There have been attempts to publish the 1641 Depositions before, in the 1930s and 1960s, but these plans were abandoned thanks to the outbreaks of, respectively, World War II and the ‘Troubles’. After all, explains Professor Ohlmeyer, the Depositions were, and still are, extremely contentious. The fact that the testimonies were taken mainly from Protestant … Read more
Jane Ohlmeyer At the height of the ‘general crisis’ which gripped Europe during the middle decades of the seventeenth century, one preacher in 1643 informed the English House of Commons that ‘These are days of shaking and this shaking is universal: the Palatinate, Bohemia, Germania, Catalonia, Portugal, Ireland, England’. He could have added Scotland and … Read more
by Nicholas Canny It is a commonplace that the merit of any piece of historical investigation can be judged by the sources employed and by the questions asked by the historians of those sources. One of my silent criticisms of the work of the earlier generation of historians who had studied early modern Ireland was … Read more
Even today, over three hundred years since the death of the Duke of Ormond in 1688, the legacy of his viceroyalty is magnificently apparent in the capital city of Ireland. The Royal Hospital at Kilmainham, built in 1677 on Ormond’s orders, was constructed to house the pensioners of the long Irish wars. St Stephen’s Green, … Read more