in everything from their correspondence to their language. Miller continues to emphasize that "passivity and fate" dominated migrant lives. Where some sections of the Irish in America displayed cohesion and accommodation with bustling America, such as in their organized supports of Irish nationalism, these merely reflected the hegemonic efforts of the prefamine Irish-American bourgeoisie to establish and "maintain their authority over the Catholic masses." Miller regrets that these poorer and, according to him, often radical masses consented to being co-opted into America and American values in order to achieve the struggle to end British rule in Ireland. These opening chapters are a strong restatement of what Donald Akenson has archly described as the "Celtic-Catholic Handicap thesis." Miller still believes that Irish Catholics justifiably—if not for their stated reasons—felt like exiles in the United States. In his revising for this section, Miller does not address Akenson specifically (indeed, he is never cited), but it is undoubtedly a counter blast to those, like the Canada-based scholar, who criticize his view of prefamine and famine Ireland as well as his description of Irish life in America. Unfortunately, Miller does not answer the charges directly. Section two, "Irish Protestants in Ireland and America," reflects Miller's later career and ongoing research into the story of Irish Protestants and emigration. Influenced by his work with Bruce Boling, Arthur Schrier, and David Doyle for the collection of letters, Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan (2003), Miller came to revise some of his earlier views on Irish Protestants. Originally, Miller saw Protestants as "more energetic, industrious, innovative, thrifty, and individualistic—more capitalist-minded, in other words—than their Catholic countrymen." The five chapters included in this section indicate that the Protestant experience was more complicated than originally thought. His 1993 [End Page 146] essay "'Scotch-Irish,' 'Black Irish,' and 'Real Irish': Emigrants and Identities in the Old South," while somewhat overstated, remains thought-provoking. The other chapters are stronger and innovative. He provides a provocative account of the development of an Irish identity among Ulster Presbyterian immigrants in America in "'Scotch-Irish' Ethnicity in Early America: Its Regional and Political Origins," which appeared in Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan. His chapters on "Class Conflict and the Origins of Unionist Hegemony in Early Nineteenth-Century Ulster" and "The Famine's Scars" explore the growing sense of alienation among Ulster Protestants—particularly Presbyterian—from the British political system in Ireland. He correctly highlights how the recent sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland have not been immutable since the Plantation of Ulster, but have ebbed and flowed through the varying political atmospheres. Here, Miller indicates clearly how the experience of Irish emigrants...

This chapter deals with the years between the November Uprising of 1830–31 and the January Uprising of 1863–64. The mounting frustration of Irish nationalists with British governments, which failed to accede to O’Connell’s demand for the repeal of the Act of Union, strengthened identification with the Poles in these decades. Reports of poor government in Ireland, exemplified by the mass deaths of the Great Hunger, persuaded some British as well as Irish commentators that British rule in Ireland was as iniquitous as Russian rule in Poland. Strong critics of colonialism worldwide, members of the Young Ireland movement, most notably William Smith O’Brien, were particularly drawn to the notion of a shared experience of oppression.

The Forgotten Nationalist:John Mitchel, Race, and Irish American Identity David T. Gleeson (bio) Bryan P. McGovern . John Mitchel: Irish Nationalist, Southern Secessionist. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009. xviii + 293 pp. Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $36.00. Bryan McGovern has provided a long-overdue modern biography of the Irish nationalist John Mitchel. Mitchel, the son of a Unitarian minister from County Derry, became the premier propagandist of Irish nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century. His life and his polemic influenced both the Irish in Ireland and in the United States. In the U.S., he, in a sense, set the tone of Irish American nationalism for generations. Long after his death, Mitchel was feted in Irish nationalist circles for his virulent anti-British propaganda. Admirers wrote a number of biographies and kept his books in print on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet, after the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922, Mitchel the man, if not his rhetoric, fell into disfavor. One can put this disconnect between Mitchel and his work down to his strong support for the Confederate States of America during the Civil War and for its "cornerstone," slavery. He thus became something of an embarrassment to more progressive revolutionary nationalists of the later twentieth century even as they continued to use his propaganda in their anti-British campaigns during the latter-day "Troubles" in Northern Ireland. McGovern's scholarly effort here is to be welcomed—especially as there is no major collection of John Mitchel papers, only some scattered letters. As his subtitle suggests, McGovern pays a lot of attention to the most neglected aspect of Mitchel's life, the time he spent in America, particularly in the South. He begins, however, with good coverage of Mitchel's early life in Ireland and his rise to prominence there. The first issue dealt with ably is how the Protestant Mitchel could have such interest in and appeal to Irish Catholics when sectarianism in Ireland was on the rise. Mitchel's father, fitting his embrace of Unitarianism within the Ulster Presbyterian tradition, had a very liberal attitude toward Catholics. The young Mitchel was imbued with this tolerance and would retain it throughout his life, even to the point of accepting the [End Page 658] conversion of his daughters to the Roman Catholic faith and of one of them entering the Catholic sisterhood. McGovern believes that Mitchel always held an ecumenical dream that Irish people would bury their denominational differences and focus more on national unity. The other big influence on Mitchel's early life was Thomas Davis, a fellow Protestant and the spiritual father of Irish cultural nationalism in the 1840s. Mitchel supported Davis' view that a "Young Ireland" could resurrect a dormant Celtic and Irish national identity. After Davis' death in 1845, Mitchel became more radical in his nationalism. Part of his radicalism, somewhat ironically, came from his admiration for the Scottish conservative writer and scourge of the liberal industrial age, Thomas Carlyle. Mitchel overcame Carlyle's anti-Irish writings to endorse his critique of the modern era (Carlyle came to admire Mitchel, too, despite the younger man's strong Irish nationalism). McGovern pays good attention to this relationship but also recognizes that Mitchel moved beyond Carlyle's mere reactionism. Mitchel came to recognize that the whole system of landholding in Ireland (where a tiny Anglican elite owned the vast majority of land) needed to be overthrown and that violent rebellion against British rule in Ireland was the only way to achieve this. The massive death and dislocation of the Great Famine, which began in 1845, pushed Mitchel in this direction. He began to see even his former colleagues in Young Ireland, who did not disavow violence but did not advocate it either, as hopelessly misguided moderates. He split from them in early 1848 and founded his own weekly newspaper, The United Irishman, named for the purveyors of the last major rebellion against British rule back in 1798 (The Society of United Irishmen). Inspired by the February revolution in Paris, Mitchel called publically for armed rebellion. The authorities moved quickly and preemptively arrested him, charged him with treason, and sentenced him to death. This...

‘I Must Be Buried at Straide’: Michael Davitt’s Final Request John Dunleavy Should I die in Ireland I would wish to be buried at Straide Co. Mayo without any funeral demonstration. If I die in America I must be buried in my mother’s grave at Manayunk, near Philadelphia and on no account brought back to Ireland. If in any other country (outside of Great Britain) to be buried in the nearest graveyard to where I may die, with the simplest possible ceremony. Should I die in Great Britain I must be buried at Straide. Michael Davitt made his will in 1904, some two years before his death. He had clear views as to where he should be buried. He was to die in Dublin in 1906 after a short illness, and he was buried at Straide, in the west of Ireland, where he had been born sixty years previously. Not surprisingly, in view of his public career, his Requiem Mass and the funeral journey across Ireland on 2 June 1906, took on the appearance of a semi-public demonstration. There were delegates from the numerous organisations with which he had been associated, leading members of the Irish Parliamentary Party and the United Irish League, and – a reflection on the universal affection for the Land League’s founder – representatives of several colonial governments.1 He found a last resting place at Straide, his grave being marked with a Celtic cross suitably inscribed in Irish and English. Significant as Davitt’s contribution to the Irish cause might have been, his biographer concedes that by 1906 he had become a marginal figure in his own country and had been so for almost a generation. The months of what have been termed ‘the Land War’ were the high-water mark of his distinct contribution to the long struggle for Irish freedom. The institution of landlordism, in particular, which he regarded as the most detested symbol of British rule in Ireland, and which he hoped to see replaced by public ownership of land, was in retreat by 1906 but not in the way he would have wished. Instead of being a country of large estates, due to a series of land acts enacted by the Westminster parliament, Ireland was on the road to becoming a society consisting of countless small, ownerJohn Dunleavy Studies • volume 107 • number 428 474 occupiers. The established political parties were already feeling the effects of new forces at work in Ireland, such as the cultural nationalism promoted by the likes of the Gaelic League and the Gaelic Athletic Association, and even Sinn Féin, though the latter was still dismissed by some as little more than the ‘green Hungarian policy’.2 It is because of these new elements at work in Ireland, elements which would ultimately succeed in wresting power from the British and securing self-government, that Davitt and his generation of nationalists have been sadly neglected. It was some years before Davitt found a biographer. Shortly after his death, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington began compiling a study of Davitt, a man he greatly admired, resulting in a life published soon afterwards. Michael M O’Hara, a journalist, published Chief and Tribune: Parnell and Davitt some years later. Both these writers relied heavily on printed sources, though their books are still worthy of perusal. It was not until as recently as 1981 that the long-awaited study by the late Professor T W Moody, of Trinity College appeared in print. This is based on primary sources, both in manuscript and in print. In the absence of a work of this nature, it is not surprising that Davitt and his generation have been marginalised by writers and teachers for so long. The appearance of Moody’s work has stimulated a later generation of students to research Davitt’s public life, resulting in articles and books and encouraging discussion through the media and in schools and conferences. The multitude of events that took place during the course of the centenary year of 2006 need not be listed here.3 The present writer was first drawn to Davitt many years ago, when living in the Lancashire town of Haslingden. A series of...

New York History Spring 2014© 2014 by The New York State Historical Association 193 Society of United Irishmen Revolutionary and NewYork Manumission Society Lawyer: Thomas Addis Emmet and the Irish Contributions to the Antislavery Movement in New York Craig A. Landy, Independent Scholar The year 2014 marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Addis Emmet, a leader of the revolutionary Society of United Irishmen and a prominent New York lawyer following his forced exile from Ireland. Although there may have been more celebrated leaders of the movement behind the Irish Rebellion of 1798, Thomas Emmet’s unselfish desire to obtain a radical parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation earned him the recognition by Irish historian W.E.H. Lecky as, “one of the few really interesting figures connected with the rebellion.”1 In New York, Emmet devoted himself to his legal career and family, rising to the top among lawyers in the state and proving the equal of those lions of the national bar who argued before the United States Supreme Court such as William Pickney and Daniel Webster. Emmet’s reputation as an Irish patriot and his willingness to champion the cause of the newly-arrived Irish in New York endeared him to his fellow immigrants, who often turned to him for counsel and leadership. This essay explores the first case that Emmet received in New York in 1805, which involved the prosecution of the captain of a Newport, Rhode Island slave ship and traces the origins of Emmet’s antislavery beliefs in Ireland and his subsequent efforts involving slavery and the slave trade in the United States, especially his work with and for the New-York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, and Protecting Such of Them as Have Been, or May Be Liberated, commonly known as the New-York Manumission Society (N‑YMS). Through this first case, Emmet began the arc of his legal career in America, eventually achieving a level of success 1. W.E.H. Lecky, A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1892), 4:253. 194 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY undreamed of when he first arrived. The case also frames an aspect of the radicalism spawned in the United Irish movement in Ireland and transplanted across the Atlantic in the Age of Revolution. The United Irishmen gave rise to one of the more radical movements advocating the rights of man in the Anglo-Irish world at the end of the eighteenth century. These men were radicals who, by either reform or revolution, were proponents of parliamentary change and religious equality in Ireland. In New York, the more visible former United Irishmen continued to pursue a radical path in the political arena, but on social issues, in particular, some modified their views towards slavery and race, while others held fast to their previous beliefs. This study, therefore, departs from previous examinations of the Americanization of the United Irish radical tradition in one significant way: it emphasizes a less studied segment of those American United Irishmen who arrived in New York between 1802 and 1806, including Thomas Addis Emmet, William James Macneven, and William Sampson. Their antislavery attitudes, forged in revolutionary Ireland and transplanted to America, waivered less than their fellow émigr és. This article explores why this later group’s opposition to slavery was less influenced by the process of American accommodation that affected some of the earlier-arriving former United Irishmen.2 Few historians have examined the first case Emmet received in America, which is hardly surprising given the general paucity of court records dating back to the early nineteenth century in New York. However, a fresh look at archived records, now available online, reveals that Emmet’s first case likely involved a prosecution in New York City under the federal laws against the slave trade that resulted in an unprecedented victory for the antislavery movement, a prolonged prison confinement for a young New England captain and not one, but two presidential pardons. Emmet’s first case has been hailed as the most dramatic and most difficult case prosecuted by the leading New York antislavery society in its sixty-five year history. 2. For discussion of the...

When questioned by a parliamentary committee after the rebellion of 1798, the United Irish leader Thomas Addis Emmet predicted that ‘if a revolution ever takes place, a very different system of political economy will be established from what has hitherto prevailed here’. Was there any real substance to this claim? Did Emmet’s words indicate that the republican leadership genuinely sought a radical reshaping of society, or was he simply indulging in empty rhetoric that a broken United Irish movement could never make good? It has always been difficult to pin down the United Irishmen’s socio-economic views: their pronouncements in this area were few and were generally couched in vague terms. This is hardly surprising. Given that the society’s membership was far from socially homogeneous, the leadership no doubt recognised the difficulties involved in trying to produce an agreed programme of social reform. In an organisation one of whose earliest rules had been ‘to attend to those things in which we agree, to exclude from our thoughts those in which we differ’, it was generally judged prudent to steer clear of such a potentially divisive subject. Moreover, the readiness with which the government instigated prosecutions of outspoken radicals, particularly after the outbreak of war in 1793, made advisable a degree of caution in any statements which could be construed as threatening the established social order. Nevertheless, the society did address the issue of social reform from time to time, and individual United Irishmen also espoused a variety of proposals. This article will attempt to examine some of the strands of United Irish social thinking and to determine if the movement had such a thing as a coherent programme of social reform.

REBEL MOTIVES AND MENTALITIES: THE BATTLE FOR NEW ROSS, 5 JUNE 1798* TOM DUNNE was the 1798 rebellion in Wexford a matter of “insurgency” or of “revolution ”? Or to put it another way: what was the motivation and mentality of the rank-and-file rebel? This remains the most important and the most difficult question concerning the rebellion and one that has received disappointingly little attention in recent work. This essay proposes one possible answer by focusing on the key and relatively well-defined group of rebels who captured briefly, then lost, the strategic town of New Ross in the bloodiest engagement of the rebellion. I The term “insurgency” I take to denote popular resistance to what is perceived as political or economic oppression. It has long been applied in this way to the Wexford rebels who are still referred to colloquially as “the insurgents.” Its reactive, spontaneous, and traditional connotations were stressed in nineteenth-century Catholic histories such as those of Edward Hay and Patrick Kavanagh, and led to its rejection by Miles Byrne in his 1863 Memoirs. After a lifetime in the French army Byrne had, as Tom Bartlett points out, a “customary military distaste for insurgency” and so “constantly stressed the military discipline and good order maintained by the Irish rebels, in effect denying that they were insurgents.”1 By contrast, my dictionary defines the term “revolution” as “the forcible overthrow of a government or social order in favour of a new system .” It is understood to involve modern revolutionary aims and ideoloTHE BATTLE FOR NEW ROSS, 5 JUNE 1798 5 * An earlier version of this essay was delivered in June 1998 at the conference on “1798, 1848, 1898: Revolution, Revival, and Commemoration” at University College, Cork, organized by the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland. 1 Thomas Bartlett, “Miles Byrne: United Irishman, Irish Exile, and Beau Sabreur,” in The Mighty Wave: The 1798 Rebellion in Wexford, ed. Dáire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996), 126. gies, and this is what was signaled by the slogan (or “logo”) of Wexford’s official bicentenary-commemoration body, “Comóradh ’98,” that is, “the United Irish revolution.” While clearly anachronistic in the sense that no actual “revolution” took place in 1798, this slogan claims a basis in recent historical research. The government of the Irish Republic also adopted it as the official state view during the bicentennial commemorations because of its powerful resonances with nationalists and their hopes for the Northern Ireland “peace process.” Among historians it has been promoted most vigorously by Kevin Whelan (also a major influence on the official commemoration ), who has urged that “we must relinquish our obsession . . . with pikes and deaths, murder, mayhem, and martyrdom. We should instead stress the living principles of democracy and pluralism which the United Irishmen formulated.”2 To suit this essentially political agenda the 1798 rebellion in Wexford has been transformed from the bloodiest and one of the most sectarian episodes in modern Irish history into, paradoxically , a model and symbol of hope for a future pluralist, peaceful, consensual Ireland, when the dreams of “United Irishmen” will at last be realized.3 The “Comóradh” slogan involves a distortion and popularization of Louis Cullen’s important 1987 hypothesis that, contrary to received opinion and the accounts of the United Irish leaders themselves, there was a significant United Irish presence in Wexford before the rebellion.4 Cullen offered no new documentary evidence (nor has any come to light since), but instead he brilliantly interrogated the main contemporary accounts, particularly those of Edward Hay and Thomas Cloney, and argued persuasively that in order to minimize the culpability of their non-involvement in the rebellion, they concealed the presence of a United Irish organization . In addition, he used a list that Richard Musgrave had published in 1801, together with scattered references to the military ranks of rebel leaders and his unrivalled knowledge of kinship groups and radical politics, to project an organization of six to seven United Irish “regiments” and to link their distribution to the outbreak and early course of the rebellion. It was a tour de force, offering a new understanding of hitherto puzzling THE...

This chapter analyses the complex connections between varieties of contemporary Irish republicanism and the notion of ‘radical nostalgia’, a term adopted from Peter Glazer’s (2005) important work on commemoration of the Spanish Civil War. The first section is devoted to examining the relationship between nostalgia and radical (or revolutionary) politics, and some of the characteristic ways in which socialist and/or radical nationalist movements have utilised nostalgia as a means to mobilise support. In the (alleged) context of the ‘unfinished revolution’ in Ireland, various strands of the republican ‘family’, including both the ‘mainstream’ or ‘establishment republicanism’ of Provisional Sinn Féin as well as many of the myriad so-called ‘dissident’ groups, have sought to lay claim to the legacies and heritage of the Irish ‘struggle’ and ‘resistance’ to British rule in Ireland. In particular, there has been an intra-republican effort to mobilise radical nostalgia in the service of divergent contemporary political goals, leading to a mnemonic competition regarding which branch of the movement can most plausibly claim the mantle of authenticity and continuity with the ‘heroic’ history (both recent and more distant) of Irish republican activism. The chapter further analyses the broad contours of these struggles over ‘ownership’ of republican memory, with specific reference to the experiences of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Finally, the chapter focuses upon the ‘post-conflict’ generation of republicans, which, it is argued, has often been recruited into ‘dissident’ organisations, at least in part on the basis of a radical nostalgia, or exo-nostalgia, for a past they never knew.

Reviews ANANYA JAHANARA KABiR and DEANNE wii.liams, eds. PostcolonialApproaches to the EuropeanMiddleAges: Translating Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp.xii, 298. isbn: 978-0-521-8273-7. $80. The eleven essays collected in this volume cohere principally around an insight that might seem obvious in hindsight but which is no less profound for its obviousness: that postcolonial approaches to the European Middle Ages are not anachronistic, as some critics have complained, because the MiddleAgeswere, byvirtue ofthe fact that they were inaugurated by the fall ofthe Roman Empire, in fact, already postcolonial. They come after empire; indeed the very word 'colonial,' as Seth Lerer points out, derives from the Latin colonia, for the sorts of military settlements that dotted the Roman empire (79). This audacious move takes back theory for the Middle Ages, demonstrating that medievalists need not be content merely to apologize meekly for applying theory 'anachronisrically' ro their subject but, as Bruce Holsinger argues in a 2002 Speculum arricie, can confront the presenrist bias ofcontemporary theory, recognizing and building upon the literally groundbreaking work of medievalists who have always figuted (often invisibly) in the development of litetary theories, including postcolonialism. Suddenly everything old is new again; some very oldfashioned medieval scholarship begins to look quite novel. Contriburors to this volume, stripping away rhe stereotypes that have clung, like so many barnacles, to medieval studies, uncover in eveiything from the Très riches heures of the Duke de Berry, Anglo-Saxon poetry, maps, John Gower, Alexander romances, Romance philology, and Fernando de Roja readings rhar challenge 'western myths oforigins, history, identity, and temporality' (2). And yet, two questions must necessarily follow from this insight into medieval postcolonialism. The first concerns the ways in which this postcolonialism differs from that which followed the end ofEuropean empires after World War II. What balance ought we to strike between acknowledging their similarities and cataloguing their differences? Collectively, the essays tackle this question admirably, most explicitly in Ananya Jahanara Kabir's reading of British ofFicials' use ofmedieval England as an analogy for Imperial British India, a means of'translating' the colony's cultural strangeness, but it is a thread that appears in other essays as well. A second question asks how medievalists should go about uncovering the postcolonialism of the European Middle Ages and its continuing effects in modern Europe and its former colonies without appropriating and intellectualizing the language that postcolonial theory offers to make sense ofgenuine oppression. In this regard, Lerer's reading of ARTHURIANA l6.1 (2006) 105 1?6ARTHURIANA Beowulfthrough Seamus Heaney's experience of British rule in Ireland serves as a salutary reminder ofEurope's own inrernal colonizarion. Michelle Warren links the connections between Joseph Bédier's obsessions over philological origins to linguistic purity and anxieties about racial hybridity and métissage resulting from his experiences of 'republican colonialism' (218) on the island of Bourbon. Noting that, within postcolonial theory, translation often figures the asymmetrical power relations of colonization, the editors draw upon the medieval trope of transito imperii et studii as a means to connect the disparate essays in the volume. All are 'case studies of translation as the transfer of language, culture, and power' (7). Lerer's essay, for insrance, moves from an investigation of a narrow linguistic problem oftranslation—how to render in modern English the Anglo-Saxon phrase 'on fagne flor' in Beoivulf—to a meditation on what that poem's most recent translator, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, might 'carry over' to the poem from his own postcolonial Northern Ireland. The volume is full ofsuch juxtapositions, leaps across geographical sites, temporal chasms, and disciplinary boundaries (although all but two ofthe contributors are affiliated with English departments): the translation of ancient Trojans into late medieval Turks in the visual arts (James G. Harper), for instance, or the Alexander romances' 'translation' of the static east-west binary into a more complex four part history mapped onro the four cardinal points ofthe earth (Suzanne Conklin Akbari). Material culture emerges as a significant carrier of cultural translarion in everyrhing from Anglo-Saxon spolia (materials plundered from Roman ruins and incorporated into medieval buildings), medieval maps, Roman mosaics, and French tapestries. In at least one essay...

The Great Famine provided a stimulus to the writing of history, not least because it eroded the credibility both of British rule in Ireland, and of Irish landowners. The new interpretations can be characterized as follows. The authors of a Catholic narrative wanted the Catholic nation that had emerged from suffering to be treated as an equal with the English and Scottish nations within a shared British monarchy. Militant nationalist historians cherished memories of Catholic sufferings in the hope that these would foment popular ‘disaffection’ and further revolutionary action. Moderate Unionist historians acknowledged the unjust treatment of the Irish in the past and detailed this to encourage the present government to promote reform that would elicit loyalty. Hard-line Unionist historians also faulted past British rule. Their concern, however, was that governments had not stuck rigidly to stern measures that would have produced stability. They believed that stability might still be achieved if the present government avoided conciliation.