The brilliant Bishop James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin (J.K.L.) was the outstanding Catholic bishop of his time. This major source book is a companion volume to the author's two-volume study of Doyle which won the NUI Irish Historical Research Prize. It comprises the complete corpus of Doyle's pastoral and education letters. The pastoral letters detail the religious renewal and reform of the Irish Church which Doyle led in the era of Catholic Emancipation. The work contains the national pastoral letters written by Doyle in the name of the entire Irish hierarchy. Doyle's letters on education are essential for understanding the background to the founding of the national system of education in 1831. They deal with the education of the poor and include letters to the Catholic Association and Daniel O'Connell.

Doyle enjoyed an international reputation as an outstanding advocate of the rights of Catholics and Ireland. This book examines in depth Doyle's intellectual and political contribution to contemporary Irish and English public life.

Nigel Yates provides a major reassessment of the religious state of Ireland between 1770 and 1850. He argues that this was both a period of intense reform across all the major religious groups in Ireland and also one in which the seeds of religious tension, which were to dominate Irish politics and society for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were sown. He examines in detail, from a wide range of primary sources, the mechanics of this reform programme and the growing tensions between religious groups in this period, showing how political and religious issues became inextricably mixed and how various measures that might have been taken to improve the situation were not politically or religiously possible.

Why do we send children to school? Who should take responsibility for children's health and education? Should girls and boys be educated separately or together? These questions provoke much contemporary debate, but also have a longer, often-overlooked history. Mary Hatfield explores these questions and more in this comprehensive cultural history of childhood in nineteenth-century Ireland. Many modern ideas about Irish childhood have their roots in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, when an emerging middle-class took a disproportionate role in shaping the definition of a 'good' childhood. This study deconstructs several key changes in medical care, educational provision, and ideals of parental care. It takes an innovative holistic approach to the middle-class child's social world, by synthesising a broad base of documentary, visual, and material sources, including clothes, books, medical treatises, religious tracts, photographs, illustrations, and autobiographies. It offers invaluable new insights into Irish boarding schools, the material culture of childhood, and the experience of boys and girls in education.

This book provides a much-needed historiographical overview of modern Irish History, which is often written mainly from a socio-political perspective. This guide offers a comprehensive account of Irish History in its manifold aspects such as family, famine, labour, institutional, women, cultural, art, identity and migration histories.

Daniel O'Connell, often referred to as The Liberator, was an Irish political leader in the first half of the 19th century. One of the most remarkable historical figures in Irish history, he campaigned for Catholic Emancipation, including the right for Catholics to sit in the Westminster Parliament, and repeal of the Act of Union which combined Great Britain and Ireland. Famous in his day as the most feared lawyer in Ireland, O'Connell tormented judges, terrorised opposing barristers, and won a reputation for saving the lives of so many men who would otherwise have been hanged. He became 'The Counsellor', the fearless defender of the people. He secured that reputation through his campaign for Catholic emancipation when he founded the first successful mass democratic movement in European history, and became 'The Liberator'.

An Immigrant Bishop is a revised examination of the Irish intellectual roots of Bishop John England’s American pastoral works in the diocese of Charleston, South Carolina (1820-1842). The text focuses on his political philosophy and his theology of the Church, both of which were influenced by the Enlightenment and a theological, not a political, Gallicanism. As the study demonstrates, we now know more about England’s intellectual life prior to his immigration than we do about any other Catholic immigrant from Ireland. Neither Peter Guilday’s monumental two-volume biography (1927) of England nor any subsequent scholarly study of England has uncovered and analyzed, as this book does, England’s many unpublished and published writings in Ireland—his explicitly authored texts, his published speeches before the Cork Aggregate meetings, and his pseudonymous articles in the Cork Mercantile Chronicle between 1808, when he was ordained, and 1820, when he emigrated to the United States. John England (1786-1842), the first Catholic bishop of Charleston, was the foremost national spokesman for Catholicism in the United States during the years of his episcopacy and the primary apologist for the compatibility of Catholicism and American republicanism. He was also the first Catholic bishop to speak before the United States Congress and the first American to receive a papal appointment as an Apostolic Delegate to a foreign country (in this case to negotiate a concordat with President Jean Pierre Boyer of Haiti). He is considered the father of the Baltimore Provincial Councils and the nineteenth-century American Catholic conciliar tradition. He was also the only bishop in American history to develop a constitutional form of diocesan government and administration. Among other things he was the first cleric to establish a diocesan newspaper that had something of a national distribution. England’s contribution to the early formation of an American Catholicism has been told many times before, but he has the kind of creative mind and episcopal leadership that demands repeated re-considerations.