Sponsored by the Folger Institute for British Political Thought, Washington DC, this, the second of three seminars on political thought in Ireland, will run from 8 May to 13 June 1997. It will ask how Gaelic/Catholic, Scots/Presbyterian, English/Anglican clergymen, intellects and scholars contributed to the development of a distinctive Irish political culture and identity during the seventeenth century. The seminar will consider the writings of leading political theorists and literary figures, such as Patrick Darcy, William Molyneux, Geoffrey Keating and Sir John Temple, who lived in Ireland, together with the work of Irish scholars, such as Conor O’Mahony, who resided on the continent. More generally it will examine the constitutional relationship between Ireland and Britain, the nature of Irish royalism, the slippery concept of Irish national identity, the development of Catholic and Protestant polemic, and the dissemination of political thought and culture. Throughout the seminar will attempt to marry the empirical methods of historians with the textual theories of literary scholars and to set developments in Irish political thought and culture in a wider Scottish, English and European context.
Speakers: David Armitage (Columbia), Aidan Clarke (TCD), Bernadette Cunningham (Dublin Diocesan Library), Raymond Gillespie (Maynooth), Patrick Kelly (TCD), Allan Macinnes (Aberdeen), Breandan Ó Buachalla (UCD), and Tadgh Ó hAnnracháin (UCD).
Enquiries: Jane Ohlmeyer, Dept. of History & Economic History, Taylor Building, King’s College, Old Aberdeen AB9 2UB, tel: 01224-273886, fax: 01224-272203 or
Folger Institute, Folger Shakespeare Library, 201 East Capitol St., S.E., Washington DC 20003-1094, tel: (202) 5444600.