The wolf is as rich an image in literature as it is a reality—albeit a persecuted one—in natural history. Invariably featured as a menace in mythology and folklore, the wolf, demon or hero, is a strange and glamorous creature, the enigmatic ancestor of our domestic dog, and still roams Russian Asia, Canada and Alaska.Anyone with … Read more
The essays collected in this volume have been assembled as a tribute to Nicholas Canny by his colleagues and former students on the occasion of his retirement from the established professorship of history at NUI Galway. They centre on two themes that have been at the heart of Nicholas’s own concerns over the years as … Read more
Our understanding of the Cromwellian period from 1649 to 1660 has been sorely hampered by the fact that the records of the period were lost in the destruction of the Four Courts in 1922. The fact that the documentary evidence for this most controversial of historical periods is almost non-existent has meant that apocryphal stories, … Read more
It was a book that was ‘certain to have reverberations in the field of Anglo-Irish history’. Thus Hugh Kearney praised Laurence Stone’s epic exploration of the English nobility, The crisis of the aristocracy, 1558–1641 (1965), in a review published by Irish Historical Studies in 1966. With Stone’s opus to serve as a model and stimulus, … Read more
The kaleidoscope of history The Flight of the Earls is one of those iconic episodes that represents a seismic shift in Irish history, nothing less than the eclipse of the old Gaelic order and its replacement by a new colonial dispensation, exemplified by the Plantation of Ulster. Inevitably it is a story of loss, expropriation … Read more