The past twenty years or so have witnessed an upsurge in the academic study of Tudor Ireland. A number of young scholars were inspired by a series of important essays dealing with the Irish reformation by Brendan Bradshaw, Nicholas Canny and Karl Bottigheimer in the 1970s and 1980s and influenced by diocesan studies undertaken by … Read more
The ‘Captain Rock’ campaign of 1821–4 is one in a series of outbreaks of agrarian unrest that began in the 1760s and continued until the eve of the Famine, when starvation finally made concerted action impossible and the landlords closed in to make the evictions and clearances they had long desired. The Rock years were … Read more
‘MARRIED WOMAN GETS DEGREE’ was the immortal headline in a Mayo newspaper in 1955 when local woman Sheila Mulloy (née O’Malley) was awarded a Ph.D for her research on correspondence between France and Ireland during the Williamite War. Over the following years she raised eight children yet still found time to edit … Read more
Foclóirí agus foclóirithe na Gaeilge Liam Mac Amhlaigh (Cois Life, €15) ISBN 9781901176834 This book is a brief easy guide to Irish lexicography and Irish lexicographers. It is scholarly, accurate and well written, and provides an overview of its subject from the middle of the seventeenth century to the present day. The author correctly states … Read more
The post-medieval archaeology of Ireland, 1550–1850 Audrey Horning, Ruairí Ó Baoill, Colm Donnelly and Paul Logue (eds) (Wordwell, for the Irish Post-Medieval Archaeology Group, €70) ISBN 9781905569137 This welcome collection serves several purposes and prompts even more questions. First, it surveys comprehensively what post-medieval archaeologists have achieved, mainly during the last 30 years. It also … Read more