Revision of "Calendar of State Papers relating to Ireland" for 1509-1585, published in two volumes under the editorship of Hans Claud Hamilton in 1860 and 1867.

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.

This book provides the first systematic analysis of the whole range of treatises written on the ‘reform’ of Ireland in Tudor times. By assessing approximately six-hundred extant treatises it demonstrates how the Tudors viewed Ireland and how they arrived at the policies which they chose to implement there during the sixteenth century.

Though known today largely for dating the creation of the world to 4004BC, James Ussher (1581-1656) was an important scholar and ecclesiastical leader in the seventeenth century. As Professor of Theology at Trinity College Dublin, and Archbishop of Armagh from 1625, he shaped the newly protestant Church of Ireland. Tracing its roots back to St Patrick, he gave it a sense of Irish identity and provided a theology which was strongly Calvinist and fiercely anti-Catholic. In exile in England in the 1640s he advised both king and parliament, trying to heal the ever-widening rift by devising a compromise over church government. Forced finally to choose sides by the outbreak of civil war in 1642, Ussher opted for the royalists, but found it difficult to combine his loyalty to Charles with his detestation of Catholicism. A meticulous scholar and an extensive researcher, Ussher had a breathtaking command of languages and disciplines - 'learned to a miracle' according to one of his friends. He worked on a series of problems: the early history of bishops, the origins of Christianity in Ireland and Britain, and the implications of double predestination, making advances which were to prove of lasting significance. Tracing the interconnections between this scholarship and his wider ecclesiastical and political interests, Alan Ford throws new light on the character and attitudes of a seminal figure in the history of Irish Protestantism.

This book examines the native Irish experience of conquest and colonisation in Ulster in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Central to this argument is that the Ulster plantation bears more comparisons to European expansion throughout the Atlantic than (as some historians have argued) the early-modern state’s consolidation of control over its peripheral territories. Farrell also demonstrates that plantation Ulster did not see any significant attempt to transform the Irish culturally or economically in these years, notwithstanding the rhetoric of a ‘civilising mission’. Challenging recent scholarship on the integrative aspects of plantation society, he argues that this emphasis obscures the antagonism which characterised relations between native and newcomer until the eve of the 1641 rising. This book is of interest not only to students of early-modern Ireland but is also a valuable contribution to the burgeoning field of Atlantic history and indeed colonial studies in general.

The first published text of the diplomatic and personal papers written, copied, and handled by the poet Edmund Spenser during his years of secretarial service and colonial planting in Ireland, 1580-1589. They are presented here with a generous introduction, illustrations, notes and appendices.