Histories of Ireland, 1600-1800: Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In 1924 the scholar Daniel Corkery published a study of eighteenth-century Gaelic poetry entitled, The Hidden Ireland. He referred to the fact that up onto that point the history, politics, and culture, of the Irish-speaking majority on the island of Ireland were virtually invisible in the work of mainstream, Anglphone, historians, such as the otherwise meticulous W.E.H.Lecky. Lecky, rather, focused on the Dublin parliament, the Anglo-Irish, Protestant governing elite, and drew on entirely English language sources in print and in the archive. It was as if the majority community has vanished from history. Corkery instigated the slow, painstaking, retrieval of that hidden past, and in recent decades Irish language scholars have mined the rich and vast corpus of poetry in manuscript, to reconstruct a vibrant political ‘counter-culture'. This team-taught survey course examines in counterpointthe overlapping histories of Corkery's hidden- and leckey's Anglo-Ireland. beginning with the plantation of the province of Ulster by Scots and English protestant settlers at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the topics covered include religious conflict, the wars of the three kingdoms in the 1640s, the Cromwellian conquest, the Williamite wars, Jacobitism, parliamentary reform, the age of revolution, and the union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800-01. (All materials originally in the Irish language will be read in English translation.)