Irish identities · Irish Identities and Political Thought in Early Modern Historical Writing: Greek and Roman Sources

Irish Identities and Political Thought in Early Modern Historical Writing: Greek and Roman Sources

Post-Brexit debates about union, sovereignty, autonomy, and national identities relating to the Northern Ireland Protocol in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland can be traced back to seventeenth-century reflections on conquest, dynastic monarchy, empire-building, the Reformation, and colonial plantations in Ireland. In this period, historical writing played a pivotal role in expressing political, national, and religious divisions in early modern Irish society. The project investigates two foundational pieces of seventeenth-century Irish historical writing: the Irish-language Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (Foundation of Knowledge on Ireland) by Geoffrey Keating (1580-1644) and the Neo-Latin Cambrensis Eversus (Refutation of Cambrensis) by John Lynch (1599-1677). These narratives defended the history of Ireland from negative claims made by the medieval historian Gerald of Wales, whose writings were used to justify English conquest. Although it is now acknowledged that Irish lay and clerical elites were well educated in the Classics, the exploitation of Greek and Roman models by influential figures, such as Keating and Lynch, has only been partially addressed. “Irish identities” contextualises the influence of Greek and Roman models on the emergence of Irish protonational discourse and on the vindication of the Irish past. The project asks how and why early modern Irish authors exploited the cultural capital of classical rhetoric, history, and political thought through both Irish and Latin in order to fashion a distinct representation of Irish history and identity. The project aims to reconstruct the knowledge base of Classical sources of Geoffrey Keating and John Lynch (WP1) and to examine the impact of Greek and Roman models, including rhetorical patterns (WP2), Classical political thought (WP3), Classical references and allusions (WP4), on the presentation of Irish history and identity in Foras Feasa ar Éirinn and Cambrensis Eversus, as well as on political discourses reflected in these narratives. The project impacts our understanding of the various trajectories of Irish identity in the early modern period. It sheds light on wider, archipelagic and European, dimensions of Irish identity and representations of the Irish past in the seventeenth century. The results of this project may be useful to the scholars of contemporary Irish identity who tend to consider the Europeanisation of Irish identity a phenomenon of the 20th century. “Irish identities” also reveals alternative perspectives on British monarchy and Ireland’s position within it. The project may therefore encourage further comparative studies into visions of dynastic monarchy in non-Anglophone regions of the early modern British monarchy (i.e, Scotland and Wales), which are underexamined in comparison with its Anglocentric counterparts.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз