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A new history of Ireland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

Marianne Elliott*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Liverpool

Extract

The travail of the mountains has finally ended with the publication of the long-awaited second volume of A new history of Ireland, almost two decades after its inception. By a curious coincidence Clarendon has simultaneously published the second volume of the History of Wales (R.R. Davies, Conquest, coexistence and change: Wales, 1063-1415). A comparison is therefore not only inevitable, it is revealing. The Welsh volume is carefully integrated and closely written, whereas its Irish counterpart lumbers along camel-like with sometimes distressingly little co-ordination: where Davies contains his narrative within a tight conceptual framework, the latter is constructed on a traditional narrative scheme that consumes half of the text. The difference is due in part to the probably insurmountable difficulty of integrating the labours of nineteen contributors, but part of the problem arises from the rigidity of the scheme into which their labours are compressed.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 1987

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References

1 A new history of Ireland, Vol. II: Medieval Ireland, 1169–1534. Edited by Cosgrove, Art. Pp lxii, 982. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1987 £75.Google Scholar

2 P.R.O.I, Memorandum roll, 3 Edw. II, m.20 d.

3 Ibid., m.40 d.

4 A new history oOf Ireland, vol. iv: eighteenth-century Ireland, 1691–1800. Edited by Moody, T.W. and Vaughan, W.E.. Pp lxiv, 849. Oxford: Clarendon. 1986. £65.Google Scholar

5 Dickson, David, New foundations: Ireland, 1660–1800 (Dublin, 1987)Google Scholar; Foster, R.F, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London, 1988, forthcoming).Google Scholar

6 See Canny, Nicholas, ‘The formation of the Irish mind: religion, politics and Gaelic Irish literature, 1580–1750’ in Philbin, C.H.E. (ed.), Nationalism and popular protest in Ireland (Cambridge, 1987), pp 5079.Google Scholar

7 Dunne, T J., ‘The Gaelic response to conquest and colonisation: the evidence of the poetry’ in Studia Hibernica, 10 (1980), pp 730 Google Scholar; Elliott, Marianne, Partners in revolution: the United Irishmen and France (New Haven and London, 1982), pp 47 Google Scholar See also Breatnach, Pádraig A., ‘Oral and written transmission of poetry in the eighteenth century’ in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 2 (1987), pp 5765.Google Scholar

8 See Cullen, Louis, ‘Catholics under the penal laws’ in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 1 (1986), pp 2336 Google Scholar; Connolly, S.J, ‘Religion and history’ in Irish Economic and Social History, 10 (1983), pp 6680,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and his unpublished paper, ‘Religion, culture and ideology: the making of the penal laws’, read to the conference of Irish historians in Britain at Liverpool in April 1986.

9 Malcomson, A.P W, John Foster: the politics of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy (Oxford, 1978).Google Scholar

10 It is only fair to add that the recent works of W J. McCormack and Seamus Deane are likely to spark off a new debate on this subject: McCormack, W J, Ascendancy and tradition in Anglo-Irish literary history from 1789 to 1939 (Oxford, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Vision and revision in the study of eighteenth-century Irish parliamentary rhetoric’ in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, ii (1987), pp 7–35; Deane, Seamus, A short history of Irish literature (London, 1986)Google Scholar; idem, ‘Swift and the Anglo-Irish intellect’ in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, i (1986), pp 9–22. Roy Foster in his forthcoming survey, Modern Ireland, devotes a chapter to the concept and in my forthcoming biography of Theobald Wolfe Tone I detail its development in the 1790s.

11 Clark, Samuel and Donnelly, James S. Jr (eds), Irish peasants: violence and political unrest, 1780–1914 (Manchester, 1983).Google Scholar