Nationalism is a particularly slippery subject to define and understand, particularly when applied to early modern Europe. In this collection of essays, Brendan Bradshaw provides an insight into how concepts of ’nationalism’ and ’national identity’ can be understood and applied to pre-modern Ireland. Drawing upon a selection of his most provocative and pioneering essays, together with three entirely new pieces, the limits and contexts of Irish nationalism are explored and its impact on both early modern society and later generations, examined. The collection reflects especially upon the emergence of national consciousness in Ireland during a calamitous period when the late-medieval, undeveloped sense of a collective identity became suffused with patriotic sentiment and acquired a political edge bound up with notions of national sovereignty and representative self-government. The volume opens with a discussion of the historical methods employed, and an extended introductory essay tracing the history of national consciousness in Ireland from its first beginnings as recorded in the poetry of the early Christian Church to its early-modern flowering, which provides the context for the case studies addressed in the subsequent chapters. These range across a wealth of subjects, including comparisons of Tudor Wales and Ireland, Irish reactions to the ’Westward Enterprise’, the Ulster Rising of 1641, the Elizabethans and the Irish, and the two sieges of Limerick. The volume concludes with a transcription and discussion of ’A Treatise for the Reformation of Ireland, 1554-5’. The result of a lifetime’s study, this volume offers a rich and rewarding journey through a turbulent yet fascinating period of Irish history, not only illuminating political and religious developments within Ireland, but also how these affected events across the British Isles and beyond.

Nationalism is a particularly slippery subject to define and understand, particularly when applied to early modern Europe. In this collection of essays, Brendan Bradshaw provides an insight into how concepts of ’nationalism’ and ’national identity’ can be understood and applied to pre-modern Ireland. Drawing upon a selection of his most provocative and pioneering essays, together with three entirely new pieces, the limits and contexts of Irish nationalism are explored and its impact on both early modern society and later generations, examined. The collection reflects especially upon the emergence of national consciousness in Ireland during a calamitous period when the late-medieval, undeveloped sense of a collective identity became suffused with patriotic sentiment and acquired a political edge bound up with notions of national sovereignty and representative self-government. The volume opens with a discussion of the historical methods employed, and an extended introductory essay tracing the history of national consciousness in Ireland from its first beginnings as recorded in the poetry of the early Christian Church to its early-modern flowering, which provides the context for the case studies addressed in the subsequent chapters. These range across a wealth of subjects, including comparisons of Tudor Wales and Ireland, Irish reactions to the ’Westward Enterprise’, the Ulster Rising of 1641, the Elizabethans and the Irish, and the two sieges of Limerick. The volume concludes with a transcription and discussion of ’A Treatise for the Reformation of Ireland, 1554-5’. The result of a lifetime’s study, this volume offers a rich and rewarding journey through a turbulent yet fascinating period of Irish history, not only illuminating political and religious developments within Ireland, but also how these affected events across the British Isles and beyond.

This holistic study demonstrates the interconnected nature of early medieval origin legends and traces their growth over time.

This volume contains work by scholars actively publishing on origin legends across early medieval western Europe, from the fall of Rome to the high Middle Ages. Its thematic structure creates dialogue between texts and regions traditionally studied in isolation.

Imagining Ireland's Pasts describes how various authors addressed the history of early modern Ireland over four centuries and explains why they could not settle on an agreed narrative. It shows how conflicting interpretations broke frequently along denominational lines, but that authors were also influenced by ethnic, cultural, and political considerations, and by whether they were resident in Ireland or living in exile. Imagining Ireland's Past: Early Modern Ireland through the Centuries details how authors extolled the merits of their progenitors, offered hope and guidance to the particular audience they addressed, and disputed opposing narratives. The author shows how competing scholars, whether contributing to vernacular histories or empirical studies, became transfixed by the traumatic events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they sought to explain either how stability had finally been achieved, or how the descendants of those who had been wronged might secure redress.

This volume addresses the question of ‘identity’ in East-Central Europe. It engages with a specific definition of ‘sub-cultures’ over the period from c. 1900 to the present and proposes novel ways in which the term can be used with the purpose of understanding identities that do not conform to the fixed, standard categories imposed from the top down, such as ‘ethnic group’, ‘majority’ or ‘minority’. Instead, a ‘sub-culture’ is an identity that sits between these categories. It may blend languages, e.g. dialect forms, cultural practices, ethnic and social identifications, or religious affiliations as well as concepts of race and biology that, similarly, sit outside national projects.

The contributions in this collection offer a wide range of stylistic perspectives on landscape, place and environment, by focusing on a variety of text-types ranging from poetry, the Bible, fictional and non-fictional prose, to newspaper articles, condo names, online texts and exhibitions. Employing both established and cutting-edge methodologies from, among others, corpus linguistics, metaphor studies, Text World Theory and ecostylistics, the eleven chapters in the volume provide an overview of how landscape, place and environment are encoded and can be investigated in literary and non-literary discourse. The studies collected here stand as evidence of the possibility of, and the need for, a “stylistics of landscape”, which emphasises how represented spaces are made manifest linguistically; a “stylistics of place”, which focuses on the discursive and affective qualities of those represented spaces; and a “stylistics of environment”, which reiterates the urgency for environmentally-responsible humanities, able to support a change in the anthropocentric narrative which poses humans as the most important variable in the human-animal and human-environment relationships.

Delve into a world of kelpies, mermaids, selkies, ghosts, warlords, and fairies. This collection gives you Celtic tales, previously unrecorded or only found in obscure compilations. Mostly collected by the author on her ancestral home of the Isle of Barra in the Hebrides, these lesser-known tales from Scotland, Ireland, and Wales are supported by a brief history of the Celts, a glossary of the Gaelic integrated in the stories, an appendix of superstitions about fairy protection, and bibliographies that reflect the author's extensive research. Seventeen ballads collected almost one hundred years ago and excerpts from the author's journal of travels in Scotland make this book a unique and valuable resource for anyone who tells stories.

This volume offers fresh perspectives on the political, military, religious, social, cultural, intellectual, economic, and environmental history of early modern Ireland and situates these discussions in global and comparative contexts. The opening chapters focus on 'Politics' and 'Religion and War' and offer a chronological narrative, informed by the re-interpretation of new archives. The remaining chapters are more thematic, with chapters on 'Society', 'Culture', and 'Economy and Environment', and often respond to wider methodologies and historiographical debates. Interdisciplinary cross-pollination - between, on the one hand, history and, on the other, disciplines like anthropology, archaeology, geography, computer science, literature and gender and environmental studies - informs many of the chapters. The volume offers a range of new departures by a generation of scholars who explain in a refreshing and accessible manner how and why people acted as they did in the transformative and tumultuous years between 1550 and 1730.

Now in its second edition, this comprehensive history of the Celts draws on archaeological, historical, literary and linguistic evidence to provide a comprehensive and colourful overview from origins to the present. Divided into three parts, the first covers the continental Celts in prehistory and antiquity, complete with accounts of the Celts in Germany, France, Italy, Iberia and Asia Minor. Part Two follows the Celts from the departure of the Romans to the late Middle Ages, including the migrations to and settlements in Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Brittany. This section also includes discussions of the Celtic kingdoms and the significance of Christianisation. Part Three brings the history of the Celts up to the present, covering the assimilation of the Celts within the national cultures of Great Britain, France and Ireland. Included in this consideration are the suppression of Gaelic, the declines, revivals and survivals of languages and literatures, and the histories of Celtic culture. The book concludes with a discussion of the recent history of the meaning of 'Celtic' and an examination of the cultural legacy of the Celts in the modern era.