Research News
New Publications
 Ireland, Empire and the Early Modern World: the James Ford Lectures (University of Oxford, 2021)Jane Ohlmeyer These lectures re-examine Ireland’s role in empire through the lens of early modernity. The focus will be on Ireland and the First English Empire (c.1550-1770s) but it is critical, where possible and appropriate, to look to other European and global empires for meaningful comparisons and contrasts. These lectures draw on a wide range of written, visual, and archaeological sources while works of poetry, prose, and performance help to recapture emotions and more nuanced senses of identity. Four interconnected themes underpin the series. First, as England’s first colony, Ireland formed an integral part of the English imperial system. Second, as well as being colonised the Irish operated as active colonists in the English and other European empires. Third, the extent to which Ireland served as laboratory for empire in India and the Atlantic world is analysed. Finally, the impact empire had on the material and mental worlds of people living in early modern Ireland is examined alongside how these years are remembered today. |
 Cultures of Calvinism in Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2020)Edited by Crawford Gribben and Graeme Murdock Calvinism has been associated with distinctive literary cultures, with republican, liberal, and participatory political cultures, with cultures of violence and vandalism, with enlightened cultures, with cultures of social discipline, with secular cultures, and with the emergence of capitalism. Despite these many associations, this volume recognizes that Reformed Protestantism did not develop as a uniform tradition with straightforward social, cultural, or political implications. This book assesses the complex character and impact of Calvinism in early modern Europe. It analyses the ways in which Calvinism related to the multi-confessional cultural environment that prevailed in Europe after the Reformation, while also considering the character and objectives, as well as the unintended and unexpected consequences, of the cultures of Calvinism in early modern Europe. |
 Taxation, Politics and Protest in Ireland, 1662-2016 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019)Edited by Douglas Kanter and Patrick Walsh This book examines the politics of taxation in Ireland between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. Combining political, economic, and policy history, it contributes to a growing interdisciplinary literature on public finance, while also providing context for the ongoing debate on taxation and austerity in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Taxation, Politics, and Protest in Ireland illuminates a neglected aspect of Irish history, and will be of interest to scholars, policymakers, and members of the public who wish to understand a subject that is central to the modern Irish experience. |
 Religion and Violence in France: 1500 to the Present (special issue of French History, 2019)Edited by Joseph Clarke This collection brings together historians and sociologists to rethink a recurring theme in French history: the relationship between religion and violence. Ranging from the sixteenth century’s wars of religion to protest movements in present-day France, the articles in this volume adopt a diachronic approach in order to interrogate long-standing assumptions about the connection between confessional identity and civil conflict in the French context. With articles addressing local, national and colonial case studies, this collection complicates our understanding of the role religion has played over five centuries of Franco-French conflict. |
 The English Bible in the Early Modern World(Brill, 2018)Edited by Robert Armstrong and Tadhg Ó Hannracháin The English Bible in the Early Modern World addresses the most significant book available in the English language in the centuries after the Reformation, and investigates its impact on popular religion and reading practices, and on theology, religious controversy and intellectual history between 1530 and 1700. Individual chapters discuss the responses of both clergy and laity to the sacred text, with particular emphasis on the range of settings in which the Bible was encountered and the variety of responses prompted by engagement with the Scriptures. Particular attention is given to debates around the text and interpretation of the Bible, to an emerging Protestant understanding of Scripture and to challenges it faced over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. |
 Militarized Cultural Encounters in the Long Nineteenth Century (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018)Edited by Joseph Clarke and John Horne This book explores European soldiers’ encounters with their continent’s exotic frontiers from the wars of the late eighteenth century to the First World War. In numerous military expeditions to Italy, Spain, Russia, Greece and the ‘Levant’ they found wild landscapes and strange societies inhabited by peoples who needed to be ‘civilized.’ Yet often they also discovered founding sites of Europe’s own ‘civilization’ (Rome, Jerusalem) or decaying reminders of ancient grandeur. The resulting encounters proved seminal in forging a military version of the ‘civilizing mission’ that shaped Europe’s image of itself as well as its relations with its own periphery during the long nineteenth century. |
Insular Christianity. Alternative models of the Church in Britain and Ireland, c.1570-c.1700 (Manchester University Press, 2013)Edited by Robert Armstrong and Tadhg O hAnnrachain This collection of essays on the alternative establishments which both Presbyterians and Catholics attempted to create in Britain and Ireland offers a dynamic new perspective on the evolution of post-reformation religious communities. Deriving from the Insular Christianity project in Dublin, the book combines essays by some of the leading scholars in the field with work by brilliant and upcoming researchers. |
Ireland: 1641. Contexts and reactions. (Manchester University Press, 2013)Edited by Micheal O Siochru and Jane Ohlmeyer This volume will be of interest to historians of early modern Europe as well as those engaged in early colonial studies in the Atlantic world and beyond, as the volume adopts a genuinely comparative approach throughout, examining developments in a broad global context. |
The Plantation of Ulster. Ideology and practice (Manchester University Press, 2012)Edited by Micheal O Siochru and Eamonn O Ciardha The pivotal importance of the Plantation to the shared histories of Ireland and Britain would be difficult to overstate. This collection of essays by leading scholars in the field moves away from an exclusive colonial perspective, to include the native Catholic experience, and in so doing will hopefully stimulate further research into this crucial episode in Irish and British history. |
Making Ireland English: The Irish Aristocracy In The Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press, 2012)(external)Jane Ohlmeyer This ground-breaking book provides the first comprehensive study of the remaking of Ireland's aristocracy during the seventeenth century. It is a study of the Irish peerage and its role in the establishment of English control over Ireland. Jane Ohlmeyer's research in the archives of the era yields a major new understanding of early Irish and British elite, and it offers fresh perspectives on the experiences of the Irish, English, and Scottish lords in wider British and Continental contexts. |
 Ritual and Violence: Natalie Zemon Davis and Early Modern France. Past and Present Supplement 7 (2012) (external)Edited by Graeme Murdock, Penny Roberts, and Andrew Spicer. This collection of essays seeks to offer new insights and approaches to the relationship between religion and violence as well as paying tribute to the immense contribution made in this field by Natalie Zemon Davis. |
 Conquest and Land in Ireland: The Transplantation to Connacht, 1649-1680 (Boydell and Brewer, 2011)
(external)John Cunningham. This book examines the transplantation to Connacht, a notorious element of the land settlement implemented in mid-seventeenth century Ireland. It situates the origins of the transplantation in the heat of conquest, reconstructs its implementation in the turbulent 1650s and explores its far-reaching outcomes. It thus enables the significance of the transplantation, and its relevance to wider themes such as colonialism, state formation and ethnic cleansing, to be better understood. |
 Decorative plasterwork in Ireland and Europe. Ornament and the early modern interior (Four Courts Press, 2012) (external)Edited by Christine Casey and Conor Lucey. Sumptuous plasterwork ornament is a celebrated and distinctive feature of Ireland's 18th-century domestic architecture. Migrant craftsmen brought the modelling skills and decorative forms of European plasterwork and influenced the emergence of a prolific and idiosyncratic local production. In this volume, specialists from Ireland, Britain and Europe explore early modern decoration from a range of perspectives that include formal analysis, discussion of technique and workshop practices, and documentation of the social and economic life of artisans. |
 The minutes of the Antrim ministers' meetings, 1654–8 (Four Courts Press, 2012)Edited by Mark S. Sweetnam These minutes record the business conducted at the regular meetings of the Presbyterian ministers and elders who formed the leadership of the predominantly Ulster-Scots community in Antrim. They provide an unparalleled insight into the concerns and pressures that helped to shape the identity and inform the practice of that community in a precarious and difficult period, as they enjoyed a brief period of toleration under the Cromwellian regime. The minutes appear here in print for the first time, with a comprehensive introduction and apparatus. |
 The 1641 Depositions and the Irish Rebellion (Pickering and Chatto, 2012) (external)Editors: Eamon Darcy, Annaleigh Margey and Elaine Murphy The 1641 Depositions are among the most important documents relating to early modern Irish history. This essay collection is part of a major project run by Trinity College Dublin, using the depositions to investigate the life and culture of seventeenth-century Ireland. The 1641 Rebellion and other key sieges of the period are discussed in the light of new information, and the potential for further research using this resource is assessed. As the first systematic investigation of the depositions and their context, this collection will make a significant contribution to our understanding of this period. |
 The Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (Boydell and Brewer, 2013). (external)Eamon Darcy The aim of this book is to investigate how the 1641 rebellion broke out and whether there was a meaning in the violence which ensued. It also seeks to understand how the English administration in Ireland portrayed these events to the wider world, and to examine whether and how far their claims were justified. Did they deliberately construct a narrative of death and destruction that belied what really happened? An obvious, if overlooked, context is that of the Atlantic world; and particular questions asked are whether the English colonists drew upon similar cultural frameworks to describe atrocities in the Americas; how this shaped the portrayal of the 1641 rebellion in contemporary pamphlets; and the effect that this had on the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms between England, Ireland and Scotland. |