Joseph Starr In Europe the eighteenth century was known as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. Intellectuals firmly believed that men were perfectible and that having achieved that state an era of harmony, peace and progress would emerge. Armed with these ideas they set out to reform every … Read more
Hiram Morgan The palpable and enduring effect of the Reformation on Irish history should not be allowed to obscure the impact also made by the Renaissance. The rationale behind the Tudor attempt to ‘reform’ the Irish polity and the Gaelic section of its population was provided by humanists variously inspired by classical ideas of … Read more
John S. Powell It was a sure sign that the Huguenot plantation of Portarlington in County Laois was dead when a historian turned it into an article (Sir Erasmus Borrowes in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology in 1855). Previously the town had seemed a curiosity of the Irish midlands, a hangover from seventeenth-century religious … Read more
Colm J. Donnelly A tower house is a fortified medieval residence of stone, usually four or more stories in height. Like most of the surviving monuments of our medieval past, the majority of Irish tower houses are in poor condition, with collapsed walls and ivy shrouded exteriors reflecting centuries of neglect. Yet these ruins, the … Read more
‘A real Irish historian’ Seán Duffy talks to James Lydon who last year retired as Lecky Professor of Modern History in Trinity College, Dublin. SD: Tell me about your family background and early years. JL: I was born in Galway. My mother was from an Irish-speaking family not far from the city. My father was … Read more