This article highlights some of the historiographical trends over the past one hundred years in how the Irish diaspora in early medieval Europe has been studied. The role of the peregrini, the Irish monastic exiles who left Ireland for Britain and continental Europe from the sixth century onwards, has to some extent been marginal and tangential to the historiography of this island. Forms of modern ‘Irophobia’ in some scholarship have also led to an obfuscation of the early medieval religious and ethnic landscape by seeking to minimise Irish cultural influence. The article argues that by contextualising the phenomenon of Irish clerical exile in Europe within broader theological and comparative frameworks, further research in this field has the potential to clarify the influence of the Irish and to show how the experience of exile contributed to the formation of both Irish and European identities in the middle ages.

During the brief ‘universal peace’ following the treaty of London in 1518, Surrey's expedition brought to Ireland as chief governor Henry VIII's best general, ostensibly leading a reconnaissance in force to discover how the king might reduce the land to order and obedience. Despite the expedition's protracted planning, as here outlined, the king's aims remained unclear, at least to Surrey. His army spent most of the time garrisoning the Pale and compelling submissions by neighbouring border chiefs. As suggested in a previously unnoticed cache of documents, King Henry hoped the Irish could be persuaded to use English law and the king's courts, restoring crown land since overrun, so that a recovery of the revenues would meet the expedition's costs. When Surrey insisted that Ireland's reform would entail a lengthy and costly military conquest, he soon lost interest. As renewed war threatened in continental Europe, Surrey was instructed to focus on the Pale's defence to reduce the king's costs, so conserving the monarch's treasure for other ‘higher enterprises’. Surrey's short-lived expedition and brief recall disrupted the political stability established by the earl of Kildare's defence of the Pale, with little achieved.

This article explores the legal strategies of negotiation employed by Gaelic lords in early modern Munster through a case study of the O'Driscoll lordship of Collymore, County Cork. The late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced an environment of intense legal contestation, as indigenous legal practices and hierarchies were methodically attacked by the colonial administration. But, as English administrators attempted to eradicate Irish legal precedent (and with it the legitimacy of the Gaelic aristocracy), Gaelic lords responded with new and often innovative legal strategies. The territory of Collymore presents a microcosm of the legal tensions produced by and under the Munster plantation, subject to competing claims by rival O'Driscoll heirs, MacCarthy Reagh overlords, ‘Old English’ neighbours and incoming planters. This article offers a reconstruction and analysis of the complex legal disputes surrounding Collymore. It argues that through otherwise routine legal interactions like inheritance disputes and chancery suits, Irish lords reframed their authority in the vocabulary of English law, trading tanistry for primogeniture and the language of overlordship for that of landlordship. Through these rhetorical and theoretical shifts, they attempted to redefine the very basis and nature of their authority.

The assessment tax on land, which paid the occupying army, increased steadily during the 1650s, and soon out-stripped the capacity of the Irish economy, slowly recovering from over a decade of war. Matters came to a head in 1657, when there were efforts by Irish M.P.s at Westminster to reduce the rate, and also pressure from Protestant landowners on the Dublin government to change the way in which the tax was administered. These initiatives brought together landowners from very different backgrounds and from all four provinces, in a coordinated campaign of lobbying which achieved considerable gains in Dublin but was less successful in London. This article uses new evidence to explore the problems endemic within the assessment system, the way in which influence could be brought to bear, and the difficulties encountered by those trying to change policies imposed from across the Irish Sea.

Sylvester O'Halloran was a prominent surgeon in late eighteenth-century Limerick. He wrote extensively on medicine, history and antiquarianism. His contribution to medicine included a series of monographs on eye disease, limb amputation and head injury. Of these many publications only his work on head injury was of clinical significance. His proposals to standardise the training and assessment of surgeons in Ireland were reflected in the procedures of the County Infirmaries Board and likely inspired the curriculum of the newly founded Royal College of Surgeons in 1784. This article reflects on O'Halloran's medical career, suggesting that his impact on practice was modest but his proposals on surgical education contributed to the professionalisation of surgery in Ireland in the eighteenth century.

Recent historiography gives an increasingly nuanced picture of interactions between religion and wider society in nineteenth-century Ireland. Yet, when considering the relationships between religion and philanthropy, something central to everyday life in urban centres, emphasis is still placed on the role of the institutional Catholic Church, and there is a sense that lay Catholics were less involved in charity than their Protestant counterparts. Connected with this is the idea that Protestant charities used open forms of governance, but Catholic charities were secretive, an assertion that parallels claims about tensions between Catholicism and democracy. This historiography, however, also suggests that the situation in the early nineteenth century may have been different from later in the century. This article compares small-scale Catholic and Protestant parochial charities in early nineteenth-century Dublin, while also considering similar institutions associated with Presbyterian congregations in Edinburgh. It indicates that some Catholic parochial charities were at least as committed to open procedures and lay participation as their Anglican and Presbyterian counterparts. By exploring these charities and making comparisons, the article shows that some of Dublin's middle-class Catholics were dedicated to the same ideals as early nineteenth-century British reformers.

This paper explores the foundation of the Dublin Horse Show from 1868–80, when it was held at the Royal Dublin Society's (R.D.S.) headquarters on Merrion Square. Early iterations were intended to address the depletion of the equine population in the mid-nineteenth century, a matter of concern for agriculture and industry, but also for those with an interest in sport and horses as opportunities for leisure. Horse shows arose nearly simultaneously in Ireland and England as intersections between associational culture, agricultural improvement and a burgeoning middle-class leisure sphere established animal shows as instruments for improving breeding, but also as forms of entertainment. The popular success of horse shows fostered the development of economic clusters, as local businesses began to depend on them as reliable sources of annual income. They also reflected equestrian sport's migration from largely elite pursuits into popular recreation, including competitions that would eventually lead to the modern sport of showjumping. The events established at the early R.D.S. Horse Show are still recognisable today in their combination of improvement and leisure based in the promotion of Irish horses as exemplars of sporting excellence.

The last fifty years have witnessed the production of a large body of scholarship exploring the political and social history of the Irish Civil War and its aftermath. Debate has focused principally on the administrative abilities and democratic credentials of the Free State government and the extent to which revolutionary ideals were expressed institutionally following the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. However, there has been strikingly little attempt to contextualise, rather than appraise, the lineage of the moral and ideological assumptions embedded in the executive council's public professions of political conviction, or to understand Treatyite policy-making on its own terms. In particular, historians have tended to weigh and measure the performance of the Cumann na nGaedheal government against anachronistic and moralising definitions of what the Irish revolution stood for at the expense of any systematic attempt to reconstruct the manner in which relevant historical actors understood this relationship. Focusing on the heterodox intellectual firmament of the Irish-Ireland movement, this paper demonstrates that the Cumann na nGaedheal government never abandoned the political languages of the revolution; rather, they constructed an ideology to support the new state rooted in their own interpretation of what they considered revolutionary ideals of Irish-Ireland nationalism.