ABSTRACT

Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives offers fresh approaches and case studies that push the field of early modern Ireland, and of British and European history more generally, into unexplored directions.

The centuries between 1500 and 1700 were pivotal in Ireland’s history, yet so much about this period has remained neglected until relatively recently, and a great deal has yet to be explored. Containing seventeen original and individually commissioned essays by an international and interdisciplinary group of leading and emerging scholars, this book covers a wide range of topics, including social, cultural, and political history as well as folklore, medicine, archaeology, and digital humanities, all of which are enhanced by a selection of maps, graphs, tables, and images.

Urging a reevaluation of the terms and assumptions which have been used to describe Ireland’s past, and a consideration of the new directions in which the study of early modern Ireland could be taken, Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives is a groundbreaking collection for students and scholars studying early modern Irish history.

chapter 1|26 pages

Introduction

The past, present, and future of early modern Ireland

chapter 2|22 pages

Writing the social and cultural history of Ireland, 1550–1660

Wills as example and inspiration

chapter 3|15 pages

‘I doe add this treatise, as a supplement of mine owne experience’

Subjectivity and life-writing in early modern Ireland

chapter 6|17 pages

Bardic close reading

chapter 8|17 pages

Munster and India

The local and global in early modern Ireland

chapter 9|19 pages

Questioning the viceroys

Toward a new model of English government in Tudor Ireland, 1536–1594 1

chapter 10|14 pages

‘[T]hey … doo nowe resort to the fountaine heade’ 1

The Palesmen’s petitions during the Nine Years’ War, 1594–1603

chapter 12|17 pages

The history of medicine in early modern Ireland

Some research problems and opportunities

chapter 13|20 pages

Dung beetles and the ‘Vulgar Traditions’

Applying folkloric sources and methods to early modern Ireland 1

chapter 14|21 pages

‘Barbarisme and obdurate wilfulnesse’

Agricultural materialism, animal welfare, and Irish studies 1

chapter 17|20 pages

Mapping the past

Geographical information systems and the exploitation of linked historical data

chapter |10 pages

Afterword

‘Revising anew’ early modern Irish history 1