Early Modern History (1500–1700)

Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State 1485-1725 Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (eds.) (Longman, hb £36, pb £14.99) ISBN 0-5822-0964-1, 0-5822-0963-3

It is hardly more than twenty years since John Pocock first called for the creation of the ‘unknown subject’ (as he called it) of British History. Although the concept has not yet managed to penetrate to book shops (where shelves labelled ‘British History’ tend to be occupied by old-fashioned ‘popular’ histories of England). It is … Read more

‘No heroes now’?

As a writer of history textbooks, Elma Collins has had a profound, if unsung, influence on the generation of students who have passed through the Southern school system over the past thirty years. She currently teaches at the Institute of Education, Dublin and tutors at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. She is an active member of … Read more

Castles and fortifications in Ireland 1485-1945, Paul M. Kerrigan (Collins Press, £24.95)

Reviewed by Harman Murtagh ‘Power’, as Mao Zse-tung observed, ‘comes from the barrel of a gun’. His aphorism is true in the most literal sense of early modern Europe where the introduction of gunpowder and artillery precipitated a military revolution, which so overthrew traditional medieval security arrangements as to beget an entirely new military system, … Read more

Celibacy in the Catholic Church: a brief history

Thomas O’Loughlin     One of the most carefully fostered aspects of the image of the Catholic priest is that he is without a wife. Indeed, this image has been built up by the church administration as an essential part of its own esprit de corps. In recent centuries, certainly since clerical problems in mid-eighteenth-century … Read more

The Dead, Sick and Wounded of the Nine Years War (1594-1603)

In every sixteenth century campaign in Ireland as elsewhere disease was a greater killer than battle wounds. Field hospitals and army surgeons tried to cope with both. For English survivors welfare measures were often taken back home on their return but efforts to rehabilitate the sick and wounded were also made in Ireland. However, information … Read more