KEVIN O’ROURKE Pelican €20 ISBN 9780241398272 Reviewed by Eoin Dillon Eoin Dillon is a scholar of twentieth-century African history. Brexit has produced a crisis in the British body politic unparallelled since the Second World War. Suez in 1956, when France, the UK and Israel tried to re-seize the canal from the Egyptians and had to … Read more
Exploring medieval Ireland’s economy via papal taxation records. By Chris Chevallier There are multiple obstacles hindering the study of the Irish medieval economy. Regionalism and political divisions spatially limited the effective administrative reach of the colonial government. Shifting alliances, conflict and a frontier in constant flux exacerbated this issue. Concerning existing records, colonial financial … Read more
Two competing visions of Ireland are played out in their works, but each, in his own way, transformed the study of medieval Ireland. By Ruairí Cullen The dawn of ‘scientific’ history writing in the nineteenth century produced little original work on the Anglo-Normans in Ireland. Historians had not been kind to Strongbow and his companions, … Read more
By Stuart Kinsella Strongbow, or Richard fitz Gilbert de Clare, was buried in 1176 in Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin ‘within sight of the hallowed cross’. So said Gerald of Wales, yet nothing is known of Strongbow’s tomb before it was damaged by the collapse of the cathedral’s south wall in 1562. A nearby mural … Read more
Exhibition, 9 May–30 August 2019, RIA, Dawson Street, Dublin. Amidst the catastrophic horrors of Ireland’s Great Famine of 1845–50 a few bright examples of selfless humanitarianism shine through. One of these, little remembered in Ireland, was the Polish émigré Paul Edmund Strzelecki, known to many of his contemporaries simply as ‘the Count’. Arriving in Ireland … Read more