Understandings of the 1641 rebellion, one of the most controversial moments in Irish history, is currently undergoing a radical scholarly transformation, thanks in part to the recent digitization of the 1641 depositions (http://1641.tcd.ie/). This has finally made accessible the testimonies of thousands of Protestant settlers, which have long been at the center of the controversy but rarely examined, and is facilitating more nuanced analysis of the rebellion than has hitherto been possible. There could be no better time, then, for John Gibney to look back over 350 years of historical scholarship and consider the place of 1641 in Ireland’s embattled history. The Shadow of a Year: The 1641 Rebellion in Irish History and Memory demonstrates that histories of 1641 have long played a key role in the country’s sectarian politics, particularly at times of political crisis. Maintaining that historical interpretations of the rebellion have remained largely static through different periods of upheaval (from the Cromwellian land settlement through the 1798 rebellion to independence), Gibney divides them into two broad categories. Protestant histories are the subject of the first chapter: these present the view that the rebellion was a massacre aimed at the extermination of the Protestant settler community in Ireland. The second chapter takes as its focus Catholic histories, which assert that violence has been deliberately exaggerated to legitimate the continued oppression of Irish Catholics. The third chapter moves to the turn of the twentieth century, but argues that the professionalization of historical scholarship at this juncture did not significantly alter the way the rebellion was represented, and histories continued to be drawn along broadly sectarian lines.

The Shadow of a Year provides a truly comprehensive survey of the historiography of the 1641 rebellion across four centuries. I did wonder, though, if the historical writings were as straightforward as Gibney often suggested; many of the texts — most obviously Sir John Temple’s enormously influential The Irish Rebellion (1646) — would repay further study. Furthermore, while the Protestant-Catholic dichotomy is helpful to a point, it inevitably flattens the complexities of the writing. The book predominantly focuses on history writing, yet it also includes some historical fiction and poetry, which is disproportionately used to evidence later Catholic interpretations of 1641 (yet earlier examples, such as Cola’s Furie, a play commissioned by the confederate Catholics in 1646, is overlooked). These other forms of remembering are important because they offer an alternative to the elite, scholarly interpretation that tends to be privileged by the book’s attention to the published work of historians and polemicists (which also makes it distinctly male dominated). However, a clearer rationale for their inclusion would have been helpful, as would a greater sensitivity to the generic qualities of imaginative (and other) literature. The relationship between history and memory could also be much further scrutinized. The historical writing nevertheless offers occasional glimpses of a fascinating oral-memorial culture, which in some ways represents Gibney’s ideal project: he admits in his introduction that he had intended to emulate Guy Beiner’s 2007 book on the folk history and social memory of 1798 but was prevented from doing so by a lack of extant sources, particularly among the National Folklore Collection. But if 1641 “simply does not register” (16) in the folkloric record, as Gibney suggests, then I hope succeeding scholars will look elsewhere for appropriate source material, or account for this surprising gap in the archive.

Overall, The Shadow of a Year makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the enduring legacy of 1641 at a pivotal moment in the scholarship as well as in Ireland’s sectarian history — and the two are related, since the depositions could not have been digitized without the Northern Ireland Peace Agreement. Gibney explicitly locates his work in this context, and in his richly suggestive introduction and conclusion he raises critical (but as yet unanswerable) questions about the relationship between the 1641 rebellion, (Northern) Irish memory, and peace and reconciliation (or continued sectarian conflict) in the twenty-first century. Gibney says that his book “‘is intended to open up a topic” (19), and alongside publications such as and Micheál Ó Siochrú and Jane Ohlmeyer’s Ireland: 1641 (2013), his book marks an exciting development in the scholarship of the 1641 rebellion and its role in Ireland’s (traumatic) memory culture.