Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives

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.

Sarah Covington is Professor of History at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York, and director of the Irish Studies program at Queens College. In addition to two books and numerous articles on early modern England and Ireland, she is the author of a forthcoming book that will explore the political, folkloric, literary, and religious afterlives of Oliver Cromwell in Ireland over three centuries.

Vincent P. Carey teaches European history at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh in upstate New York. He has published extensively on sixteenth-century Ireland and is currently finishing a book tentatively titled Murder on the Border of the Pale: A Sixteenth-Century Irish Micro-History.

Valerie McGowan-Doyle is Professor of History at Lorain County Community College and Adjunct Associate Professor of History at Kent State University. She is the author of The Book of Howth: Elizabethan Conquest and the Old English (2011) and coeditor of Elizabeth I and Ireland (2014). Her current research examines violence against women in early modern Ireland.