NICHOLAS CANNY Oxford University Press £90 ISBN 9780198808961 Reviewed by John Gibney This book arose, as its author admits in the very first line, ‘by accident rather than design’. Nicholas Canny is one of the small group of historians who revolutionised the study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland from the 1960s onwards. His work was … Read more
By Joe Culley @TheRealCulls In the cover story of our previous edition, Laurence Geary explained that vaccination in Ireland is often said to have begun in Cork in 1800 when a local physician treated 300 children against smallpox. How appropriate, then, that Cork again features as ground zero in Strangling angel: diphtheria and childhood immunization … Read more
CRAWFORD GRIBBEN Oxford University Press £25 ISBN 9780198868187 Reviewed by Mary Kenny I have grown accustomed to the theme of Christian (and Catholic) Ireland’s decline and fall: it is almost a new genre of collective ‘misery memoir’. Crawford Gribben’s conclusion, at the end of his admirable and scholarly book, is broadly similar to that of … Read more
THOMAS EARLS FITZGERALD Routledge £120 ISBN 9780367333522 Reviewed by Mary McAuliffe Thomas Earls Fitzgerald has produced the latest in a very welcome series of publications of new research on the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, in this case concentrating on the period in County Kerry. This book is a meticulously researched, closely analysed … Read more
LUKE EASTWOOD The History Press €14.99 ISBN 9780750998000 Reviewed by Regina Sexton To embrace a study of Ireland’s best-known and best-loved festival of Hallowe’en is no small undertaking. Overshadowing any attempt are seminal works of sound and extensive scholarship: Máire MacNeill’s The festival of Lughnasa (1962), Séamus Ó Catháin’s Festival of Brigit: Celtic goddess and … Read more