Nick Maxwell Richard Boyle was one of the most significant and controversial characters in early modern Ireland. An archetypal English adventurer, by his own account he was variously an earnest royal official who rose through the ranks to reach the very top of government through sheer ability; a successful entrepreneur and industrialist; a great landowner, having acquired … Read more
The vast riches of Boyle’s archive are being showcased through the Irish Research Council-funded ‘Digital Boyle’ project (2014) at UCC. This will present images of key documents from the earl’s papers in an interactive display to be exhibited in the coming months at suitable locations. Manuscript images will be placed alongside transcriptions of texts, including … Read more
The Boyle family archive, known as the Lismore Papers, is one of the most important archival collections for the study of seventeenth-century Ireland. It is split into two collections, one of which is located in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin, and the other at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. The archive comprises thousands of … Read more
In 2012 the Irish Research Council agreed to fund an interdisciplinary project on ‘The Colonial Landscapes of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, c. 1602–1643’, involving a team of historians and archaeologists at University College Cork under the leadership of Dr David Edwards. The project set out to reconstruct Boyle’s vast estate, charting its extent, … Read more
At the beginning of the 1590s Ireland stood on the brink of a new era that would forever alter the economic, cultural and social characteristics of its people. The catalyst for these changes was the Nine Years War (1595–1603). In this period Gaelic military power reached its zenith, but it perversely ended with the completion … Read more