Every scholar of early modern Ireland dwells in the inescapable shadow—or light—cast by two figures who have transformed the field since the 1970s. Nicholas Canny and Brendan Bradshaw certainly benefited from noteworthy predecessors—David Quinn being perhaps the most notable—and they were joined by others such as Steven Ellis, Ciaran Brady, and Colm Lennon, who advanced, deepened, or took early modern Ireland in entirely new directions. But Canny and Bradshaw are towering not least because they have so articulately, if contentiously, disagreed with each other. “Titanic struggle” would not be too strong a description of the scholarly heat generated between the two, particularly over the question of English policy toward conquest and colonization. Their debates were productive as well, by making scholars ruminate on such topics as ideology, politics, poetry, or historical methodology—all of which remain pertinent today.

Canny and other critics make brief appearances throughout Bradshaw's “And So Began the Irish Nation,” but the volume presents itself as Bradshaw's singular remit, as it offers his central thesis asserting the emergence of a nationalist ideology and “consciousness” in early modern Ireland. By including previously published essays in one volume—which is useful for those who have had to track down some very seminal articles in different journals and collections—Bradshaw admits that he presents these retrospective essays from a defensive position, after finding himself still in “the eye of a storm” with the 1989 publication of his “Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland” (included here). Bradshaw unleashed the eruption when he argued from the premise that “Irish historiography took a wrong turn in the 1930s,” with a “revisionist” position that sought to expunge Ireland of the nationalist “legends, anachronisms, idealisations and sheer confusions” that had bedeviled Irish history writing since the nineteenth century; instead, revisionists believed in a “non-whiggish” analysis determined by a value-free “scientific methodology” (15) and proceeded to “professionalize” the stance through university appointments of like-minded “academic politicians” (35), and the establishment of journals such as Irish Historical Studies. More alarmingly, for Bradshaw, was the “tacit evasion” embedded in the revisionist school that found little room for the role of catastrophic violence and dispossession that especially characterized early modern Ireland (17). This avoidance resulted in a separation from popular memory as well, with “the communal memory retain[ing] a keen sense of the tragic dimension of the national history,” lost on the revisionists (21). Though Bradshaw does not overtly say so, the writing of revisionists, with some exceptions—Roy Foster most notably—was also very dull, not to say turgid (and perhaps purposefully so), thus ensuring the continuation of a “credibility gap between the historical profession and the public” (40).

Bradshaw thus seeks to oppose the revisionist turn by replacing “the old nationalist history, myths and all” (40) with a “healthy” ideological nationalism, and one defined by ethnic inclusiveness; a shared Counter-Reformation Catholicism; the contributions of learned advocates for a common if at times invented history (the most notable being Geoffrey Keating, “Ireland's first national historian and ideologue” [89]); assertions of Ireland as a sovereign kingdom, “governed by its own lords and commons under the English Crown” (90); and, from the Tudor period on, a hostility to the new and more aggressively colonizing English presence in Ireland. The latter hostility was expressed most potently in Gaelic poetry of exile and dispossession—a point which elicited fierce rebuttals by Tom Dunne and Michelle O'Riordan. Bradshaw follows his lengthy argument with a series of essays or “case studies” that elucidate his position, from a survey of nationalism and the Irish parliamentary tradition (one of Bradshaw's primary contributions to early modern Irish history) to a comparative analysis of the impact and reception of the reformation on and in Wales and Ireland.

The historiographical storms have grown less fierce in the years since Bradshaw wrote these essays and engaged in intense exchanges with scholars such as Steven Ellis or Bernadette Cunningham, and many of his calls have been taken up by other historians, including Bradshaw's own student, Hiram Morgan. The volume's essays, however, would have benefited from an introduction that acknowledged or engaged with these more recent works. For example, studies of violence by Vincent Carey, David Edwards, and others indeed focus their attention on the “catastrophic dimension” of early modern Ireland, to powerful effect. Historians are also beginning to tentatively reach into alternative sources and to respect rather than dismiss “popular” memory, with Guy Beiner the most prominent practitioner of such an approach, in his exploration of the folklore of 1798. It should be noted, however, that Bradshaw first recognized the usefulness of folklore and oral history for understanding early modern Ireland, as his excellent and perhaps most personal essay on Patrick Sarsfield, the dashing if doomed Jacobite hero of 1690 and 1691, demonstrates. In general, however, “nationalism” itself, while defined by Bradshaw according to its component parts, could have been problematized as a term; or at least Benedict Anderson, among others, might have been consulted. Bradshaw's nationalism also tends at times to reduce the complexities of early modern Irish history and supersedes other ideological movements at play. While Bradshaw carefully places the ideology in its early modern context, it also seeps out at times to join a larger whiggish stream, however unwittingly. Even so, the essays in “And So Began the Irish Nation” stand as a monument to a pioneering historian of a kind rarely seen today: a well-battered historian, to be sure, but one who changed and challenged all of our thinking on the traumatic story that was early modern Ireland, and whose legacy will remain with us, deservedly so, for decades to come.