By Fiona Fitzsimons The medieval church practised ‘churching’ as a rite of purification and thanksgiving for the safe delivery of a woman after the birth of her child. It marked the end of the ‘green month’ of the woman’s confinement and her resumption of normal domestic life and sexual relations with her husband. At the Reformation … Read more
The 1916 Easter Rising proved to be the spark that ignited the tensions within Basque nationalism. By Kyle McCreanor Historians have recently taken a greater interest in the global context of the Irish revolutionary period (1913–23) and in its international reverberations, which were felt even in the Basque Country, a region straddling the Western Pyrenees … Read more
A microcosm of the third Home Rule crisis. By M.C. Rast In several important ways, the third Home Rule crisis had little to do with Ireland; it was as much a British political dilemma as an Irish one, and played out throughout the United Kingdom. To many British politicians, Home Rule was a continuation of … Read more
Four different legal systems operated, with profound consequences for the concept of legitimacy. By Cormac T. Hickey In force until the Flight of the Earls and the collapse of the Gaelic order in the early seventeenth century, brehon law did not distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate children in terms of either rights or responsibilities, but … Read more
The Irishman who sold sex, sport and sensationalism in late nineteenth-century America. By Liam Barry-Hayes Richard Kyle Fox was born on the Albertbridge Road, Belfast, on 12 August 1846. His father, James, was a carpenter and his mother, Mary (née Kyle), was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. As a teenager Fox worked as an … Read more