Early Modern Ireland

New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives

Sarah Covington, Valerie McGowan-Doyle, Vincent Carey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815373933
• eBook ISBN: 9781351242998
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives offers fresh approaches and case studies that push the field of early modern Ireland, and of British and European history more generally, into unexplored directions.

The centuries between 1500 and 1700 were pivotal in Ireland's history, yet so much about this period has remained neglected until relatively recently, and a great deal has yet to be explored. Containing seventeen original and individually commissioned essays by an international and interdisciplinary group of leading and emerging scholars, this book covers a wide range of topics, including social, cultural, and political history as well as folklore, medicine, archaeology, and digital humanities, all of which are enhanced by a selection of maps, graphs, tables, and images.

Urging a reevaluation of the terms and assumptions which have been used to describe Ireland's past, and a consideration of the new directions in which the study of early modern Ireland could be taken, Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives is a groundbreaking collection for students and scholars studying early modern Irish history.

1 Introduction

The past, present, and future of early modern Ireland

Sarah Covington, Vincent P. Carey and Valerie McGowan-Doyle

Few historical developments have been as revolutionary as the events which occurred in Ireland over the early modern period. In 1500, the country was a lordship of the English crown, though rule from London was weak, and vast territories outside the Pale were controlled by independent and mighty aristocratic families of Gaelic Irish and Old English stock. By 1700, Ireland was technically a kingdom though also, confusingly, a colony whose conquest had been very much ‘consolidated’ through wars and dispossession.¹ As for the Gaelic elite, they were well eclipsed from power by 1700, even if their cultural (and with Jacobite poetry, political) world lived on.² Catholicism, which was the sole faith in Ireland at the beginning of the sixteenth century, as it was in Europe more generally, continued to be the church of most people in Ireland, though in 1700 it existed under an oppressive regime dominated by the new Anglo-Irish Protestant minority. Ireland’s landscape in 1500, meanwhile, was also relatively unknown to the English, at least cartographically; by 1700, the country was the most systematically mapped in Europe, leading to a revolution in property ownership with the small Protestant class owning an enormous majority of the land.³ In short, anyone who had lived in 1500 and was suddenly propelled forward to 1700 would hardly have recognized the place at all.⁴

Historical and literary scholarship relating to this time has undergone its own transformations as well, particularly in the twentieth century. To generalize (and also bypass some important exceptions, which will be discussed later in this chapter), over sixty years ago it was possible to read a 300-page book on sixteenth-century England that mentioned Ireland in precisely seven pages, with the country indexed under ‘rebellion of’.⁵ The wars of the mid-seventeenth century, still labeled the ‘Civil War’, the ‘Puritan Revolution’, or the ‘English Revolution’, hardly mentioned related and contributing developments in Ireland. Studies of Ireland were overwhelmingly focused on political and economic history,⁶ and with some exceptions, the country’s place in the bourgeoning British Empire and larger world was bypassed.⁷ It was rare to read of the violence in the period, even if nineteenth-century histories, particularly those of a nationalist orientation, certainly dwelled on it.⁸ Women were hardly examined at all, while the social and cultural worlds that animated different groups or men such as Geoffrey Keating tended to be overlooked as well, despite—again—intense interest in the subject during the nineteenth century. Not least, Edmund Spenser was still largely known as the author of the Faerie Queene, not as the man who spent significant time in Ireland and whose work was deeply informed by that country.⁹

Our picture of early modern Ireland is entirely different today due in great part to the pioneering efforts of scholars who began to ask new questions of the period in the 1970s. This collection has itself been inspired by the contributions of one of those scholars, Nicholas Canny, for whom three sessions of the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) annual meeting in 2016 were given in honor of his contributions to early modern history. All the panelists at that conference were based in North American universities to underscore our appreciation of how Canny essentially opened up the field for those of us working there. The collection has now moved well beyond those RSA sessions, but its other intent remains the same: to suggest further avenues for research in early modern Ireland and to offer, in the process, new ways of thinking about the approaches and methods of our respective and intermingling disciplines.

To be fair, many scholars before the 1970s offered their own significant contributions to our understanding of the period. But with Canny, Brendan Bradshaw, Ciaran Brady, Colm Lennon, Steven Ellis, and Toby Barnard, followed generationally by Bernadette Cunningham, Mary O’Dowd, Raymond Gillespie, Vincent Carey, and Alan Ford, the field today has now fully arrived and grown. An increasing number of monographs, articles, and collections are published every year on early modern Ireland or (for better and worse) on ‘Britain and Ireland’. Volume Two of the recent Cambridge History of Ireland is an essential contribution and will be referenced for decades to come.¹⁰ The earlier New Oxford History of Ireland, and Volume Three especially, also remains an invaluable reference, along with guides such as Sources for Modern Irish History 1534–1641.¹¹ Digital humanities is flourishing around early modern Ireland, while literary scholarship that focuses on Ireland has especially proliferated in recent years, spurred on in part by the publication of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (including Volume Four, on women)¹² and postcolonial studies in the 1990s. The house of Spenser continues to grow (perhaps at the expense of other writers on Ireland), with his Irish dimension deepening our understanding of his work, while new attention paid to Irish-language prose and poetry, exiled continental writings, and material presented on digital humanities platforms—to cite just a few examples—has similarly flourished. Early modern (or rather ‘post-medieval’) archaeology has also helped us to understand more about plantations, domestic and church structures, artifacts, and other physical survivals, and the clues and conclusions they yield, while material culture has extended more broadly into other disciplines.¹³ And historical geography, after the equally seminal efforts of John Andrews and William Smyth, itself represents a cutting edge of scholarship, especially in its focus on cartographers and surveyors such as Richard Bartlett and William Petty.¹⁴

The chapters in this collection seek on the one hand to build on this existing literature by focusing on new sources, questions, methods, and approaches that present and future scholars may pursue to possibly field-changing effect. But pursuing ‘new directions’ does not simply mean that one presents a fresh and original topic or source, or applies brilliantly innovative interpretations to a well-trodden one. It can also involve an overhaul of one’s own existing assumptions about what the writing of history, literature, or archaeology might traditionally mean and the very terms on which we think, in this case, of Ireland’s past. Not least, it calls us to examine our own vested interests in choosing or framing our subjects and sources the way we do, and the particular contexts and agendas in which we write. Ireland in the centuries between 1500 and 1700 may therefore be more known than ever before; yet it still remains an elusive entity, requiring new tools and methods to widen its bounds and excavate its other depths. And while no one can truly foresee what new historical or scholarly turns lie ahead, the interdisciplinary essays which follow attempt to point the way by asking questions and suggesting answers. What, for example, are the sources that have yet to be probed, and how should they be used? In what ways should the disciplines better address each other? How can political or social history be taken into new territories? In what ways should Irish-language material be incorporated more deeply into studies that remain dominated by English-language sources? And what new theoretical or thematic approaches have not yet been applied to early modern Ireland or even discovered at all? Not least, how do the questions we ask ourselves today—or may ask ourselves tomorrow—shape our own approach to this most turbulent time and place?

Past and current directions

Historians of early modern Ireland hold a particularly poignant relationship to the period they study, not least because so many sources—with the exception of Irish-language poems and prose works, which are plentiful¹⁵—are so scarce or have perished. The most spectacular incident that brought on this relative dearth was the conflagration of the Public Record Office in 1922, which was destroyed in the midst of the Civil War, incinerating an incalculable number of administrative, legislative, ecclesiastical, and court records relating to Ireland from the thirteenth through nineteenth centuries. For early modernists especially, it is not too much of an exaggeration to state that this loss is viewed as comparable to the burning of the Library of Alexandria or the destruction of the Mayan Codices, even though a project is underway to digitally reconstruct the archive.¹⁶ Other acts of destruction also occurred, however, to undermine the source base of pre-1700 records. In 1711, a fire in the Custom Office reduced privy council books and records from the surveyor general’s office to a charred heap; in 1758, another fire, this time at Dublin Castle’s Birmingham Tower, extinguished central administration records, such as rolls of common pleas and pleas of the crown.¹⁷ Historians have thus had to rely upon sources such as surviving State Papers, which reflect correspondence between Dublin Castle and the Privy Council in London, resulting in the oft-repeated ‘castle-centric’ view of Irish history.¹⁸ On the other hand, we know much of early modern Ireland—or rather perceptions of early modern Ireland—because the writing of it extends back to the period itself, in works by Spenser, Edmund Campion, Richard Stanihurst, Mícheál Ó Cléirigh, and Geoffrey Keating.¹⁹

The eighteenth century also issued its histories or, with the Thomas Carte papers, its repositories. But it was not until the nineteenth century that the period was given renewed attention, spurred on by Catholic emancipation, emergent nationalist and unionist movements, and the tensions around the Land War, which viewed events in early modern Ireland as the source of the current outrageous dispensation.²⁰ J. P. Prendergast, who changed his positions on such issues as Home Rule later in life, thus offered a (nationalist) study of Ireland in the 1650s that fell on sympathetic ears and, in the words of John Cunningham, made certain that issues such as the ‘forced transplantation of peoples west … now bulked larger in the public consciousness and in histories of mid seventeenth-century Ireland than had previously been the case’.²¹ In the wake of the 1922 fire, the works of Prendergast and his contemporaries or near-contemporaries J. A. Froude, Mary Hickson, John Gilbert, P.F. Moran, S.R. Gardiner, and Robert Dunlop—not to mention the local archaeological journals—became especially important as they included in their works material and documents now lost to the flames.²² On the other hand, while these scholars were careful in their editorial practices, they also intervened in choosing, omitting, or cutting parts of their texts by necessity and sometimes strategy—though what precisely went missing, unfortunately, cannot entirely be discerned, given the loss of those original records.

Richard Bagwell’s three-volume Ireland under the Tudors, first composed in 1885 and followed by his Ireland under the Stuarts, was one of the first systematic histories of the modern period and focused on political, administrative, and military history: unsurprising for a work compiled primarily from the State Papers—though other sources were consulted—and written in an age that privileged the political as the only history which mattered.²³ Bagwell was an acolyte of the great eighteenth-century historian W.E.H. Lecky and contemporary with Lecky’s nemesis Froude, and if he lacked the imaginative range and literary style of either, his volumes comprised a valuable narrative survey that embodied the careful textual scholarship of its time.²⁴ Bagwell’s other contemporary, William F.T. Butler—born in Tipperary and described as ‘at once dominantly Norman and notably Irish’²⁵—found much to dislike in the book, however. Butler’s own focus was on the legal and fiscal aspects of land tenure in the late medieval and early modern period, and he found Bagwell’s treatment of New English settlements during the Tudor period ‘inadequate’. More significantly, Butler, in another work, took the measure of the Gaelic Irish world, thus filling in a subject that had been relatively overlooked in Bagwell.²⁶

Despite these fastidious if somewhat parched works, however, it was the nationalist, unionist, or generally sectarian histories that compelled historians in the 1930s to advocate for a new method and approach to Ireland’s past. The movement that came to be known as revisionism, which emerged out of Irish scholars’ training in London’s Institute of Historical Research and found expression in the journal Irish Historical Studies, would dominate generations of historians and elicit much controversy, not least in its stated pursuit of what became known as ‘value-free’ history—a stance which appeared especially egregious to those who believed it minimized or even effaced the very real traumas of Ireland’s past.²⁷ The resurgence of revisionism in a new context—that is,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword: New Directions for Early Modern Ireland
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: the past, present, and future of early modern Ireland
• 2 Writing the social and cultural history of Ireland, 1550–1660: wills as example and inspiration
• 3 ‘I doe add this treatise, as a supplement of mine owne experience’: subjectivity and life-writing in early modern Ireland
• 4 Clerical wives in Tudor and early Stuart Ireland
• 5 Making Early Modern Irish studies Irish? Teaching, learning, and researching Early Modern Irish in a digital age
• 6 Bardic close reading
• 7 ‘Nation’ as Pobal in seventeenth-century Irish
• 8 Munster and India: the local and global in early modern Ireland
• 9 Questioning the viceroys: toward a new model of English government in Tudor Ireland, 1536–1594
• 10 ‘[T]hey … doo nowe resort to the fountaine heade’: the Palesmen’s petitions during the Nine Years’ War, 1594–1603
• 11 Institutional history and the early modern Irish state
• 12 The history of medicine in early modern Ireland: some research problems and opportunities
• 13 Dung beetles and the ‘Vulgar Traditions’: applying folkloric sources and methods to early modern Ireland
• 14 ‘Barbarisme and obdurate wilfulnesse’: agricultural materialism, animal welfare, and Irish studies
• 15 Archaeologies of early modern Ireland—crossing the disciplinary divide
• 16 Climate, debt, and conflict: environmental history as a new direction in understanding early modern Ireland
• 17 Mapping the past: geographical information systems and the exploitation of linked historical data
• Afterword: ‘Revising anew’ early modern Irish history
• Index