The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: The 1590s Crisis, John McGurk. (Manchester University Press, £45) ISBN 0719049598

John McGurk’s Herculean study of the raising, supplying and impact of the Elizabethan army of the 1590s on England and Ireland is the result of years of painstaking research and is unlikely to be replaced as the standard work for quite some time to come. Aside from Bartlett and Jefferey’s recent Military History of Ireland … Read more

They Shall Grow Not Old: Irish Soldiers and the Great War, Myles Dungan. (Four Courts Press, £17.95) ISBN 1851823476

This is a ‘popular’ rather than an academic work. The author states at the outset that it is ‘designed merely to keep before the public eye a neglected area of historical research and evaluation and to bring some more anecdotal material into the public domain in an edited, organised and palatable form’ (p.9). By academic … Read more

Reviewers

Tony Canavan is an editorial consultant and member of the editorial board of History Ireland; David Edwards lectures in history at NUI, Cork; Thomas O’Loughlin lectures in theology at the University of Wales, Lampeter; C.D.C. Armstrong is a freelance historian.

Religion and Rebellion: Historical Studies, Judith Devlin and Ronan Fanning (eds.). (University College Dublin Press, £35) ISBN 1900621037 A History of the Church of Ireland, 1691-1996 Alan Acheson (Columba Press, APCK, £25) ISBN 185607210X

Religion and Rebellion contains the proceedings of the twenty-second biennial Irish Conference of Historians, held in May 1995. The title is not an exact description of the contents. Only a few of the essays deal with ‘rebellion’ in the usual sense of the word: violent resistance to established authority. ‘Religion, rebellion, dissent, and social protest’ … Read more