The study of early modern Ireland has expanded dramatically in recent decades, as even a brief perusal of the many publications, conferences, colloquia, and lectures bear witness. Reconsideration of the institutions, politics, and strategies of conquest within this crucial period of consolidated English control has developed apace alongside the turn to new topics such as violence, women, and gender; increased attention to the Irish language and the literature produced within the Gaelic world; and the growth of digital humanities, making valuable primary documents more readily available and to a wider audience. Given this growth and the array of new approaches, this volume of The Cambridge History of Ireland covering 1550–1730 (the second in this four-volume series) provides a welcome and much-needed update to the 1976 volume on early modern Ireland in Oxford University Press's New History of Ireland, edited by T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne.
Drawing together established and new scholars and edited by Jane Ohlmeyer, the collection includes twenty-four essays and an afterword by Nicholas Canny, arranged under the subheadings of “Politics,” “Religion and War,” “Society,” “Culture,” and “Economy and Environment.” The opportunity provided here for established scholars to revisit topics to which their careers have been devoted allows them to offer fresh insights on their areas of expertise, such as Colm Lennon's essay on Protestantism in Ireland; Mary O'Dowd's on the family; Ciaran Brady's on politics and policy; and Marc Caball's and Bernadette Cunningham's on language, literature, and print in Irish.
Other essays draw together more recent concerns and travel new ground, beginning with Ohlmeyer's introduction, which situates early modern Ireland within a global context of trade that brought goods from across Europe, the New World, the Middle East, and Asia to the island, deepening readers’ appreciation not only of Ireland's place within the larger world but also of the richness and complex amenities of daily life. Attention to the material and personal nature of daily life is expanded upon in essays by Jane Fenlon on art and architecture and by Susan Flavin on material culture, while Clodagh Tait's essay on society moves away from an older focus on ethnic and hybrid identities to consider class across the socioeconomic spectrum from poor to elite. The elite serve as the focus of Brendan Kane's essay, which builds on his former work on honor in the English and Gaelic worlds by here teasing out contemporary understandings of aristocratic mentalities as they also underwent transformation in this period. One of the newest subjects to be considered here is the final essay by Francis Ludlow and Arlene Crampsie on environmental history, which, among other topics, neatly returns to the context with which Ohlmeyer began the introduction: the integration of Ireland's economy into the wider world as it impacted and was impacted by the environment and climate. The collection concludes with Canny's afterword that fittingly traces narrative constructions of Ireland's history from the sixteenth century to the present. Canny maps each era's histories onto its concerns: early modern religious conflict, nineteenth-century nationalism, or The Troubles, for instance. He closes with an impassioned plea for the abandonment of the lingering effects of agenda-driven history in favor of a future generation of historians whose search for “fresh knowledge” and “new perspectives” will aid us in “understanding how and why people acted as they did in that very turbulent age,” ultimately bringing us “closer to the truth rather than [confirming] people in their prejudices” (663).
The new approaches and topics set out here will certainly aid in the fulfillment of Canny's plea, attracting a new generation of historians while revitalizing the field and those already working in it, ensuring the continued growth of interest in early modern Ireland. Each of the essays, too numerous to consider individually here, set out larger developments and themes in clear and accessible language suitable for undergraduates and those new to the subject, such as Annaleigh Margey's helpful overview of plantations, their evolution, theorization, and historiography, while offering novel and nuanced interpretations sure to reinvigorate advanced scholars.
