The Old English in Early Modern Ireland: The Palesmen and the Nine Years’ War, 1594–1603. Ruth A. Canning. Irish Historical Monograph Series 20. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2019. xii + 228 pp. $120.
humor in the title of the chapter on “The Scandinavian Intervention” (better known to the world as the Viking invasions). The chapter on “Perception and Reality: Ireland c. 980–1229” is, in fact, a study of kingship as reflected in the native Irish literary sources of the period. That on “Conquest and Conquerors” provides an amusing contrast between the “fellowship of arms” exercised by the chivalric conquerors and the savagery of their native opponents: “So it transpired that when in May 1170 the English won their famous victory at Dún Domnaill (Baginbun, Co. Wexford), they eschewed their own military customs and slaughtered their captives” (162). This kind of special pleading is reminiscent of the bad old days of John Horace Round and his Irish disciple, Goddard Henry Orpen. Even worse, however, is the vista offered in the chapter on “Angevin Ireland” of the same benighted conquerors who “found themselves time-travellers to an Iron Age” society (205), one obviously crying out for the civilizing hand of the English (the term Anglo-Norman has been jettisoned). But how to explain “the murder, deposition and self-slaughter that characterises English elite politics in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries?” Their origins, we are told, “might better be traced to the Curragh of Kildare” (219) than to any innate disposition among the civilized elite. But there are good things in the book: Brendan Smith, “Disaster and Opportunity, 1320–1450”; Katharine Simms, “The Political Recovery of Gaelic Ireland” and “Gaelic Culture and Society”; Peter Crooks, “The Structure of Politics in Theory and Practice, 1210–1541”; and Robin Frame, “Contexts, Divisions and Unities: Perspectives from the Later Middle Ages.” The chapter on “Material Culture” tries hard to refute the view of Françoise Henry that “in many ways the Norman invasion mark[ed] in Ireland the end of a world, and certainly the death of original artistic endeavour” (Irish Art in the Romanesque Period 1020–1170 A.D. [1970], 25). The absence of a chapter on Anglo-Norman literature in Ireland speaks for itself.