Political Representation: Communities, Ideas and Institutions in Europe (c. 1200 - c. 1690), a scholarly collection on representation in medieval and early modern Europe, opens up the field of institutional and parliamentary history to new paradigms of representation across a wide geography and chronology – as testified by the volume’s studies on assemblies ranging from Burgundy and Brabant to Ireland and Italy. The focus is on three areas: institutional developments of representative institutions in Western Europe; the composition of these institutions concerning interest groups and individual participants; and the ideological environment of representatives in time and space. By analysing the balance between bottom-up and top-down approaches to the functioning of institutions of representation; by studying the actors behind the representative institutions linking prosopographical research with changes in political dialogue; and by exploring the ideological world of representation, this volume makes a key contribution to the historiography of pre-modern government and political culture. Contributors are María Asenjo-González, Wim Blockmans, Mario Damen, Coleman A. Dennehy, Jan Dumolyn, Marco Gentile, David Grummitt, Peter Hoppenbrouwers, Alastair J. Mann, Tim Neu, Ida Nijenhuis, Michael Penman, Graeme Small, Robert Stein and Marie Van Eeckenrode. See inside the book.

This institutional history charts the development and evolution of parliament from the Scottish and Irish parliaments, through the post-Act of Union parliament and into the devolved assemblies of the 1990s. It considers all aspects of parliament as an institution, including membership, parties, constituencies and elections.

The Irish parliament was both the scene of frequent political battles and an important administrative and legal element of the state machinery of early modern Ireland. This institutional study looks at how parliament dispatched its business on a day-to-day basis. It takes in major areas of responsibility such as creating law, delivering justice, conversing with the executive and administering parliamentary privilege. Its ultimate aim is to present the Irish parliament as one of many such representative assemblies emerging from the feudal state and into the modern world, with a changing set of responsibilities that would inevitably transform the institution and how it saw both itself and the other political assemblies of the day.

A critical analysis of the written sources for early modern Irish history.

One of the greatest frustrations for generations of genealogical researchers has been that reliable guidance on sources for perhaps the most critical period in the establishment of their family's links with Ulster, the period up to 1800, has proved to be so elusive. Not any more. This book can claim to be the first comprehensive guide for family historians searching for ancestors in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ulster. Whether their ancestors are of English, Scottish, or Gaelic Irish origin, it will be of enormous value to anyone wishing to conduct research in Ulster prior to 1800. A comprehensive range of sources from the period 1600-1800 are identified and explained in very clear terms. Information on the whereabouts of these records and how they may be accessed is also provided. Equally important, there is guidance on how effectively they might be used. The appendices to the book include a full listing of pre-1800 church records for Ulster; a detailed description of nearly 250 collections of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century estate papers; and a summary breakdown of the sources available from this period for each parish in Ulster.