Review of Terence Brown "The Whole Protestant Community: the Making of a Historical Myth"; Review of Marianne Elliott "Watchmen in Sion: the Protestant Idea of Liberty"; Review of Robert L. McCartney "Liberty and Authority in Ireland" (original) (raw)
Related papers
Dublin Review of Books, 2019
Dublin review of Books asked three historians, Prof John Horgan, Dr Niall Meehan, Dr Robbie Roulston, to respond to the recent publication of Ian D'Alton and Ida Milne's edited collection, Protestant and Irish. Each was asked to write a short initial response to the book and then, each having read the first tranche, to write a second longer one [page four here] in which they were free to react to points brought up by the other contributors.
High or low? Writing the Irish Reformation in the early nineteenth century
Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
The Irish Reformation is a contentious issue, not just between Catholic and Protestant, but also within the Protestant churches, as competing Presbyterian and Anglican claims are made over the history of the Irish reformation. This chapter looks at the way in which James Seaton Reid (1798-1851), laid claim to the Reformation for Irish Dissent in his History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. It then examines the rival Anglican histories by two High Churchmen: Richard Mant (1775-1848), Bishop of Down and Connor; and Charles Elrington (1787-1850), the Regius Professor of Divinity in Trinity College, Dublin. It is clear that, in each case, theological and denominational conviction decisively shaped their history writing. Equally, however, significant advances were made by all three scholars in unearthing important new primary sources, and in identifying key points of controversy and debate which still represent a challenge to eccleciastical historians, of whatever denomination or none, today.
The Canon of Irish Cultiural History: some questions
Brian Kennedy in the Winter 1986 issue of Studies concluded his admirable survey of the journal's history by raising some questions of historical approach. He was critical of a 'a new historical orthodoxy' which, while sympathetic to reviews such as the Irish Statesman and the Bell, used Catholic periodicals such as the Catholic Bulletin, the Capuchin Annual, the Irish Rosary, the Irish Monthly and the Irish Ecclesiastical Record as sources for 'the mere quotable quote to prove that there was a nation of blind fools.' Kennedy maintained that these Catholic publications deserved better treatment and called for a re-assessment of them. By chance I was concluding a detailed study of the Catholic Bulletin when this article appeared, and it is, I feel, of consequence, that my research endorses the contention of Kennedy. It would be of small account, although significant, if my findings merely served to rehabilitate the Catholic Bulletin; but they cast serious doubt on several cultural assumptions commonly accepted by recent cultural analysts. Richard Kearney, despite criticism of his own historical treatment of twentieth-century journals by Kennedy, has recently renewed his plea that a proper study of history is necessary so that tradition may be a positive force in fashioning an Irish culture of the future. 'Our task,' he stated in the Irish Times of 4 November 1986, 'is to discriminate between those national myths which incarcerate and those which emancipate:2 One cannot but agree that such a critical analysis, such a 'process of innovative translation' as Kearney calls it, should be a pre-requisite for any understanding of not only such cultural concepts as the nature of Irish identity, but also of the political structures which should result from, and reflect, the analysis of cultural realities.
Irish Protestantism to the Present Day
2003
Irish protestantism has always been in a minority, but a minority which has decisively shaped Irish religious and political identities. This article traces the development of Irish protestantism, including the Church of Ireland, the Presbyterian church and the dissenting churches, from the Reformation up to the late twentieth century.
“For God and the Empire”: An Irish Historian's Rapid Rise, Strange Fall, and Remarkable Resurrection
Field Day Review 7 2011, 2011
The early 1980s were a momentous era in recent Irish political history. The post-Hunger Strikes rise of Sinn Féin threatened British policy in Northern Ireland and—alongside severe economic problems—also endangered what establishment figures called political and social ‘stability’ in the Irish Republic. In the same period, moreover, the appeal of Irish Republicanism resurged among the traditionally and (from the Dublin élite’s perspective) dangerously ‘green’ Irish in the United States. In one or both parts of divided Ireland, a combination of censorship, repression, mass migration, and the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 maintained ‘acceptable levels’ of violence and dissent. At the same time, however, the British and Irish political establishments also relied on academics and journalists. Their task was to ‘revise’ and destabilize ‘traditional’ Irish and Irish-American understandings of the history and contemporary implications of British imperialism and Irish resistance—on the grounds that popular perceptions of past events, such as the Great Famine and Partition, generated ideological, emotional, or even practical support for militant Irish Republicanism. In an essay published in 1983, Dr. Raymond James Raymond (latterly, Ray Raymond), a young Irish historian teaching in the United States, succinctly described what, he contended, should be modern Irish history’s principal functions. It should refute, he avowed, one or more of three Irish nationalist beliefs, all of which he characterized as ‘romanticized and un-historic’. These beliefs were: first, ‘[that] the history of Ireland is a history of British oppression’; second, ‘[that] the British presence in Ireland has been disastrous for the Irish people’; and third, ‘[that] Irish freedom had to be achieved through violence’. Such scholarly opinions naturally seemed authoritative, and, indeed, in the early 1980s no young historian of Ireland appeared to have a brighter future and greater potential influence, especially in the United States..... To discover what happened next.... read on. Field Day Review, 7, 2011, Editors: Seamus Deane & Ciarán Deane, Paperback: 270 pages, ISBN 978-0-946755-51-6