By Cora Crampton Up to the end of the sixteenth century the Gaelic polity relied heavily on intermarriage as a crucial means of consolidating political and military power bases. To this end, high-status Gaelic women functioned as political resources under the control of their male relatives. It is proposed to examine available traces of the … Read more
By Jesse Harrington In two parliamentary questions in June 2024, Clare TD Cathal Crowe called for a government task force to locate and recover the alleged crown of Brian Bóruma (Brian Boru), the Irish king mortally wounded at Clontarf in 1014. Crowe suggested that, if this crown existed, it might be found somewhere in the … Read more
By Damien McLellan In the second episode of the recent RTÉ TV documentary Invasion: The Normans (reviewed in HI 32.5, Sept./Oct. 2024), the romantic and anachronistic 1864 illustration by James Doyle (below) was shown to represent Henry II’s arrival in Waterford. Henry is depicted as having presumably stepped up from his ship, which is lying … Read more
ALVIN JACKSONOxford University Press£35ISBN 9780192883742 REVIEWED BYBrian Girvin Brian Girvin is Honorary Professor of Contemporary Politics at the University of Glasgow. In 2007, the 300th anniversary of the Act of Union between England and Scotland passed by largely unnoticed. Public and political focus over the following years was on threats to the union rather than … Read more
MARTIN O’DONOGHUE and EMER PURCELL (eds)UCD Press€30ISBN 9781739086305 REVIEWED BYDermot Meleady Dermot Meleady is the author of John Redmond: the national leader (Merrion Press, 2013) and Redmond: the Parnellite (Cork University Press, 2008). In Redmond’s long campaign for Home Rule, the pivotal moment was November 1909, when the UK Liberal government clashed head-on with the … Read more