‘A vague feeling of melancholy . . . tempered by . . . relief’, eh? If the prospect of your kids going back to school elicits the latter rather than the former emotion, then two recent publications from the Liffey Press are what are required. For the kids 2 (222pp, ?14.95 pb, ISBN 1904148859), ‘a … Read more
Colmán of Cloyne: a study Paul MacCotter (Four Courts Press, €30) ISBN 1 851 827935 Colmán mac Léinín, credited with the foundation of the sixth-century monastery of Cluain Uama, Cloyne, Co. Cork, has been rather neglected by modern scholarship. Paul MacCotter speculates that the absence of an extant Vita, if one was ever written, … Read more
What was an ‘angel’? ‘Castle chamber’? ‘Raskins’? A ‘Cunningham acre’? So asks the dust-jacket of Byrne’s dictionary of Irish local history (pp352, £20 pb, ISBN 1856354237), published by Mercier Press. The description on the cover—‘an extensive range of key local history terminology, a must for all local historians’—is far too modest and is qualified by … Read more
It was commonplace in the late 1970s and early 1980s for political historians to venture that the imbalance in Lecky’s coverage of the eighteenth century, which prompted him to devote three of his seminal five-volume History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century to the 1790s, would soon be remedied. This expectation was informed primarily by … Read more
Gone are the days when English historians ignored the question of British involvement in Ireland in the early modern period. When considered at all, the traditional narrative tended to trivialise the Irish experience and minimalise its impact on the grand sweep of English history. An example of this tendency is found in the influential England … Read more