Modern Ireland Research Articles

Vincent Buckley, Colonialism and the Problem of Irish-Australian Identity

Perhaps no Australian writer or thinker has probed the condition of Irishness in Australia more extensively than the poet-critic Vincent Buckley (1925-88). His first memoir Cutting Green Hay (1983) considers how his own family negotiated their Irish heritage, often through modes of strategic amnesia in which Irish cultural modes mutate into Australian identity. This, for him, results in a cultural deprivation that he seeks to remedy in himself, not least through many extended visits to Ireland, his ‘source country’ or ‘imagination’s home’. Yet in Memory Ireland (1985) and other essays, he offers a scarifying analysis of contemporary Irish society also marked by a loss of memory, which he ascribes in this case to the post-colonial torpor and imaginative enervation of independent Ireland. So Buckley seeks to reveal the scotomisation, or mental blind spots, that characterise both Irish-Australia and modern Ireland. Drawing mainly on prose works, including archives and unpublished sources, this essay seeks to bring to the fore the question of colonialism in Buckley’s reflections on Irishness, attentive to some of his own blind spots. It considers his deep debt to Yeats, but also the impossibility for Buckley, as he saw it, to follow Yeats’s example in creating a national imaginary that unified settler and native. This impacts Buckley’s sense of how an artist achieves success in the international literary field, but also maps back onto the question of setter-colonialism in Australia. I argue that Indigenous Australia shadows his thinking about Irish colonialism, sometimes explicitly, as in the poem ‘Gaeltacht’ from The Pattern (1979), but in a more fraught and culpable way than simply through assertions of shared victimhood. If the conquest and dispossession of Gaelic Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mirrors that of Indigenous Australia in the nineteenth and twentieth, it also deflects, redirects and sublimates it for an Australian poet.The Irish have certainly been historical victims of British colonialism, but they have also been beneficiaries of settler-colonialism in Australia, as his poem ‘Dick Donnelly’, the Irish-named Aboriginal man, ‘the last songman of his people’, poignantly attests.

Getting in, and out, of marriage in modern Ireland

Getting in, and out, of marriage in modern Ireland <sup />

:Dissent and Authority in Early Modern Ireland: The English Problem from Bale to Shakespeare

:<i>Dissent and Authority in Early Modern Ireland: The English Problem from Bale to Shakespeare</i>

Plantation, Contagion, and Containment in Spenser and Bryskett

Abstract Early modern Ireland was notoriously, or reputedly, a place of disease: the plague, the ague, the country fever, the looseness, the bloody flux, and an assortment of coughs, chills, sweats, and other illnesses—Ireland’s endemii morbi or “reigning diseases”—regularly figure in surviving letters and historical accounts from the period. This essay explores not only the reports of disease issuing from Ireland at this time, but the way in which the experience and rhetoric of contagion help to shape ideas about space, security, and civility in the colonial theory of the period. In Spenser’s View of the present state of Ireland (c. 1596) and Bryskett’s A Discourse of Ciuill Life (1606), illness and its metaphors seem to correlate with, and perhaps to occasion, complex responses to the alleged disorder and promiscuity of the Irish—energies evident, too, in the military and political strategies of deputies Sir Henry Sidney, Arthur Lord Grey, and Sir Arthur Chichester. This essay sees Spenser’s View and Bryskett’s Discourse as polemical attempts – at key moments before the planting of Munster and Ulster – to push New English colonial policy away from the morbid failures of Pale government and violent military suppression toward the corpus sanum of plantation.

Catholicism in Modern Ireland – Ellen Coyne's Are You There, God? It's Me, Ellen

Catholicism in Modern Ireland – Ellen Coyne’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Ellen Greg Daly Signs of the times Few phrases from the Second Vatican Council fall more readily from the lips of those familiar with it than ‘signs of the times’. Christmas 1961 saw its first use in a conciliar context, when in his message convening the Council the following year, Pope St John XXIII reminded people that Christ has not left the world he redeemed, and recommended ‘that one should know how to distinguish the signs of the times’.1 Anybody serious about the Church’s mission and identity in modern Ireland should already have taken on board the jolts of recent years’marriage and repeal referendums, with Dublin’sArchbishop Emeritus Diarmuid Martin famously having said in May 2015 that the 62% vote to redefine marriage showed the extent to which the Church needed a ‘reality check’ in terms of understanding and responding to what he described as a cultural revolution.2 The 2018 repeal referendum underlined this reality with an even more decisive headline figure of 66.4% voting to remove Ireland’s constitutional protections for unborn human life. Far from being seen as signs of the times, pointers to a cultural revolution that demanded understanding and creative responses, some too easily decreed these two-to-one defeats as evidence that the tide could be turned. If constitutional protections for the unborn could be installed with a two-to-one vote in 1983, and overturned by a similar two-to-one vote in 2018, maybe in a generation it would be possible to restore the totemic ‘Eighth Amendment’. Aside from an arguably misplaced focus on the constitutional amendment itself, rather than on what the amendment was intended to help achieve, such analyses tended to miss how referendums are blunt tools, and how the real devil in these matters tends to be in the details. RTÉ’s exit poll from the 2018 vote should have banished any naïve hopes about the likely stance of Irish society a generation from now. Studies • volume 110 • number 438 191 Yes, 66.4% of voters overall had opted to repeal Ireland’s constitutional protections for the unborn, but among the two youngest groups of voters, those aged 25–34 and 18–24, support for repeal stood far higher, at 84.6% and 87.6% respectively. What’s more, when asked what factors were important to these voters in making their decisions, just 27% of those aged 25–34 said they thought the right to life of the unborn was a significant factor in their calculations, with this dropping to a mere 20% among those aged 18–24. Further, just 5–6% of voters in these age groups said their religious views had been important to them when considering how they should vote.3 Desperate figures, especially given how many of these voters would have gone through Catholic schools, one might think, and truly alarming ones for a Church that has described itself as an expert in humanity and decisively teaches a duty to cherish the dignity of every single human, a duty of solidarity with our fellow humans, and a duty to work for the good of humanity as a whole. For all that, though, further excavation of the data uncovers faint signs of hope. These groups still largely identify as Catholic – 65% in the older cohort and 63% in the younger one – with worship rates, though low compared to the practice of recent decades, still being surprisingly high. 12% of voters aged 18–24 attended services at least weekly, with the number of those worshipping rising to 23% when those attending at least monthly were factored in, and 54% when those attending just a few times a year were taken into account; the figures for those in the 25–34 group are higher again, with 13% attending services at least weekly, a total of 26% attending at least monthly, and 62% attending at least a few times a year.4 One indisputable reading of this, as with the overall national figures, is that plenty of those who clearly supported the decision to repeal the Eighth Amendment were practising...

Gay Byrne: The ‘Conservative Catholic’ Who Changed Ireland

Gay Byrne: The ‘Conservative Catholic’ Who Changed Ireland Mary Kenny When Parnell died, he was described as ‘the uncrowned King of Ireland’. Something similar might be said – was said – about the broadcaster Gay Byrne, when he died in November 2019, aged eighty-five. Gay (‘Gaybo’ as he was popularly known) was not only the most famous television and radio presence in Ireland.At his death, tributes poured in from all sides emphasising the width of his impact on Irish society. For thirty-four years Gay Byrne had been the hugely influential host of the longest-running TV show in Europe, ‘The Late Late Show’. He had also hosted a radio programme on the national airwaves for twenty-seven years, ‘The Gay Byrne Hour’, which had also had a meaningful country-wide impact. This earned him the title of ‘the Great Window-Opener’by academic Finola Doyle O’Neill1 – he ‘opened the windows’ on Irish society, and allowed what had been previously ‘brushed under the carpet’ to be spoken. Commentators even took to dividing Irish social mores into a ‘before Gaybo’ and an ‘after Gaybo’ era: as London’s Daily Telegraph reported, ‘he brought debates on abortion, AIDS, contraception, death, divorce and suicide into the nation’s homes’.2 It would be oft repeated that he lifted the stone which hid the squalid secrets of the past. Although a lifelong observant Catholic, he was, nonetheless, credited with breaking the dominant power of the Catholic Church in Ireland. He ‘pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in a Catholic country’, according to the obituary in The Times.3 ‘Anyone writing the social history of the country will have to consider Gay Byrne as one of the key figures in modern Ireland’, a letter-writer wrote in the Irish Times.4 Ed Walsh, another contributor, wrote that Gay was ‘A lone voice when Ireland was under the control of the Catholic Church. He … made such a difference, when people started to think for themselves’.5 ‘He bridged the chasm between the curtain-squinting, God-fearing, inward-looking Ireland of the past’, wrote the columnist Jennifer O’Connell, ‘and the more Studies • volume 110 • number 438 175 compassionate, courageous and forgiving one that was emerging’.6 It was even claimed by the feminist Carol Hunt that Gay was a steward of the Irish feminist movement. We forget, wrote Hunt, ‘just how oppressive, misogynistic and church-dominated this country was in 1962’. Gay helped to transform Ireland ‘from near theocracy to liberal secular state’.7 Gay didn’t invent Irish feminism, but he facilitated its réclame. He invited feminists onto his show (including myself, as a founder member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement), because he knew it would make good TV. Yet he was essentially quite an old-fashioned type of Irishman, who liked the idea of the mother being at the heart of a home, as his own mother had been. My contemporary in the movement, the late June Levine, who worked as a researcher for Gay, was critical of his alpha-male, domineering attitudes, which she compared to that of a Christian Brother – ‘merciless, unreasonable and relentless on anyone who fell short’.8 Nell McCafferty thought Gay’s attitude to women ‘patronising’: he had a spot on his radio show where he would telephone housewives, opening with the greeting ‘How’re ya, Missus?’ Nell’s mother in Derry was longing for such a call – so she could answer it with a withering ‘F*** off!’9 But June Levine was onto something when she mentioned the Christian Brother influence, for Gabriel Mary Byrne was indeed a grateful product of a Christian Brothers education at Dublin’s renowned Synge Street. He told the Dublin Hot Press, in 1986, that ‘I have great admiration for the Christian Brothers because without them none of us would have got an education of any kind’. Some of the Brothers were ‘brutal’ and some were ‘bonkers’, and the surroundings were ‘horrible’ – overcrowded classrooms, tenement buildings. And yet, he reflected, there were Brothers who were enlightened educators.10 Early days Gay was born in 1934, the youngest of six children (of whom five survived) into a Dublin family...

A snapshot of ABO, RH, and JK blood group systems in modern Ireland.

ObjectivesThis study aimed to capture a snapshot of the Irish population to determine if there had been any changes in the ABO and RH blood group system (BGS) distribution from previous Irish studies and to establish an Irish JK BGS frequency, providing real time donor information to the Irish Blood Transfusion Service (IBTS).BackgroundIreland's population is constantly increasing and becoming more diverse, this has potential implications for the IBTS to provide blood with extended phenotypes for certain cohorts of patients.Materials and methodsAll first time blood donors had relevant testing performed in the Automated Donor Grouping (ADG) laboratory using the Beckman Coulter PK7300 analyzer with appropriate antisera by validated methods. All pertinent information and test results were categorized and analyzed.ResultsThe number of donors tested was 3427. ABO phenotype: A: 29.82%, B: 12.02%, O: 54.95% and A,B: 3.21%. RHD: 82.26%. RHCE: R1R1: 17.62%, R2R2: 2.89%, R1R2: 13.95%, R1r: 33.35%, R2r: 13.07%, Ror: 1.25%, R1RZ: 0.06%, R2RZ: 0.06%, r′r: 0.55%, r″r: 0.53%, rr: 16.66%. Kidd phenotype: Jk(a + b+): 49.63%, Jk(a‐b+): 23.34%, Jk(a + b‐): 27.02%.ConclusionThe observed frequencies for the relevant BGSs remained relatively unchanged to the prevalence values expected; however, statistically significant differences between the 2015 study and some of the previous studies were found for ABO distribution. 14.24% of the first time donors were born outside Ireland and statistically significant differences (P‐value < 0.001) were noted for aspects of the ABO and Rh phenotype distribution for the Irish born donors (BiI) vs those born outside Ireland (BoI).

The Old English in Early Modern Ireland: The Palesmen and the Nine Years’ War, 1594–1603, by Ruth A. Canning

The Old English in Early Modern Ireland: The Palesmen and the Nine Years’ War, 1594–1603, by Ruth A. Canning

The ‘Recusancy Revolt’ of 1603 Revisited, Popular Politics, and Civic Catholicism in Early Modern Ireland

AbstractThis article contributes to a body of work exploring the possibilities of a popular politics in Ireland before the rising of 1641. It does so by revisiting the ‘recusancy revolt’ of 1603 in which, in the interregnum created by Elizabeth I's death, churches and civic space in towns in the south and west of Ireland were reoccupied for Catholic worship. Reading for meaning in the shaping and timing of the crowd rituals at the heart of the protest, the article argues that Old English elites and people physically acted out the recovery of these spaces for the public performance of a civic Catholicism, in which corporate worship was integral both to the maintenance of the civic order and to the defence of ancient liberties and freedoms against the encroachments of an anglicizing and Protestant regime. Analysing the dynamics of these confessional protests, the article assesses the potential for an active citizenry represented by popular political mobilization in 1603 and contrasts this with later popular mobilization in the 1641 rising. It explores the paradox at the heart of a protest in which it was believed that the restoration of public Catholic worship could co-exist with continuing civic loyalty to an English and Protestant monarchy.

How Revolutionary Was the "Irish Revolution"?

How Revolutionary Was the "Irish Revolution"? Marc Mulholland (bio) "My Lords, for ten years … it is no exaggeration, it is the literal truth to say that there has been going on in Ireland a great revolution—social partly, political partly."1 So said Sir Charles Russell QC in 1889. He was addressing the special commission sitting in judgment on the Land War and the rise of the radical Parnellite nationalist party since 1879. We are now more likely, however, to think of the ten years between 1912 and 1923 as the "Irish Revolution." This way of thinking is relatively new. It is true that the language of revolution can be found in Irish history, particularly in the ambiguity of the militant separatist tradition. Until reorganization in 1873 there was no formal certainty whether the initials IRB indicated that this Irish brotherhood was "revolutionary" or "republican."2 "Revolutionary" was generally understood to signal a commitment to illegality, and in this regard the distance from "constitutional" nationalism could easily shrink, as episodes such as the 1879–82 Land War had shown.3 But while we can find self-identifying "revolutionaries" in modern Ireland, and revolutionism elided with militancy, can we claim as a revolution the period in which the independent Irish state was founded and Northern Ireland carved out? A couple of instant histories at the time did refer to the period as a revolution. Alison Phillips defined the collapse of British rule in most of Ireland as the local expression of an ongoing international "revolution," a generalized crisis of stable hierarchy and empires. For this reason he called his book The Revolution in Ireland rather than The [End Page 139] Irish Revolution.4 From a nationalist perspective we find a similarly ambiguous categorization of Ireland's experience as "revolution." William O'Brien, in his book The Irish Revolution and How It Came About, described the process in rather unrevolutionary terms: at once a militant backlash against home rule, and as its constitutional consummation.5 These descriptors of "revolution" did not stick in the years after Irish independence and partition. In general, no fixed term came to describe as a totality the series of episodes including the third Home Rule bill and "Ulster Crisis" of 1912–14, the 1913 Lock Out, the 1916 Easter Rising, the 1919–21 Anglo-Irish War, the 1920–22 Ulster Troubles, and the 1922–23 Irish Civil War. For a society that still remembered these episodes with all too sharp clarity, and not yet concerned with how to collectively label them in a "decade of centenaries," these were intertwined paternosters. When a blanket term was felt to be required, that old term "Irish Troubles" was often rolled out.6 Padraic Colum, in his 1959 celebration of Arthur Griffith, the founder of moderate Sinn Féin, argued that the "Irish Revolution affords … an admirable and somewhat neglected case history of a nationalist revolution in our modern Western world."7 He did not find very many willing to take up the term "nationalist revolution," however. In Cold War Ireland the milieu of conservative Fine Gael nationalism was unlikely to enthuse about revolution of any sort. The term used around the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations of 1916, stoutly ignored by Ulster unionists, was "The Irish Uprising" or, more neutrally, in 1969, "The Conflict."8 [End Page 140] Revolution as a descriptor appeared at the end of the 1960s in the context of a wave of national-liberation struggles in the global south. For Oliver MacDonagh, the revolutionary delusions of "halfcrazed millenarians" had to be yoked to the sober constitutionalism of Arthur Griffith's Sinn Féin to win independence.9 F.S.L. Lyons likewise depicted the merging of a separatist underground with moderates to achieve at least a "thwarted revolution."10 In 1971 C. Desmond Greaves used the term "Irish revolution" in his biography of the leftist anti-Treaty leader Liam Mellowes. Greaves characterized the period as an incomplete "national revolution." The political implication of this in the context of the Northern Ireland Troubles, escalating as he wrote, was obvious.11 George Dangerfield in his 1976 study of the period The Damnable Question also spoke of the "unfinished...

The Daughters of the First Earl of Cork: Writing Family, Faith, Politics and Place by Ann-Maria Walsh

Reviewed by: The Daughters of the First Earl of Cork: Writing Family, Faith, Politics and Place by Ann-Maria Walsh Mary O’Dowd The Daughters of the First Earl of Cork: Writing Family, Faith, Politics and Place, by Ann-Maria Walsh (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2020, 194 p., hardcover, €50) Collections of family papers are rare for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland. If records do survive, they usually consist of documents that successive generations considered legally or financially important. Private archives abound with property deeds, wills, marriage settlements, and tenancy agreements. Personal correspondence between members of the family or with those outside the extended kin group survive in a more sporadic fashion. The extensive archive of the family of Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork, is, therefore, exceptional. As Ann-Maria Walsh documents in her book on the correspondence of the women in Boyle’s family, the archive provides a detailed record of the lives of one of the most prominent families in early modern Ireland. While the financially savvy earl kept a meticulous record of his property and commercial transactions, he also preserved his correspondence with his children from their early years through to adulthood. The majority of Cork’s papers are deposited in the archive of Chatsworth House, Derbyshire. The letters of the first earl’s daughters are, however, scattered throughout this large collection of documents, a fact that discouraged other scholars from searching for them. Undaunted by the task, Walsh trawled through the Chatsworth archive to identify the women’s letters. She also visited many other archival institutions in England and in Ireland to locate additional letters and relevant documentation. The result is a unique record of writing by a group of seventeenth-century Irish women. A central value of Walsh’s book is the bibliography in which she lists the individual letters she has identified and utilized in her analysis. Richard Boyle had fifteen children with his second wife, Catherine Fenton. Twelve of the children survived into adulthood (seven daughters and five sons). As Walsh notes, Boyle ensured that all of his children (girls as well as boys) were taught to read and write. This was partly for religious reasons: reading the Bible [End Page 155] was at the core of the children’s Protestant formation. Yet there was also a wider dimension to the girls’ education than a narrow focus on religious texts. They were encouraged by their father to read contemporary literature; taught how to speak (if not write) in French; and trained in the art of letter writing. Throughout the Boyle sisters’ adult lives, letter writing formed an important part of their daily routine. As Walsh notes, it was one of their “every day responsibilities.” Hence, too, the survival of such a rich archive of letters. As a literary scholar, Walsh opted to consider the letters thematically, an approach that also facilitated her critique of individual letters that illuminate certain themes. She focuses on five themes: the women’s relationship with place and identity, their life stages as women, their experience of the war that dominated their lives in the 1640s, their Protestant piety, and their attempts to establish a legacy for future generations of their families. The letters regularly refer to the movement of the sisters and their families to other parts of Ireland or across the Irish Sea to stay in the homes their father or husbands had established in England. Walsh suggests that the constant crossing from Ireland to England meant that the Boyle women did not develop any sense of national consciousness but rather focused on local loyalties to the place where they lived. Their strongest and longest loyalty was, however, to their membership in the Boyle kin group. Despite their marriages and physical separation, the sisters maintained throughout their lives a strong connection with each other, with their brothers and sisters-in-law, and with their father. Cork clearly encouraged, if not on occasion bribed, his children to keep him informed of their activities. As Nicholas Canny has documented, Cork carefully planned the marriages of all his children from an early age. His daughters Katherine and Dorothy were sent to live with their intended in-laws when they...

'Joy among the Irish children that […] there will be war': Irish Children and Seventeenth-Century Wars

During the tumultuous wars and rebellions in early modern Ireland, children were inevitably drawn into conflicts that spread far from battlefields and into homes, farms, and villages. While most of the evidence about children in these wars depicts them suffering from violence, hunger, and disease, there were also many reports of violence perpetrated or threatened by Catholic Irish children. Such violence was presented by Protestant witnesses and commentators as evidence of the barbarity of their Irish Catholic parents as well as of the children themselves. This paper will examine the emotional work that these narratives performed for the Protestants in Ireland and the English readers of anti-Irish propaganda.

BEING A NON-WHITE IRISH? RACISM IN MODERN IRELAND

The paper attempts to identify the features of the spread of racist views and sentiments in Ireland in the late 20 and early 21 centuries. The author draws attention to the specifics of migration flows in the country, which for a long time was a region of active emigration, which led to a not very active spread of racism until recently, with the exception of the policy towards Irish travellers. Based on statistics, materials from Irish media and blogs, as well as materials from anti-racist organizations, various mechanisms of racialization of migrants in modern Ireland are demonstrated. The author concludes that there was a significant role of the state in affirming whiteness as an important part of Irish identity and, at the same time, that the racist views are marginal in modern Irish agenda.

CELTIC LANGUAGE ELEMENTS IN THE PLACE NAMES OF IRELAND

The article deals with the culture and heritage of ancient Celts by analyzing the toponyms of Celtic origin in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, as well as in the places where the Irish diaspora is present. In accordance with the set goal, the article considers the cultural component in the meaning of linguistic units and the classifi cation of toponyms and their use in diff erent parts of the island. By the example of the analysis of the meaning of Celtic toponyms functioning in modern Ireland and Northern Ireland, it is shown that Celtic national heritage has not been lost. The study of toponyms allows us to penetrate into the worldview of the ancient people whose culture infl uenced and shaped the descendants of Celts. Key words: Celtic languages, place name, toponymy, Ireland, the Irish language, semantics.

Post-Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry by Jefferson Holdridge Brian Ó Conchubhair (review)

always been here’. The context is his introduction to John Scotus Eriugena’s homily on the prologue of St John’s gospel. The Christ who was to come was present to the people of Ireland in their solidarity with creation and in their contemplation of the cosmos. Perhaps that’s why Christianity was accepted in this far-flung island without the martyrdom that accompanied the advent of Christianity in other lands. Eriugena states: ‘In all human beings, indeed to put it simply, in the created universe as a whole, the Word is true light that subsists now and always has because it never ceases to subsist in all things’ (Prologue, XVIII). While concepts like deep pneumatology and deep Christology were unknown to this ninth-century Irishman, we already find the seeds of a Celtic tradition of creation that is both cosmic and eschatological in its scope and that finds a fresh articulation over a millennium later in Lane’s reflections. Lane’s style is often lyrical. The text is liberally laced with poetry by Heaney, Eliot, Wordsworth and Tennyson, to name a few. This book reads as a canticle to the creation that it embraces. It is a meditation on the ingenuity of the Triune God who draws all that exists into an eternal communion of life and love. Monsignor Liam Bergin, who holds a doctorate from the Gregorian University, has been teaching theology in Boston College since 2011. He was previously rector of the Pontifical Irish College in Rome. Jefferson Holdridge and Brian Ó Conchubhair (eds), Post-Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry (Winston Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2017), 416 pages. A little book by Austin Clarke published in 1951, entitled Poetry in Modern Ireland, attempts within its 80 or so pages to review and to reflect on the poetry of the country for the previous 70 years. It is exciting about the early years of the new twentieth century and its expectation of a new era and guides us masterfully through those years of revival, our pre-occupation with mythology, our place on the edge of the romantic movement (‘a leakage from the pre-Raphaelite school’), and the wrestling of poetry with rhetoric which had been central to the best and the worst of the era. While Clarke’s book is an attempt at a synthesis by one mind and one Winter 2020-2021: Book Reviews Studies • volume 109 • number 436 474 poetic sensibility, the current book is one that is ‘all over the place’. I use this phrase in both its good and in its scattered sense: it is ‘all over the place’ in being wide-ranging, eclectic and doing its utmost to be comprehensive, but also in its other sense as it does not pretend to any conclusion, any great statement, any landing which can allow us to say, ‘Yes, this is what Irish poetry is about now!’ I take it that this is the reason for the title itself of ‘Post-Ireland’. An essay by Justin Quinn with the title ‘The Disappearance of Ireland’ is referenced several times as a kind of hook to this book, and the obvious connection is that Ireland (now more commonly referred to as ‘the island’ with much cultural cringe) has been expunged from the concerns of poets. The hidden question revolves around the unspoken conundrum of whether there is anything distinctive about Irish poetry any more, or is it just another shard of the many splinters of the Anglosphere? Many of the contributors struggle with this. Of course, it is unlikely that we will ever see again any serious references to ‘pearl-pale hands’ and ‘candlelike foam’ from the ‘dew-dropping sky’ with ‘milky wavings of neck’ in ‘sleepy song’ while ‘silky footsteps’ homely tread. The editors rightly point out that there has been a ‘disappearance of a certain vision of Ireland’, a point which would be difficult to dispute. On the other hand, is there anything to take its place in the ‘white noise of twentieth century life’? The simple answer is, no, there isn’t. Poets never had to conform to anything, and there was never a requirement to write yet again and once more about...

:The Old English in Early Modern Ireland: The Palesmen and the Nine Years’ War, 1594–1603

:<i>The Old English in Early Modern Ireland: The Palesmen and the Nine Years’ War, 1594–1603</i>

Book review: Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives

Book review: Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives

Jewish and Hebrew Books in Marsh’s Library: Materiality and Intercultural Engagement 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.

Irish Reading Societies and Circulating Libraries Founded before 1825: Useful Knowledge and Agreeable Entertainment

Keith Manley's Irish Reading Societies and Circulating Libraries Founded before 1825: Useful Knowledge and Agreeable Entertainment concisely demonstrates the integral position held by libraries and reading societies in Irish individuals' self-improvement, literacy, and social consciousness across class and religious barriers in pre-1826 Irish society. The author takes a clear yet detailed approach to surveying early modern Irish libraries, reading societies, and related establishments. A library cataloguer for the National Trust, he has published on early modern Irish library history. He co-edited The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. 2, 1640–1850 (2006), which covers a larger timeline and geographic expanse than the current work. His 2012 work, Books, Borrowers, and Shareholders: Scottish Circulating and Subscription Libraries before 1825, covers the same period and also includes a list of libraries, but focuses on commercial libraries.This monograph is in chronological order; topic, social class, and library type further divide distinct sections. The author begins with the book culture of Ireland before 1800: the complicated ties between religion, book selling, and libraries in the region. Then he discusses working class's early reading societies, and the middle class's subscription libraries. Circulating libraries are in two key chapters. James Hoey Senior was the first Irish bookseller who by 1737 started charging for books by their size. The other details bookselling after the Act of Union of 1800 as well as the evolution of circulating libraries. Two chapters discuss middle-class subscription libraries, which were often found in the largest municipalities. Knowledge-promoting societies often ran these fee-based libraries. While they could be specialist subscription libraries they were often social clubs that held meetings, conducted voting, sold shares, and sold newspapers. Reading societies established after 1800 spread ideas for self-improvement, were less political, adjusted income-based charges, and facilitated individual self-education across social classes. They also helped start the call for a national education system that came to fruition in 1831. Most religious institutions collected books. While some religious libraries were open to the public, others such as Quaker libraries were only available to members.Manley successfully integrates case studies into different chapters. Chapbooks, or Burton books, were cheap popular fiction bought by Irish people interested in popular fiction at a low price. Manley skillfully uses chapbooks as examples of inexpensive popular fiction. Chapbooks are used as case studies in his discussions of reactionary societies, such as the Cheap Book Society, and restrictions on children's reading materials. Sir Charles Gavan Duffy is another case study. Manley detailed how reading from libraries helped influence Duffy's founding of the newspaper The Nation. He also discusses the lead-up to Duffy's political career where he became the governor of Victoria-Australia. These are just two of many case studies he extrapolates from primary sources, archival materials, and specialized secondary sources.The thirty-six-page list of libraries is an impressive directory for Irish libraries, literary societies, book clubs, and the like. This is a valuable resource for students and academics in history and related humanities interested in early modern Ireland. It adds to the already astoundingly detailed information in this volume.We are in the midst of the rise of book history and tangential interdisciplinary fields. John Hinks and Matthew Day's edited collection From Compositors to Collectors: Essays on Book-Trade History (2012) focuses on predominantly British publications and book collectors and, while focusing on the book trade, has many intersections with library history and book history. A key distinction is how Hinks and Day chose papers focusing on text distribution, creation, and reception presented at Print Networks conferences between 2006 and 2009. While the whole of Manley's text focuses on circulating libraries and reading societies, only seven of the nineteen essays in Hinks and Day's work focus on specific libraries, circulating collections, or librarians.This comprehensive yet thorough monograph is appropriate for academics especially specialists in the history of the book, early modernists, and library historians.

Women’s Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland. Julie A. Eckerle, Naomi McAreavey, eds.

<i>Women’s Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland</i>. Julie A. Eckerle, Naomi McAreavey, eds.