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Notes
1. Thehistory of modern Ireland has invested the term "Anglo-Irish" with profoundly nationalistic overtones that are anachronistic in the early modern period. In this essay, the term "Anglo-Irish" will refer simply to the English community in Ireland.
2. Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland 1625-1642 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 16.
3. Aidan Clarke, "Colonial Identity in Early Seventeenth-Century Ireland," in Nationality and the Pursuit of National Independence, ed. T. W. Moody (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1978), 57; R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (London: Penguin, 1988), 50; Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Ireland of the Reign of James I, eds. C. W. Russell and John P. Prendergast (1872; Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1974), 4:289; Nicholas Canny, "Early Modern Ireland c. 1500-1700," in The Oxford History of Ireland, ed. R. F. Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 114.
4. Foster, Modern Ireland, 45.
5. Foster develops this argument in the second chapter of Modern Ireland 1600-1972, entitled "''Nationalism'' and Recusancy."
6. Ibid., 49, 51.
7. Ibid., 51.
8. Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures (London: Longman, 1985), 13. In articles published in Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism 1938-1994, ed. Ciaran Brady (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994), Stephen Ellis and Brendan Bradshaw debated the nature and purpose of Irish historiography in the early modern period. In "Nationalist Historiography and the English and Gaelic Worlds in the Late Middle Ages," Ellis critiqued the Whiggish character of early modern Irish historiography. "[T]he concern with the pre-history of Irish nationalism," he argued, "has been allowed to prejudge the issue of the island''s separate development in the late middle ages." In this essay, he sketched the outlines of a Revisionist manifesto that applied Foster''s interpretative approach to the general historiography of early modern Ireland. Rejecting the attempt of nationalistic historians to find in this period historical justification for their outlook, Ellis has interpreted the Anglo-Irish identity as a regional variant of a larger English identity and of Irish colonial life as a local manifestation of the larger trends of English life. The conflict between the crown administration and the Old English community, he suggested, played out as little more than a local feud, similar to the regional feudal conflicts of fifteenth-century England. Tensions between the Old and New English communities involved no nationalistic implications because of their provincial scale; a common English identity ultimately subsumed all regional biases and loyalties. "[N]ationalist interpretations necessarily reveal steady ''progress'' towards an independent Ireland," Ellis has written. "But the validity of such concepts can only be tested by discussing d |
