William J. Smyth.Map-Making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c. 1530–1750.:Map‐Making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c. 1530–1750.(Critical Conditions: Field Day Essays and Monographs, number 16.)

Reviews: The Ulster Crisis, 1885–1921, Dublin, 1745–1922: Hospitals, Spectacle and Vice, Britain and Ireland, 1050–1530: Economy and Society, Castle Caldwell, County Fermanagh: Life on a West Ulster Estate, 1750–1800, on the Edge of the Pale: The Rise and Decline of an Anglo-Irish Community in County Meath, 1170–1530, the Planters of Luggacurran, County Laois: A Protestant Community, 1879–1927, Balrothery Poor Law

<i>Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c. 1530–1750</i>. By William J. Smyth (Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2007) 584 pp. $ 80.00

Reviewed by: The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland David Lederer The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland. Edited by Alan Ford and John McCafferty. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. x, 249. $90.00.) This volume (the product of a University College Dublin symposium organized by Ford and McCafferty and held against the backdrop of those fateful days in Belfast, April 1998) ostensibly explores the early modern period for roots of sectarian hatred in modern Ireland. It contains a balanced mix of [End Page 667] approaches (political, religious, social, literary, and intellectual), but surprisingly concentrates less on violence and struggle than perceptions of "otherness." In many ways, it documents the symbiosis, co-existence, and downright inextricability that developed between the invented traditions of Catholic and Protestant communities in post-Reformation Ireland. In still others, it nuances subtle sectarian atavisms that persist in Anglo-Irish historiography of the early-modern period—albeit with the laudable goal of proving which side was more ecumenical. Ford's introduction begins with powerful analogies of religious violence in modern and early modern Ireland serving to trace sectarianism back to a time "when Protestants and Catholics began to live apart and create parallel communities, institutions, cultures and histories" (p. 3). What follows is a useful overview of themes broken down structurally into sections on periodization, terminology, struggle and coexistence, the sacraments, and education respectively. Suspicious of the simplistic interpretation of constant struggle in Ireland since the Act of Supremacy down to the restoration of power-sharing, Ford points to a real rise in tensions after 1580. Here he alludes to recent attempts to situate the origins of religious strife in Ireland outside the northern archipelago and within the wider European process of confessionalization. The allusion is, of course, to the lead article by Ute Lotz-Heumann, whose book on confessionalization in Ireland dramatically changed the dimensions of the pitch. Here, for the first time in English, she sums up her comparative arguments on the periodization of the Reformation/Counter-Reformation in Ireland as part of a broader European social phenomenon. McCafferty follows with a narrative prosopography of the Church of Ireland episcopate under the early Stuarts. He reveals how limitations, such as poverty, failed reorganization, and royal neglect relegated the Irish bishops to the "B" league. Faced with lay apathy, most found themselves struggling to cope in fairly dismal conditions. Alternately, Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin examines a Catholic episcopate which, though accepting Trent, remained politically divided over loyalty to the Stuarts and willing to compromise with royal Protestantism in the struggle against Puritanism. In an interesting exposé, David Edwards charts the transmigration of ordinary English Catholics to Ireland in search of greater toleration, much to the chagrin of the authorities on both sides of the Irish sea. Two submissions by Ford and Marc Caball compare literary productions composed to establish a stronger sense of identity among sectarian communities. While Ford focuses on the evolution of a unique, almost proto-nationalistic trend in the Protestant historiography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Caball detects echoes of a bardic elite which sang the praises of "Irishness" above religion. Mícheál MacGraith considers a similar problem among the Catholic political theorists Conry and McCaughwell, who compromised when faced with a divergence of their religious and political allegiance to the crown. By employing a microhistorical analysis of a land dispute between Catholic residents of Drogheda and local [End Page 668] Franciscans, Brian Jackson undermines the myth of a monolithic Catholic culture in early modern Ireland, demonstrating the clash of self-interested land tenure and Tridentine missionary zeal. Finally, Declan Downey borrows theoretically from H. C. Erik Midelfort and Otto Brünner to investigate the creation of a myth of racial and religious purity by aristocratic writers caught in a crisis of the ancient Hiberno-Norman nobility. The collection concludes with some chronological afterthoughts by John Morrill, juxtaposing the twin themes of sectarian strife and accommodation which lie at the heart of the volume. Clearly, however, it is the latter theme which dominates throughout. Those seeking detailed accounts of Cromwellian slaughter and rapine are likely to come away disappointed, but exactly that is the charm of this...

Reviewed by: Women's Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland ed. by Julie A. Eckerle and Naomi McAreavey Sarah Covington (bio) Women's Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland Julie A. Eckerle and Naomi McAreavey, editors U of Nebraska P, 2019, 342 pp. ISBN 9780803299979, $35.00 paperback. The seventeenth century was arguably the most important period in Ireland's history, as the country endured continued English colonialist policies, civil wars, violent invasion, massive land confiscations, and a settlement that led to the rule, for the next two centuries, of a tiny Protestant elite. A further disaster awaited those who study the crucial middle decades of the century, and specifically the years of Oliver Cromwell's conquest and rule. In 1922, at the height of Ireland's civil war and struggle for independence, a massive fire erupted at the Public Records Office in Dublin, destroying thousands of administrative records from the thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries. As Ernie O'Malley famously described the scene, from within the giant black cloud that arose from the flaming building, one could witness "leaves of white paper" which "looked like hovering white birds" (114). [End Page 467] While no historical period emerged unscathed, the loss was particularly damaging for seventeenth-century specialists, and especially so when it came to accessing the lives of those whose presence passed through those now-vanished records. Yet amid the charred wreckage, some sources, to quote Julie Eckerle, have been "hiding in plain sight," neglected by scholars who have focused instead on traditional governmental records or documents authored primarily by men (204). Historians, literary critics, and scholars of life writing therefore have much to celebrate with the groundbreaking publication of Women's Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland, a collection of nine essays that opens up previously neglected sources and provides fascinating readings of women's experience of and in Ireland during its most tumultuous decades. Arguing for a "more nuanced understanding of women's identity in early modern Ireland" and their representation of "Irishness" (9), the book provides a major contribution to our historical understanding of changing modes of life writing, just as it reveals the more personal side of a world whose past was otherwise lost to us, quite literally, in the flames. Life writing in this period, it should be pointed out, reflected different subjectivities, even if scholars have argued that "modern" interiority and psychology emerged in the works, for example, of Montaigne or Shakespeare. Early modern soldiers' accounts of their own experiences in war, for example, resist our expectations of what it was like to endure the trauma of the battlefield; the result is a frustrating opacity, as these texts resist the kind of emotionally forthcoming, and very modern, memoirs from World War I or Vietnam. As Anne Fogarty puts it in her essay, for pre-modern women, life writing is similar in that it was bound not only to rhetorical conventions but to female standards of honor, deportment, and the need to "uphold communal and religious values . . . as prized indicators of worth" (54), all of which were expected of women who held a relatively elevated status in English and Irish (or English-Irish) society. In other words, women's life writings can be more self-concealing than self-revealing, unless they are read sensitively and against the grain, as Marie-Louise Coolahan has demonstrated in her own pioneering work, and as the essays in this volume describe. As Julie Eckerle and Naomi McAreavey point out in their introduction, the women under examination are distinct in that they straddled the British archipelagic world, belonging to neither Ireland nor England but to an in-between space where attitudes towards Ireland could be complex and ambivalent. While no essay examines women of the Irish-speaking Gaelic order, the women under consideration fall under—and cross—a multitude of categories that defined early modern Ireland's social world: the "Old English," or those descended from the Norman invasions of the twelfth century and who remained primarily Catholic; those of the "New English," or more recent Protestant transplants in the Tudor and early Stuart periods; and those who came in and settled with Oliver Cromwell's violent invasion of...

Reviewed by: The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Literature, Translation and Violence in Early Modern Ireland by Patricia Palmer Patrick Murray The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Literature, Translation and Violence in Early Modern Ireland, by Patricia Palmer, pp. 185. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. $90. William Faulkner’s aphorism that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” emphasizes the relevance of the historical to the present. Imbued with all sorts of insinuations and counter-insinuations, claims and counter-claims, prejudices and counter-prejudices, the perception of the past remains a decisive factor in the reaction to current affairs. Placed in the context of Ireland, and in particular its partitioned Northern statelet, which keeps a tentative peace after centuries-old violence and enmity, history can be an incendiary device. Providing a narrative of the history of Ireland, and especially Ireland in the early modern period necessitates engaging with contemporary events in a profound and often fraught way: as David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait reminded us in Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (2007), “so much of Ireland’s twentieth-century conflict could be traced back to early modern origins.” The significances of articulating a history of the epoch in question are doubly intensified by the authorial voice. “Who said that?” is not just a query; depending upon its source it can prove a provocative accusation. In 1995, Ian Paisley made a speech to a gathering of Protestant Orange Order members in Drumcree. In the face of attempts to reach a resolution regarding the contentious issue of parades in the province, the future first minister provided his own outline of Ireland’s troubled past in forthright tones: Some of us know our history. Some of us know who the followers of the [other] are. What their oath is. What their aim is. Their aim is for the extermination of heresy, and we are the heretics, and they have not changed their objective. I say to that priest tonight—you may take on other people . . . but you can’t take on Ulster Protestants. Our forefathers knew the system that you represent. They knew its darkness, its superstition and its priestcraft and its epeolatry and its idolatry. And with that system as Bible Christians we have nothing to do, and we will not bow in subjection to it. [End Page 147] Verbalizing a history characterized by binary oppositions—ours and theirs, Protestant and priest, Ulster and non-Ulster—Paisley’s words also underline the significance of the narrative voice in the recording of past events. His remark “Some of us know our history” at once claims history and simultaneously reveals its very subjectivity. It strives for neutrality, seeking to espouse a detached “true” account of events. At the same time it also, through its narrator, remains inescapably biased. As Patricia Palmer’s engaging book reveals, the tongue that narrates—and the head to which it is attached—is freighted with especial importance in the context of early modern Ireland, an arena where beheading was viewed not only as an act of terror but also a legitimate policy of government. Moreover, where the dual roles of the severed head as a literary trope and a trophy of war coexisted, the aesthetic and the atrocious were often indistinguishable. “Bouncing, winking, cursing, crying out, such heads,” Palmer observes, “haunt the extraordinary range of literary works that emerged from the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland.” In investigating the role of such an object in the landscape of sixteenth-century Anglo-Irish relations, Palmer elegantly draws out what it meant to be the propagator, perpetrator, and victim of decapitation in an epoch where barbarism and erudite civility often commingled with shocking ease. The litany of violence recounted by the author will strike the reader most forcefully. Recent volumes such as the aforementioned Age of Atrocity, and the recuperation of Henry Sidney’s journal A Viceroy’s Vindication: Sir Henry Sidney’s Memoir of Service in Ireland 1556–78 (2002) by Ciarán Brady, have enhanced our awareness of the ferocity of the martial engagement between the native Irish populace and the colonizing New English forces. Brady...

Historians continue to debate what form colonial rule took in early modern Ireland. This article explores how the reception and resistance to anglicisation, located in the everyday body language of submission and subordination encoded in gesture, might be understood in the experience of colonial rule. Exploring the gestural code operating in early modern Ireland, this article examines the role of body politics in the reception of and reaction to English rule. English ‘manners and apparel’ were central to the project of anglicisation. The body played a central role in representing and articulating social hierarchies in the early modern world. Body language offered a troubling everyday reminder of the inequalities signalled in the — non-reciprocal or non-reciprocated — gestures expected of ‘subordinates’ towards ‘superiors’. If the enforcement of the gestural order was important to the establishment of English rule, this also made gesture a focus for resistance and opposition. A body politics that exploited a shared understanding of the meaning of particular gestures could be drawn on in both everyday politics and collective protests to subvert, resist and retaliate against the political agenda of anglicisation. Looking forward to the eighteenth century and beyond state action, the article calls for more work on gesture.

Dissent and Authority in Early Modern Ireland: The English Problem from Bale to Shakespeare examines the problems that beset the Tudor administration of Ireland through a range of selected 16th century English narratives. This book is primarily concerned with the period between 1541 and 1603. This bracket provides a framework that charts early modern Irish history from the constitutional change of the island from lordship to kingdom to the end of the conquest in 1603. The mounting impetus to bring Ireland to a "complete" conquest during these years has, quite naturally, led critics to associate England’s reform strategies with Irish Otherness. The preoccupation with this discourse of difference is also perceived as the "Irish Problem," a blanket term broadly used to describe just about every aspect of Irishness incompatible with the English imperialist ideologies. The term stresses everything that is "wrong" with the Irish nation—Ireland was a problem to be resolved. This book takes a different approach towards the "Irish Problem." Instead of rehashing the English government’s complaints of the recalcitrant Irish and the long struggle to impose royal authority in Ireland, I posit that the "Irish Problem" was very much shaped and developed by a larger "English Problem," namely English dissent within the English government. The discussions in this book focuse on the ways in which English writers articulated their knowledge and anxieties of the "English Problem" in sixteenth-century literary and historical narratives. This book reappraises the limitations of the "Irish Problem," and argues that the crown’s failure to control dissent within its own ranks was as detrimental to the conquest as the "Irish Problem," if not more so, and finally, it attempts to demonstrate how dissent translate into governance and conquest in early modern Ireland.

Before examining in succeeding chapters witchcraft accusations and trials in early modern Ireland, it is essential to explore the belief systems that underpinned them, for as Robin Briggs has argued, witchcraft beliefs ‘were the one absolute prior necessity if there were to be trials at all’.1 The precise relationship between intensity of belief and prosecution rates in early modern Europe, however, is more disputed historical territory: some historians suggest that intensity of witchcraft belief directly affected prosecution rates,2 while others argue that there is little evidence of such a relationship.3 This chapter will in some way contribute to this debate and offer a culturally nuanced picture of witchcraft belief in early modern Ireland.

Early modern men and their bodies carried the violence and trauma of war, although usually this bodily pain was not remarked upon. The deaths of soldiers were often enumerated but the manner of their deaths unspecified. The contemporary meanings of these deaths were in the strategic and military strength of armies rather than individual bodies or pain. Away from the battlefield, the meaning and memories of traumatised and damaged male bodies were mediated by contemporary ideas of masculine honour and masculinity. One of the aims of war was to overpower the enemy to gain territory or power, by physically overwhelming armies of men so that they were disabled either through death, wounding or capture. The fact that large numbers of men were needed for this means that inevitably most of these men and their fates are recorded with little attention to specificities. Only deaths or wounding that were out of the ordinary in some way were memorialised—either because these were elite men or because the wounded bodies suffered through unlawful violence, not acts of war.1 The line between the ordinary violence of war and unlawful killing could and did shift and blur over time and place. The spaces between these lines are a useful place to explore how pain and male bodies were conceptualised and memorialised in early modern Ireland.

Marsh’s Library in Dublin, Ireland, is an immaculately preserved library from the early eighteenth century. Founded by Archbishop Narcissus Marsh, the library has an extensive collection of Jewish and Hebrew books which includes Hebrew Bibles, Talmudic texts, rabbinic writings, and Yiddish books that date back to the early modern period. This study explores a cross section of the Jewish and Hebrew books in Marsh’s collection, with particular focus on issues of materiality—that is, how these books as material artefacts can inform our understanding of early modern history, religion, and intercultural engagement. We suggest that these books, a majority of which come from Marsh’s personal collection, are a valuable resource for reflection on (1) Christian engagement with Jewish culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, (2) the production, use, and travel of Jewish books in early modern Europe, and (3) snapshots of Jewish life in early modern Ireland and beyond.

This article assesses our much-expanded view of the texts produced by early modern women in Ireland, surveying what is available to present-day researchers and considering emerging methodologies for the analysis of early modern female voices. The range of genres with which we now know early modern women engaged owes much to feminist literary historians’ capacious approach to defining literature, expanding beyond traditionally elite genres (drama, poetry, fiction) to encompass writing in all its forms. Thus, the present corpus includes letters and petitions, life writing, devotional prose, legal depositions, as well as all kinds of verse and song, in multiple languages. Moreover, where the primary evidence in Ireland sometimes seems sparse, international perspectives have illuminated the currents of women's writing. Interpretative paradigms from other fields — book history and the history of reading, culinary and medical history, network analysis — are being applied to yield fresh insights about this material. The question of how early modern Ireland was experienced by women has been explored in studies that address such texts as articulations of subjectivity, in the light of the history of emotions. The wide range of situations and genres of women's writing in early modern Ireland is now firmly evident, inspiring a host of new approaches.

Julie A. Eckerle and Naomi McAreavey, eds. Women's Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. Pp. 342. $35.00 (paper). - Volume 59 Issue 1

Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives. Sarah Covington, Vincent P. Carey, and Valerie McGowan-Doyle, eds. Countries in the Early Modern World. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. xxvi + 346 pp. $150. - Volume 75 Issue 3

MLR, 99.1, 2004 159 equivocal status of closet drama' (p. 14), Raber is aware of the ramifications of the genre for the cultural, social, and political lives of both men and women. The book contains lengthy introductory and concluding chapters, both of which are densely packed, defining Raber's frame of reference and the conclusions that she has drawn. These might more usefully have been divided into several chapters so as to allow readers to appreciate the wealth of material that she is handling and the complexity of her analyses. Her assessment of the development of the genre and the history of its criticism are welcome sections within the introductory chapter. She spends some time locating her chosen texts within their historical framework before going on to focus upon a group of 'representative texts' in the following chapters. The central chapters allow her readers to work through Raber's hypotheses with reference to specific texts. While her choice of plays is apt and will broaden the book's appeal, it is perhaps debatable whether the overall organization best serves her purpose. She is clearly drawing upon extensive knowledge of the field, and has much to say about its place within early modern society, but a broader canvas, with central chapters devoted to themes independent of specific writers, might have served her purposes better. Raber concludes with an examination of the decline of the genre while continuing to define and refine the term 'closet drama'. Her aim during each stage of the book has been to demonstrate to her readers that closet drama provides a forum for the 'concentrated analysis of power' (p. 19), that itis an effective'vehicle forcritically analyzing and commenting upon dramatic performance' (p. 242), and that it reflects(and affects) changes in the perception and creation of gender, genre, and class throughout the early modern period. University of Reading Lucinda Becker Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion. By Patricia Palmer. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2001. xii + 254pp. ?4?; $59-95ISBN0 -521-79318-1. How legitimate is it to study early modern Ireland without a knowledge of Irish or reference to an Irish-speaking culture? What were the interactions between the dominant, invading English culture and the Irish-speaking culture the colonists encountered and displaced? On a more mundane level, how much Irish did English settlers actually know? These are the central questions posed in Patricia Palmer's important book, a work that is passionately committed but never loses sight of hardheaded scholarship and which manages to be both engaging and angrily polemical. As with most of the best scholarship, Palmer uses her insights to range more widely than her stated subject and develops a comparison between linguistic colonialism in Ireland and the destruction of languages in the Americas, enabling the reader to compare Spanish and English imperial expansion. In the opening chapters Palmer outlines the ways in which English and Spanish colonists imposed their linguistic will on the natives they encountered. Much ofthe analysis will be familiar to students of the material, but it is restated and summarized in a useful and intelligent form. Palmer shows how both English and Span? ish adventurers and commentators attacked the constituent elements of the native languages they encountered?pronunciation, semantics, grammar, cognitive range, ete.?as supposedly inferiorto the language they used themselves. The perceived lack ofwriting?often assumed because of preconceptions which precluded examination? caused peoples to be labelled as barbarians. Palmer shows how the destruction of both 160 Reviews Irish and the range of languages in the Americas occurred less through a deliberate policy?Spanish Jesuits made a concerted effortto learn a number of tongues?than the lazy and convenient assumption of superiority, a 'more indirect operation ofpower which seeped into all quarters of native life, including language' (p. 35). The Eng? lish in Ireland were more culpable still. Numerous commentators note how noisy and clamorous Ireland was. Barnaby Rich in The Irish Hubbub (1617) bases a whole pamphlet on Irish addiction to wailing and weeping loudly at funerals. Yet, as Palmer points out with perfect justice, the striking paradox is that 'the language which made...

This article explores the violence surrounding the collapse of the Munster plantation in 1598. It situates this event in the wider context of violence in early modern Ireland, and highlights both similarities and differences in the behaviour seen there, and in other, better-explored Irish episodes of violence. It also argues that while the memory of those earlier settlers was apparently forgotten or silenced, violence in 1598 played a significant part in how later violent incidents in Ireland were narrated, particularly the 1641 rebellion, and that consequently Munster played an important role in New English identity-building in the early modern period.