When Elizabeth I succeeded to the thorne in 1558 her government was already involved in wars of conquest and containment in different parts of Ireland. Before her death in 1603 there would be many more. This book gathers together 19 journals of the Elizabethan campaigns, recording military operations by crown forces in all four provinces on land and at sea. The journals cover every aspect of fighting, from preparation to the often bloody aftermath, and offers unique insights into the Tudor conquest and how it was experienced by those who took part. Though they are key historical sources, the journals have been largely neglected by modern scholarship. This represents the first publication in their entirety of many of these sources, including those previously noted in the calendars of State Papers. The journals gathered here demonstrate the importance of record-keeping for Elizabeth's commanders, and the central role of soldering in their sense of themselves and their place in history. -- Publisher description

In this collection of essays, a range of established and early-career scholars explore a variety of different perspectives on Oliver Cromwell's involvement with Ireland, in particular his military campaign of 1649-1650. In England and Wales Cromwell is regarded as a figure of national importance; in Ireland his reputation remains highly controversial. The essays gathered together here provide a fresh take on his Irish campaign, reassessing the backdrop and context of the prevailing siege warfare strategy and offering new insights into other major players such as Henry Ireton and the Marquis of Ormond. Other topics include, but are not limited to, the Cromwellian land settlement, deportation of prisoners and popular memory of Cromwell in Ireland. CONTRIBUTORS: Martyn Bennett, Heidi J. Coburn, Sarah Covington, John Cunningham, Eamon Darcy, David Farr, Padraig Lenihan, Alan Marshall, Nick Poyntz, Tom Reilly, James Scott Wheeler

An examination of written and other responses to conflict in a variety of forms and genres, from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. War and violence took many forms in medieval and early modern Europe, from political and territorial conflict to judicial and social spectacle; from religious persecution and crusade to self-mortification and martyrdom; from comedic brutality to civil and domestic aggression. Various cultural frameworks conditioned both the acceptance of these forms of violence, and the protest that they met with: the elusive concept of chivalry, Christianity and just wartheory, political ambition and the machinery of propaganda, literary genres and the expectations they generated and challenged. The essays here, from the disciplines of history, art history and literature, explore how violence and conflict were documented, depicted, narrated and debated during this period. They consider manuals created for and addressed directly to kings and aristocratic patrons; romances whose affective treatments of violence invitedprofoundly empathetic, even troublingly pleasurable, responses; diaries and "autobiographies" compiled on the field and redacted for publication and self-promotion. The ethics and aesthetics of representation, as much as the violence being represented, emerge as a profound and constant theme for writers and artists grappling with this most fundamental and difficult topic of human experience. JOANNA BELLIS is the Fitzjames Research Fellow in Oldand Middle English at Merton College, Oxford; LAURA SLATER holds a Postdoctoral Fellowship from The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London. Contributors: Anne Baden-Daintree, Anne Curry, David Grummitt, Richard W. Kaeuper, Andrew Lynch, Christina Normore, Laura Slater, Sara V. Torres, Matthew Woodcock,

Soldier, courtier, author, entertainer, and amateur spy, Thomas Churchyard (c.1529-1604) saw action in most of the principal Tudor theatres of war, was a servant to five monarchs, and had a literary career spanning over half a century during which time he produced over fifty different works in a variety of forms and genres. Churchyard's struggles to subsist as an author and soldier provides an unrivalled opportunity to examine the self-promotional strategies employed by an individual who attempts to make a living from both writing and fighting, and who experiments throughout his life with ways in which the arts of the pen and sword may be reconciled and aligned. Drawing on extensive archival and literary sources, Matthew Woodcock reconstructs the extraordinary life of a figure well-known yet long neglected in early modern literary studies. In the first ever book-length biography of Churchyard, Woodcock reveals the author to be a resourceful and innovative writer whose long literary career plays an important part in the history of professional authorship in sixteenth-century England. This book also situates Churchyard alongside contemporary soldier-authors such as Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, George Gascoigne, and Sir Philip Sidney, and it makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the relationship between literature and the military in the early modern period. Churchyard's writings drew heavily upon his own experiences at court and in the wars and the author never tired of drawing attention to the struggles he endured throughout his life. Consequently, this study addresses the wider methodological question of how we should construct the biography of an individual who was consistently preoccupied with telling his own story.

Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives offers fresh approaches and case studies that push the field of early modern Ireland, and of British and European history more generally, into unexplored directions. The centuries between 1500 and 1700 were pivotal in Ireland’s history, yet so much about this period has remained neglected until relatively recently, and a great deal has yet to be explored. Containing seventeen original and individually commissioned essays by an international and interdisciplinary group of leading and emerging scholars, this book covers a wide range of topics, including social, cultural, and political history as well as folklore, medicine, archaeology, and digital humanities, all of which are enhanced by a selection of maps, graphs, tables, and images. Urging a reevaluation of the terms and assumptions which have been used to describe Ireland’s past, and a consideration of the new directions in which the study of early modern Ireland could be taken, Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives is a groundbreaking collection for students and scholars studying early modern Irish history.

In 1544, Henry VIII led the largest army then ever raised by an English monarch to invade France. This book investigates the consequences of this action by examining the devastating impact of warfare on the native population, the methods the English used to impose their rule on the region (from the use of cartography to the construction of fortifications) and the development of English of colonial rule in France. As Murphy explores the significance of this major financial and military commitment by the Tudor monarchy, he situates the developments within the wider context of English actions in Ireland and Scotland during the mid-sixteenth century. Rather than consider the plantations established in the mid-sixteenth century Ireland as the 'laboratory' for a new form of empire, this book argues that they should be viewed along with the Boulogne venture as the English crown's final attempt to establish colonies through the use of state resources alone.

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.