The Historian as Detective: Uncovering Irish Pasts

Essays in honour of Raymond Gillespie

Salvador Ryan, Terence Dooley, Mary Ann Lyons

• Publisher: Four Courts Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781801510486
• Edition: 0
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

This collection of short essays presents the fruits of painstaking investigations conducted by over eighty scholars of history, early Irish, nua-Ghaeilge, archaeology, osteoarchaeology, forensic anthropology, geography, and classical studies who have delved into Ireland's past and pieced together fragments of evidence to uncover the fascinating truth behind an array of curious tales about intriguing characters, events, and vestiges of by-gone days.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontispiece
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of contents
• List of illustrations
• List of abbreviations
• An appreciation of the scholarship of Raymond Gillespie
• An appreciation of Raymond Gillespie as teacher
• Raymond Gillespie as mentor
• Introduction
• The case of the missing martyrs
• The case of the pilgrim: a mystery from the Irish annals
• Joined-up thinking: was this the home of an Anglo-Saxon exile in Dublin?
• St Nicholas’s churches in medieval Irish towns: a challenge for the historian as detective
• Why was the king offered six wives by the pope?
• Carlingford Castle: whodunit?
• A tale of two Delvins
• Fifty ways to cleave your brother: misfits, mayhem and murder in medieval Irish monasteries
• Richard Ledred’s swansong: reading between the lines
• The mystery of the missing Peasants’ Revolt
• Sir John Fastolf ’s love child?
• ‘Diverse persons of malice prepensed’: who stole the records from Trim Castle in 1494?
• Lost and found: the reputation of Hugh O’Neill, earl ofTyrone c.1550–1616
• A viceregal nervous breakdown? The collapse of the earl of Sussex in 1563
• ‘Unforeseen consequences of dreadful deeds’: the extinction of the O’Briens of Carrigogunnel
• Barnaby Rich: soldier, satirist, bigamist, spy
• Murder in the Tower? The mystery of the death of Archbishop Richard Creagh
• A mystery solved? Lawrence Walsh and his memoir of 1588
• Travel plans in 1595: a sale of corn, Co. Westmeath
• Did Thomas Nashe visit Ireland?
• Counting Irish provinces in Douai
• What was the auspicious occasion?
• Skulduggery in the Vatican: why was Fr Thomas Messingham’s Florilegium Insulae Sanctorum (1624) banned by the Roman Catholic Church?
• Irish Franciscan chicanery at a Roman funeral in 1626
• Purgatory lost and found
• Shape-changing at dawn on a May Day in Clare
• The curious case of the lord deputy, the Carmelite and the exorcised girl
• What the chambermaid saw: the strange case of Sir Stephen Butler and his wife
• Cannibalism at Knocknamase Castle, 1641
• Uncovering widows in the 1641 Depositions
• The Indian and the spy: a story of empire from 1640s Ireland
• ‘Mistress Roe’ on the case! Baptist enchantment and spectral detectives in Cromwellian Ireland
• From beer and shoes to sugar and slaves: five Baptist Loobys in Cork and Antigua
• Ware versus Shirley
• ‘Honest Tom Phillips’ and the third dimension – why Belfast?
• A learned identity: monuments to Thomas Coffy, at Lynally, Co. Offaly
• ‘Some traitors amongst us’: what lay behind the Williamite winter offensive of December 1690?
• Henry Luttrell: treachery or tragedy?
• Dutch School, c.1700 with apologies to the Quirke novels of Benjamin Black/John Banville
• Smuggling uncovered!
• The murder of Anne Eustace: an early eighteenth-century cause célèbre
• Cherchez le pasteur!
• The mystery of the Irish bard
• The high window
• From Marrakesh, to Aleppo, to Dublin: Ibn Tufayl, HayyIbn Yaqzān – a philosophical tale
• Murder on the high seas: the case of the Sandwich
• Plates
• Georgian deceptions: the curious cases of the conjuror, the boxer and the giant
• John Giffard: self-serving sycophant?
• Was there a hermit of Muckross?
• Volcanism, weather and harvest crises: linking climate, the environment and human experience in eighteenth-centuryIreland
• Was Theobald Wolfe Tone buried at Bodenstown?
• Confessional co-existence and the iconography of the Chapel Royal, Dublin Castle
• Still turning heads: a nineteenth-century Belfast apothecary
• Post-traumatic stress in 1820s Cork? The travails of the Ring family, 1823–31
• James Gallagher’s sermons in translation: the case of the Baltimore edition
• Lost and found: the fortunes of the McAuley family
• Daniel MacAfee and Daniel O’Connell: Protestant liberty versus ‘the Liberator’
• A steam carriage comes to Maynooth
• Searching for Ireland’s workhouse Famine emigrants in Canada
• The travails of E.J. Shirley of Lough Fea and Ettingtonin 1856
• ‘A very bad man’: William Cooney leaves the Irish College, Paris, 1872
• Ireland’s lost cardinal
• Murder in Madrid
• Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour
• Young Danny and the mystery of St Patrick
• Hiding in plain sight
• A Belfastman: the greatest friend St Helena ever had
• What became of Captain Jack? A mother’s search for the truth behind her son’s disappearance in the Great War
• The historian as detective: recovering women’s pasts
• Political or agrarian? Why was Moydrum Castle burned during the War of Independence?
• Winding of his ticker. Stopped short never to go again when the old
• The lost flag of Rathmines
• ‘How many Gods are there?’: catechetical ignorance andits celebration in Irish folklore
• Earley art cast aside for Russian splendour at Mullingar Cathedral
• In defence of the Church of Ireland!
• Unveiling the ghost of Laheen House
• The mystery of the six-foot woman!
• Lost and found: ‘new’ sources for early modern Irish history
• Notes on contributors
• Raymond Gillespie's publications to 2020