Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, Vol.1 (West Cork), Vol.2 (East and South Cork) Denis Power (comp.) (Stationary Office, £20 each) Guide to the Archives of the Office of Public Works, Rena Lohan (Stationary Office) Irish Archives Journal (Spring 1995) (Irish Society of Archives, £4.95) In recent years, there has been a massive splurge of spending … Read more
We’ll fight to the last in the honest old cause, And guard our religion, our freedom and laws. We’ll fight for our country, our king and his crown, And make all the traitors and croppies lie down. As the television documentaries, radio programmes and newspaper features marking the bicentennary of the French revolution rolled on … Read more
The foundation of St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, in 1795 represented a revolution in the history of Irish Catholicism. The penal era was drawing to a close, but the French Revolution and the loss of the continental colleges threatened the supply of priests to Ireland; of 478 seminary places in Europe before the revolution, ninety per … Read more
Landlords and tenants in mid-Victorian Ireland W.E. Vaughan (Clarendon Press, £40) This scholarly work is the result of long, methodical research based on an impressive range of primary sources, most notably estate papers. It is delivered free from irritating jargon with the econometric analysis lightened by a varied array of anecdotal backup. Vaughan questions conventional … Read more
Aristocrats Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740-1832 Stella Tillyard (Chatto and Windus, £20) Aristocrats is a tour de force. Stella Tillyard has used the stories of the four sisters of its subtitle, largely taken from their copious correspondence, to immerse the reader in the eighteenth century on both sides of the Irish Sea. The … Read more