http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1831657.html

This is the third volume of the authoritative New History of Ireland series, edited by T.W. Moody, F.X. Martin and F.J. Byrne, first published in 1976 and updated in 1989. Given my ancestral researches, I was most interested in Chapter IV by Gerard Hayes-McCoy, on the 1571-1603 period, but realised that I have read a good half-dozen more detailed and more recent studies of Elizabethan Ireland. However, it was interesting to pull back the focus a bit and look at the transformation of the country from medieval backwater in the early 16th century to geopolitical distraction by the end of the 17th, and I came away with an improved understanding of the exceptionally complex politics of the 1640s. There are also some thematic chapters on human geography, the Irish economy, coinage, literature in Irish, English and Latin, and the Irish abroad (it was slightly spooky to read those last chapters on my commute by bus through the streets of Leuven, which of course is where a lot of the Irish scholarly and cultural action took place).

The major addition to the 1976 text is a bibliographical supplement updating the publications in the next decade or so, which includes an entertaining account of historiographical disputes by Aidan Clarke, though I think it misses the Ellis / Bradshaw controversy (funny how the memory cheats - I knew Bradshaw well at Cambridge in the late 1980s and would have been sure that the dispute with Ellis was well under way by then, but I guess not). One also misses some of the more recent trends in history - very little about women, not a lot about the life of the poor as opposed to the deeds of the rich, and Brian Ó Cuív's chapter on Irish language is pretty polemical - but it's serious work seriously done. ( )

IR/00009