The introductory lecture, first delivered to the National Literary Society in 1912, continues to inspire.
Very helpful for understanding what people are talking about, especially regarding Irish history. The rest of the essays in this book concentrate on the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries - the common thread is the lens of revisionism, and the international controversy over the social role of historians and the writing of history. I was personally most fascinated by the article on the Diaspora, which was lengthy and heavily footnoted. Recommended, though background only for anything earlier than 1700 CE.
This paper concentrates on the miserable lot of women under either system during the medieval period - with many asides alluding to the 12th-14th century attempts of Church reformers to challenge (implied 'improve') the "eccentricities" of traditional Irish marriage customs. Not very helpful for bringing women into the foreground, but contains some good summaries of court cases in the medieval period. A very typical approach to women's history, with some personal emotional content that interested me.
In other words, both Duffy and Flanagan (1989 cited below, another contender for Top Honors) not only taught me something about their subjects, but also about the controversies within those subjects. If I'd gotten this book first, rather than almost last, I would have had a much better time of it. Accessible to beginners, I would say, while offering "veterans" much recent research and the author's own re-interpretations of the canon.
"The twelfth century affords especially rich materials for such study. Persons representing important aspects of experience flourished in numbers - Capets and Plantagenets, Becket, Saint Bernard, Abélard, troubadour poets, Guillaume le Maréchal, Héloise - to cite a varied few. The time is marked by many stirrings - the intellectual revolt, the turn from Romanesque to Gothic, the impulse to crusade, the struggle between church and state, the rise of vernacular literature, and others. The urban culture of the great cities is distinctive."
"Queen Eleanor knew all the personages; she was concerned with all the movements, to many of which she contributed notably; and she knew every city from London and Paris to Byzantium. Jerusalem, Rome, besides all those of her own provinces in western Europe. Her story, which runs through the last three quaters of the century, provides a 'plot' almost as compact as that of a novel, for she was the center of the feud between the Capets and the Plantagenets that agitated the whole period and culminated in the collapse of the Angevin Empire. Without historical distortion or any attempt to fictionalize, her history brings the diverse elements together and into relation." ...from the preface.
While we might wish that Professor Kelly had paid more attention to Ireland, there's a whole lot here for anyone interested in the 12th century context within which all those seemingly mysterious events occurred. For example, the entire history of the murder of Thomas à Becket, reaction to which caused Eleanor's second husband Henry II to turn his attention to Ireland in 1171, (pp. 113-149),or this marvellous tidbit in the context of the death of Henry II and the effective regency of Eleanor for her sons Richard III and John...
"...the Plantagenets followed the simple 'hungry falcon' theories laid down long before for Henry's guidance by Matilda Empress - to place relatively obscure men in seats of responsibility where their ambitions, their dependence upon bounty, and their gratitude, in various combinations, could be expected to keep them vigilant and honest." p. 254.
... or a fascinating description of Eleanor's reaction to Henry II's famous affair with Rosamond Clifford, leading to the Courts of Love, and indirectly to the attempted rebellion which brought Henry II back out of Ireland. Very helpful for keeping perspective on the external events impinging upon Irish affairs of the 12th Century.
If that doesn't provoke thought about the relationships between Henry II and the barons of the Norman Invasion - well...just keep reading!
Chapter 8 ‘Deanglicization’ pp. 136-154, is a thought - provoking assessment of the Gaelic Revivial, and provides some unexpected insights into the historical and social basis for the 20th century obsession with Irish grammar and ‘correctness’.
Chapter 9 ‘Nationality or Cosmopolitanism?’ pp. 155-165, addresses the vexed question of writing about Irish in English - for example the National Theatre staging plays in English…as well as the question of ‘provincial’ vs ‘European’ old Gaeldom. (pp. 158-162)
On p. 293 is perhaps my favorite quote of everything I've read this semester -
"…The rebels had instinctively grasped the constellation which their era formed with those earlier ones, and with those "millions unborn" of whom Pearse dreamed in his poem. Accused by their critics and by future conservative historians of being fixated on the past, they were anything but: what they sensed was their power to redirect it’s latent energies into new constellations. They therefore reserved the right to reinterpret the past in the light of their desired future, which they recruited against a despised present. So they implemented Nietzsche’s programme for all who have not been given a good father: they went out and invented a better one, a better past."
"History thereby became a form of science fiction: in order to get a fair hearing in a conservative society, the exponents of revolution had to present their intentions under the guise of a return to the idealized past.…"
(Includes specific reference to the modern social and political ideas of Connolly, Pearse and Joyce…)
It's definitely not beginner material - but in my opinion this book deserves its reputed 'cult status' as an exceptional study of the growth of Irish national identity.
I discovered during a long-ago stint reading US history in a Norwegian gymnasium that there's nothing quite like a friendly outsider to shed new light on where one's national myths and streeotypes might have originated. This thorough and loving examination of Ireland's many representations does exactly that in a fully documented, carefully woven, full-meal of a book. Dr. Leerson is a Dutch citizen, Professor of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam.
The article by Thomas Owen Clancy "Women Poets in Eary Medieval Ireland: Stating the Case", pp. 43-72, takes up modern theories of detecting gender in anonymous writings and applies them effectively to some famous early creations, such as the 'Lament of the Hag of Beara' and 'St. Ite's Fosterling'.
Marriage, property and inheritance, both the law and the political reality, get a good airing, as well as mother-child relations.
"But altogether there is too little information about the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries for one to say how different this phase of late medieval Irish law is from the law of the seventh to ninth centuries. It may be that the Durrow reord belongs more to the later phase than to the earlier, and that the ninth and tenth centuries really did witness the passing of a whole social and legal order. (footnote 94: D.A. Binchy, 'The passing of the old order' in B. Ó Cuív, ed. The Impact of the Scandinavian Invasions) But in the eyes of the law schools, there was no major change from the seventh century until the eventual triumph of Common Law in the seventeenth century." p.188-9
Return to Gaels, Gall and Church paper
Return to Front Page of Molly's Web Site
Click to email me:
Molly Ní Dana
The Mental Juggler