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.

Sheds fresh light on our understanding of violence, imperialism, and political centralisation in Tudor England.

Ireland and the Renaissance court is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring Irish and English courts, courtiers and politics in the early modern period, c. 1450-1650. Chapters are contributed by both established and emergent scholars working in the fields of history, literary studies, and philology. They focus on Gaelic cúirteanna, the indigenous centres of aristocratic life throughout the medieval period; on the regnal court of the emergent British empire based in London at Whitehall; and on Irish participation in the wider world of European elite life and letters. Collectively, they expand the chronological limits of ‘early modern’ Ireland to include the fifteenth century and recreate its multi-lingual character through exploration of its English, Irish and Latin archives. This volume is an innovative effort at moving beyond binary approaches to English-Irish history by demonstrating points of contact as well as contention.

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.

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.