Imagining Ireland’s Pasts: Early Modern Ireland through the Centuries

The book describes how various authors addressed the history of early modern Ireland over four centuries, and explains why they could not settle on an agreed narrative. It shows how conflicting interpretations broke frequently along denominational lines, but that authors were also influenced by ethnic, cultural, and political considerations, and by whether they were resident in Ireland or living in exile. The book details how each set of authors extolled the merits of their progenitors, offered hope and guidance to the particular audience they addressed, and disputed opposing narratives. The author shows how competing scholars, whether contributing to vernacular histories or empirical studies, became transfixed by the traumatic events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they sought to explain either how stability had finally been achieved, or how the descendants of those who had been wronged might secure redress. Humanist, Apocalyptic and Enlightenment authors are treated separately. Greatest attention is given to the nineteenth century when some Protestant authors adopted a nationalist perspective inspired by European liberal ideology. It is explained how this was spurned by Catholic Church leaders no less than by conservative Protestants, and how each set their minds to composing an alternative grand narrative. The publications of Lecky and Froude are given special consideration before attention shifts to authors who, in the late nineteenth century, permitted happenings from the early modern past to flow into the present to produce an outpouring of historical publications that has not been fully appreciated by scholars of Ireland’s literary renaissance.