The early modern period was arguably the most formative in Ireland's history, not least for the ways in which later writers contended with it. Nicholas Canny's Imagining Ireland's Past: Early Modern Ireland through the Centuries offers the first assessment of the many ways in which those centuries were considered, from contemporaries through writers in the generations to come. As such, the book provides a brilliant picture of Irish historical writings as sharing continuities across the longue durée even as they remained heterogeneous, contested, and deeply of their moment.

A short review cannot do justice to the depth and range of Canny's study, but a few themes may be highlighted. The first is Canny's emphasis on historical visions of early modern Ireland working in dialogue, even as they followed their own trajectories. Richard Stanihurst, for example, drew on Gerald of Wales to assert the success of the Old English in controlling the “degenerate” native Irish (12); the “apocalyptic” tradition, represented by English-born figures such as Edmund Spenser, by contrast, articulated “a unique sense of purpose in the country whose destiny they were striving to shape after the manner that God . . . considered appropriate” (24). Providing a counternarrative were accounts by Old English Catholics such as Geoffrey Keating, who paid little attention to his own period, even if he “intended the past of which he wrote to be usable for people of his own time” (52). James Ware and James Ussher, Canny writes, formulated their own histories in an attempt to forge a conciliatory stance towards Catholics, even if the ultimate aim was “to convert them to Protestantism” (81).

The 1641 uprising represented a historiographical shift, with John Temple influencing subsequent protestant narratives by detailing Catholics’ “inherent barbarism” and “justify[ing] . . . opposition” to the “relaxation of future political or religious policies towards Catholics” (97, 104). Later on, David Hume would repeat Temple's defamations, “lend[ing] his reputation to make credible” a now-entrenched narrative (172). This would be challenged by popular historians such as Hugh Reily, who addressed Catholic grievances of the time, “redeem[ing] the reputation of Irish Catholics from the slurs cast upon them by their Protestant adversaries” (194).

Another theme of the book centers on the ways in which Ireland's past was connected to the present day and hoped-for future. John Davies's Discovery (1612) “outlined an agenda for future action based on the experiences of the recent past” (71). In the eighteenth century, “aristocratic histories” of the early modern period, including Thomas Carte's account of the Duke of Ormond, were written “to rehabilitate a family's standing” (133). After the 1798 rising, Richard Musgrave used this past to “warn” the British of what could come, and offer ways in which Protestants “could secure a better future for themselves” (218). Meanwhile, Daniel O'Connell invoked the injustices of the early modern period to remind English audiences of their past “misrule” and urge Irish Catholics to become a true “political nation” (211). Later in the century, John Prendergast's description of the seventeenth-century property grabs “sought to rectify some of the anomalies that existed in the management of land” (277).

Finally, Canny explores the theme of how these writers defined the Irish nation. For the Gaelic poets, the early modern produced rupture and dispossession, while Jacobites evoked the country's Milesian roots. For David Rothe or Philip O'Sullivan Beare, the “truly Irish” were “defined by allegiance to Catholicism,” a position later followed by Francis Patrick Moran, who described the early modern martyrs as preserving Saint Patrick's “pure and uncontaminated faith” (44, 49, 112, 246). The Old English and later Protestant historians defined the Irish nation, by contrast, as reformed by civility and empire. Meanwhile, Thomas Davis and the Young Ireland movement “cultivat[ed] a sense of nationality to which all elements of the population might subscribe,” which meant crafting narratives that urged people to “forget what they had been led to believe” about the past in order to come together as “a composite nation” (222, 237).

Imagining Ireland's Past represents the life's work of a scholar at the top of his powers, surveying a vast landscape of past imaginings. Canny also offers a great deal that is new. Fresh insights are offered on Gaelic poets; Canny's use of county histories reminds us that the local is as important as the global; and his discussion of vernacular histories presents new sources that have yet to be tapped by scholars. Not least, Canny rejects the sometimes condescending treatment that many of these histories have received, in this compassionate and compulsively readable account. Imagining Ireland's Pasts is a landmark publication, and fitting for a scholar whose own work has changed the paradigm in our understanding of this turbulent and ultimately tragic age.