The 1641 Depositions And The Irish Rebellion

"The 1641 Depositions are witness testimonies, mainly by Protestants, but also by some Catholics, from all social backgrounds, concerning their experiences of the 1641 Irish rebellion. The testimonies document the loss of goods, military activity, and the alleged crimes committed by the Irish insurgents. This body of material is unparalleled anywhere in early modern Europe. It provides a unique source of information for the causes and events surrounding the 1641 rebellion and for the social, economic, cultural, religious, and political history of seventeenth- century Ireland, England and Scotland. In total, 19,010 manuscript pages in 31 bound volumes held at Trinity College Dublin have been transcribed and are arranged for publication in 12 volumes from 2014 onwards. The depositions are available online at www.1641.tcd.ie ."--Provided by publisher.

The 1641 Depositions are among the most important documents relating to early modern Irish history. This essay collection is part of a major project run by Trinity College, Dublin, using the depositions to investigate the life and culture of seventeenth-century Ireland.

After an evening spent drinking with Irish conspirators, an inebriated Owen Connelly confessed to the main colonial administrators in Ireland that a plot was afoot to root out and destroy Ireland's English and Protestant population. Within days English colonists in Ireland believed that a widespread massacre of Protestant settlers was taking place. Desperate for aid, they began to canvass their colleagues in England for help, claiming that they were surrounded by an evil popish menace bent on destroying their community. Soon sworn statements, later called the 1641 depositions, confirmed their fears (despite little by way of eye-witness testimony). In later years, Protestant commentators could point to the 1641 rebellion as proof of Catholic barbarity and perfidy. However, as the author demonstrates, despite some of the outrageous claims made in the depositions, the myth of 1641 became more important than the reality. The aim of this book is to investigate how the rebellion broke out and whether there was a meaning in the violence which ensued. It also seeks to understand how the English administration in Ireland portrayed these events to the wider world, and to examine whether and how far their claims were justified. Did they deliberately construct a narrative of death and destruction that belied what really happened? An obvious, if overlooked, context is that of the Atlantic world; and particular questions asked are whether the English colonists drew upon similar cultural frameworks to describe atrocities in the Americas; how this shaped the portrayal of the 1641 rebellion in contemporary pamphlets; and the effect that this had on the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms between England, Ireland and Scotland. EAMON DARCY is an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow working at Maynooth University, Republic of Ireland.

In October 1641 a rebellion broke out in Ireland. Dispossessed Irish Catholics rose up against British Protestant settlers whom they held responsible for their plight. This uprising, the first significant sectarian rebellion in Irish history, gave rise to a decade of war that would culminate in the brutal re-conquest of Ireland by Oliver Cromwell. It also set in motion one of the most enduring and acrimonious debates in Irish history. Was the 1641 rebellion a justified response to dispossession and repression? Or was it an unprovoked attempt at sectarian genocide? John Gibney comprehensively examines three centuries of this debate. The struggle to establish and interpret the facts of the past was also a struggle over the present: if Protestants had been slaughtered by vicious Catholics, this provided an ideal justification for maintaining Protestant privilege. If, on the other hand, Protestant propaganda had inflated a few deaths into a vast and brutal “massacre,” this justification was groundless. Gibney shows how politicians, historians, and polemicists have represented (and misrepresented) 1641 over the centuries, making a sectarian understanding of Irish history the dominant paradigm in the consciousness of the Irish Protestant and Catholic communities alike.

The 1641 rebellion is one of the seminal events in early modern Irish and British history. Its divisive legacy, based primarily on the sharply contested allegation that the rebellion began with a general massacre of Protestant settlers, is still evident in Ireland today. Indeed, the 1641 ‘massacres’, like the battles at the Boyne (1690) and Somme (1916), played a key role in creating and sustaining a collective Protestant/ British identity in Ulster, in much the same way that the subsequent Cromwellian conquest in the 1650s helped forge a new Irish Catholic national identity. Following a successful hardback edition, Ó Siochrú and OIhlmeyer's popular title is now available in paperback. The original and wide-ranging themes chosen by leading international scholars for this volume will ensure that this edited collection becomes required reading for all those interested in the history of early modern Europe. It will also appeal to those engaged in early colonial studies in the Atlantic world and beyond, as the volume adopts a genuinely comparative approach throughout, examining developments in a broad global context.

The study shows how the 1641 Irish Rebellion played an integral role in politicizing the English people and escalating the political crisis of the 1640s. The 1641 Irish Rebellion has long been recognized as a key event in the mid-17th century collapse of the Stuart monarchy. By 1641, many in England had grown restive under the weight of intertwined religious, political and economiccrises. To these audiences, the Irish rising seemed a realization of England's worst fears: a war of religious extermination supported by European papists, whose ambitions extended across the Irish Sea. England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion explores the consequences of this emergency by focusing on survivors of the rising in local, national and regional contexts. In Ireland, the experiences of survivors reflected the complexities of life in multiethnic and religiously-diverse communities. In England, by contrast, pamphleteers, ministers, and members of parliament simplified the issues, presenting the survivors as victims of an international Catholic conspiracy and assertingEnglish subjects' obligations to their countrymen and coreligionists. These obligations led to the creation of relief projects for despoiled Protestant settlers, but quickly expanded into sweeping calls for action against recusants and suspected popish agents in England. England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion contends that the mobilization of this local activism played an integral role in politicizing the English people and escalating the political crisis of the 1640s. JOSEPH COPE is Associate Professor at the State University of New York at Geneseo.

The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars. Delve into what it was like to live during the eighteenth century by reading the first-hand accounts of everyday people, including city dwellers and farmers, businessmen and bankers, artisans and merchants, artists and their patrons, politicians and their constituents. Original texts make the American, French, and Industrial revolutions vividly contemporary. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ National Library of Scotland T167040 London: printed for M. Cooper, 1746. xviii,294p.; 8°

This book is the first account of British Protestant conversion initiatives directed towards continental Europe between 1600 and 1900. Continental Europe was considered a missionary land—another periphery of the world, whose centre was imperial Britain. British missions to Europe were informed by religious experiments in America, Africa, and Asia, rendering these offensives against Europe a true form of "imaginary colonialism". British Protestant missionaries often understood themselves to be at the forefront of a civilising project directed at Catholics (and sometimes even at other Protestants). Their mission was further reinforced by Britain becoming a land of compassionate refuge for European dissenters and exiles. This book engages with the myth of International Protestantism, questioning its early origins and its narrative of transnational belonging, while also interrogating Britain as an imagined Protestant land of hope and glory. In the history of western Christianities, "converting Europe" had a role that has not been adequately investigated. This is the story of the attempted, and ultimately failed, effort to convert a continent.