history and historians. The writing of analytical history, as opposed to the compilation of chronicles or annals, had its origins in the
Renaissance and the scientific revolution, advanced significantly during the
Enlightenment, and came to maturity with the new awareness of the need for critical appraisal and objective assessment of sources that developed in the 19th century. Its extension to Ireland was impeded by religious and political divisions. That
Spenser,
Campion,
Davies, and later
Cox wrote supposed histories that were in fact justifications of English conquest and colonization is hardly surprising; a similar propagandist function was evident in historical writing everywhere and these authors met a response in kind in the writings of the
Four Masters and of Geoffrey
Keating, who used legendary accounts of the assimilation of successive waves of invaders to promote the unity of
Old English and Gaelic Irish (see
literature in Irish). What is more striking is the failure over a century later of Thomas
Leland's attempt to produce an Irish counterpart to David Hume's successful history of Great Britain, a generally acceptable analytical account of a shared national past.
Political divisions continued to be evident in the historical writing of the early 19th century, most notably in the attempts of Protestant writers to appropriate for themselves the early Christian past by creating an image of a ‘Celtic church’ independent of Roman control (see
bede). By this time, however, serious antiquarian and historical work was also being done, by scholars like
O'Donovan,
O'Curry, and
Petrie, supported by the
Royal Irish Academy and other learned bodies. In the second half of the century
Froude and
Lecky offered scholarly yet accessible works of general narrative. Although both were unionist in their politics, their extensively documented accounts of past poverty and conflict were repeatedly drawn on by nationalist propagandists. Their near contemporary Richard
Bagwell, and in the next generation Eoin
MacNeill, Edmund
Curtis, and G. H.
Orpen, carried out solid work on original sources that laid the foundations for much of what was to come. Meanwhile more politicized versions of the Irish past were offered by Alice Stopford
Green, Daniel
Corkery, and others.
The establishment in 1938 of
Irish Historical Studies is generally seen as inaugurating a revolution in Irish historical scholarship. Unfortunately the declared commitment to new standards of professional rigour was not always matched by the production of significant scholarly work. Indeed it could be argued that the transformation of Irish historical writing owed more to the succession of sober monographs produced over several decades by J. C. Beckett of Queens's University, Belfast, and by R. B. McDowell and J. G. Simms at Trinity College, Dublin, than it did to the programmatic statements and agendas for future work produced by more flamboyant, and more highly placed, figures. The collaborative volume
The Great Famine, edited by R. Dudley Edwards and T. D. Williams, provides an instructive case study: commissioned by the Irish government in 1943, it appeared thirteen years later, as a series of disconnected essays, to which the nominal editors had not contributed a word. By 1968 it was possible to contemplate a multivolume history, to be published by the mid‐1970s, that would sum up a generation's work. But the first volume of the
New History of Ireland appeared only in 1976, and at the time of writing the project is still uncompleted.
In contrast to the rather narrow focus on administrative and constitutional history that characterized the
Irish Historical Studies generation, the 1970s saw a marked broadening in the concerns of historians of Ireland. A specialized journal,
Irish Economic and Social History, began publication in 1974;
Saothar, the journal of the Irish Labour History Society, appeared two years later. Political historians shifted their attention from high politics to popular movements, historians of religion from the intricacies of church–state relations to the beliefs and practices of the ordinary church member. In all areas there was a new openness to concepts and methods borrowed from related disciplines, notably anthropology and sociology, and a new willingness to place Irish developments in a comparative perspective. The price paid for this sudden expansion was a growing tendency to fragmentation. In particular the quantitative techniques employed by demographic and economic historians have made their work increasingly inaccessible to non‐specialists. More recently the rise of literary theory has threatened to cut off what was previously one of the most rewarding areas of interdisciplinary cooperation. (See
literature and the historian.)
More recent discussion of the writing of Irish history has been dominated by the controversy over ‘revisionism’. This had its origins in objections, first voiced in the mid‐1980s, to a specific body of recent writing that was seen as openly hostile to the traditional nationalist understanding of the Irish past. Since then the debate has expanded to include a broader critique of the way in which Irish history in general has been written since the late 1930s. Essentially the argument is that the concern of academic historians to distance themselves from a nationalism identified with propagandist myth making and violence has led them to produce a bland, ‘value‐free’ history that has failed to do justice to crucial aspects of Irish experience. The apparent eagerness of most writers to minimize the responsibility of the British government for massive loss of life during the
Great Famine is one often cited example. This process of self‐censorship is seen as intensifying from the 1970s, in response to the resurgence of physical force nationalism in Northern Ireland. An alternative argument, more political in character, is that ‘revisionist’ history, denigrating the nationalist tradition, is a conservative attempt to undermine the forces of political change in Ireland north and south.
None of these charges need be accepted without question. The more critical approach to traditional understandings of the Irish past evident from the 1970s arguably owed less to developments in Northern Ireland than to the new perspectives opened up by more extensive research, and by a greater willingness to view what were supposedly peculiarly Irish problems in a comparative context. Nor is it self‐evident that to write critically of the key assumptions of nationalism is necessarily to engage in counter‐revolutionary polemic: in independent Ireland, it could be argued, nationalism has been for most of the past 80 years the official ideology, and historians who have drawn attention to its evasions, blind spots, and untested assumptions have only discharged the proper function of any society's critics and thinkers. At its best the campaign against ‘revisionism’ has encouraged a healthy revival of debate on important issues of interpretation. At its worst it has provided a bogus mantle of radicalism for what is in fact the refurbishment of traditional myths and preconceptions.
Bibliography
Brady, Ciaran (ed.), Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism (1994)
