Richard Pulteney (1730–1801) was a Leicestershire physician whose medical career suffered both from a lack of aristocratic patronage and from his dissenting religious background. However, his lifelong interest in botany and natural history, and particularly his work on the new Linnaean system of botanical classification, led to publications in the Gentleman's Magazine and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1762. His book on Linnaeus (also reissued in this series), first published in 1782, was later considered to be of great significance for the acceptance in England of the Linnaean system, and this two-volume work, published in 1790, is still relevant to the study of the history of botany. Volume 2 includes the development of botanical gardens, famous figures such as Dillenius and Sherard, and the study of botany in Scotland and Ireland.
One of Ireland's foremost literary and cultural historians, Terence Brown's command of the intellectual and cultural currents running through the Irish literary canon is second to none, and he has been enormously influential in shaping the field of Irish studies. These essays reflect the key themes of Brown's distinguished career, most crucially his critical engagement with the post-colonial model of Irish cultural and literary history currently dominant in Irish Studies. With essays on major figures such as Yeats, MacNeice, Joyce and Beckett, as well as contemporary authors including Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Brian Friel, this volume is a major contribution to scholarship, directing scholars and students to new approaches to twentieth-century Irish cultural and literary history.
One of Ireland's foremost literary and cultural historians, Terence Brown's command of the intellectual and cultural currents running through the Irish literary canon is second to none, and he has been enormously influential in shaping the field of Irish studies. These essays reflect the key themes of Brown's distinguished career, most crucially his critical engagement with the post-colonial model of Irish cultural and literary history currently dominant in Irish Studies. With essays on major figures such as Yeats, MacNeice, Joyce and Beckett, as well as contemporary authors including Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Brian Friel, this volume is a major contribution to scholarship, directing scholars and students to new approaches to twentieth-century Irish cultural and literary history.
Historiography has highlighted Ireland's sixteenth-century rebellions and ignored its revolution. The transformation of the island's political personality in the course of the middle Tudor period must be the last remarked-upon change in its whole history. Yet it might be claimed to be the most remarkable. It provided Ireland with its first sovereign constitution, gave it for the first time an ideology of nationalism, and proposed a practical political objective which has inspired and eluded a host of political movements ever since: the unification of the island's pluralistic community into a coherent political entity. The reason for the neglect lies partly in another remarkable feature of the revolution itself, the circumstances of its accomplishment. it was engineered by Anglo-Irish politicians, in collaboration with an English head of government in Ireland, and by constitutional means, in particular by parliamentary statute.
Born in London, the geologist G. B. Greenough FRS (1778–1855) initially studied law. His studies took him to the University of Göttingen where, almost by chance, he attended lectures on natural history. He was immediately hooked, gave up his legal studies, and devoted himself to geology, going on a series of scientific tours of France, Italy, Britain, Ireland and lastly India. He helped to found the Geological Society, and under its auspices, he organised a cooperative project that led to his famous geological map of England and Wales. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1807 for his services to geology. This influential series of essays, published in 1819, debunked a range of geological theories that were popular at the time, and by so doing, Greenough helped to reform much of geological thinking. The book also includes transcripts from his presidential addresses to the Geological Society.
Republic of Women recaptures a lost chapter in the narrative of intellectual history. It tells the story of a transnational network of female scholars who were active members of the seventeenth-century republic of letters and demonstrates that this intellectual commonwealth was a much more eclectic and diverse assemblage than has been assumed. These seven scholars - Anna Maria van Schurman, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, Marie de Gournay, Marie du Moulin, Dorothy Moore, Bathsua Makin and Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh - were philosophers, schoolteachers, reformers and mathematicians. They hailed from England, Ireland, Germany, France and the Netherlands, and together with their male colleagues - men like Descartes, Huygens, Hartlib and Montaigne - they represented the spectrum of contemporary approaches to science, faith, politics and the advancement of learning. Carol Pal uses their collective biography to reconfigure the intellectual biography of early modern Europe, offering a new,
A personal and political history, unpredictable and often tragic, of the series of Italian cardinals who undertook, at the invitation of the crown, to serve the king and England in the papal court. It also investigates fully the character of Anglo-papal relations in the two generations before the break with Rome. The familiar story of Henry VIII's campaign to divorce Catherine of Aragon is presented in its full context and from a Roman point of view. The account begins with the origins of the cardinal protectorship under Henry VII and concentrates on the long and intimate relationship of Henry VIII and Wolsey with Giulio de'Medici (later Pope Clement VII) and Lorenzo Campeggio, the cardinal protectors of England from 1514 until 1534 and the two Roman churchmen most involved in the divorce. The important matter of papal provisions to bishoprics in England and Ireland as well as in Scotland and elsewhere is studied against a background of European diplomacy and personal intrigue.
These volumes contain biographies of the 1367 Members of the House of Commons from 1820 to 1832, surveys of elections and politics in the 383 constituencies of Great Britain and Ireland over the same period and an introduction which analyses and sets them in context. The result of more than twenty years' work in archives and libraries throughout Britain, Ireland and abroad, they constitute the most comprehensive survey of British and Irish politics during the period. Encompassing four Parliaments and general elections in 1820, 1826, 1830 and 1831, they cover the Queen Caroline affair, agricultural distress, the Whig campaign for economies and legal reforms, debates on financial and commercial policy, the emergence of liberal Toryism, colonial slavery, repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform. The period ends with the passage of the first Reform Act, a watershed in the representative history of Britain.
This incisive study of James Joyce's work examines Finnegans Wake as a narrative response to acute problems of historical experience, especially issues of modern Irish identity implicit in historical writing about Ireland. Thomas C. Hofheinz shows how Joyce's narrative simulations of such problems enabled him to form startling linkages between public and private, objective and subjective Irish history. Hofheinz investigates Joyce's illumination of a wide range of issues - social, cultural, familial, psychological - by comparing Finnegans Wake with traditions of modern Irish historicism and historiography, including Ireland's place in the Catholic providential history of Vico's New Science; and he trenchantly challenges cultural-material methods of interpreting Joyce's historical 'subject', countering them with a reader-response philosophy owing much to the hermeneutics of Gadamer, Iser, and Ricoeur.
Born in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century, Agnes Mary Clerke achieved fame as the author of A History of Astronomy during the Nineteenth Century. Through her quarter-century career, she became the leading commentator on astronomy and astrophysics in the English-speaking world. The biography of Agnes Clerke describes the life and work of this extraordinary woman. It also chronicles the development of astronomy in the last decades of pre-Einstein science, and introduces many of the great figures in astronomy of that age including Huggins, Lockyer, Holden and Pickering; their achievements and their rivalries. The story follows her friendship with William and Margaret Huggins, and her prolific correspondence with eminent astronomers of the time. This biography will fascinate scientists, and anyone who admires intellectual achievement brought about through love of learning and sheer hard work.
Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature reveals an intriguing history of relationships among poets and editors from Ireland and Nigeria, as well as Britain and the Caribbean, during the mid-twentieth-century era of decolonization. The book explores what such leading anglophone poets as Seamus Heaney, Christopher Okigbo, and Derek Walcott had in common: 'peripheral' origins and a desire to address transnational publics without expatriating themselves. The book reconstructs how they gained the imprimatur of both local and London-based cultural institutions. It shows, furthermore, how political crises challenged them to reconsider their poetry's publics. Making substantial use of unpublished archival material, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma examines poems in print, often the pages on which they first appeared, in order to chart the transformation of the anglophone literary world. He argues that these poets' achievements cannot be extricated from the transnational networks through whi
The image of the Celt is one of the most emotive in the European past, evoking pictures of warriors, feasts, and gentle saints and scholars. This comprehensive and fully-illustrated book, first published in 2006, re-appraises the archaeology of the Celtic-speaking areas of Britain and Ireland from the late fourth to the twelfth century AD, a period in which the Celts were a leading cultural force in northern Europe. Drawing on recent scientific advances, the book provides a new perspective on the economy, settlement, material culture, art and technological achievements of the early medieval Celts and re-examines their interaction with the Romans and Vikings. Including a full survey of artefacts and archaeological sites, from memorial stones to monasteries, this is essential reading for any student or scholar with an interest in Celtic archaeology, history or culture.
Born in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century, Agnes Mary Clerke achieved fame as the author of A History of Astronomy during the Nineteenth Century. Through her quarter-century career, she became the leading commentator on astronomy and astrophysics in the English-speaking world. The biography of Agnes Clerke describes the life and work of this extraordinary woman. It also chronicles the development of astronomy in the last decades of pre-Einstein science, and introduces many of the great figures in astronomy of that age including Huggins, Lockyer, Holden and Pickering; their achievements and their rivalries. The story follows her friendship with William and Margaret Huggins, and her prolific correspondence with eminent astronomers of the time. This biography will fascinate scientists, and anyone who admires intellectual achievement brought about through love of learning and sheer hard work.
This collection of essays re-examines the historical debates of the early Stuart period from a fresh vantage point: the career of Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford. Wentworth played a crucial role in virtually every disputed policy and debate of the 1620s and 1630s. A noted 'country' parliamentarian, then a Privy Councillor and President of the Council in the North, a controversial Lord Deputy of Ireland and a close ally of Archbishop Laud - Wentworth's career encapsulates many of the paradoxes and tensions in early Stuart politics. This collection boasts a series of major articles by some of the most prominent historians currently active in seventeenth-century political history. The essays explore the nature of the political world under Charles I through Wentworth's career, challenging some of the categories and presuppositions which characterise recent work on the pre-Civil War period.
This collection of essays re-examines the historical debates of the early Stuart period from a fresh vantage point: the career of Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford. Wentworth played a crucial role in virtually every disputed policy and debate of the 1620s and 1630s. A noted 'country' parliamentarian, then a Privy Councillor and President of the Council in the North, a controversial Lord Deputy of Ireland and a close ally of Archbishop Laud - Wentworth's career encapsulates many of the paradoxes and tensions in early Stuart politics. This collection boasts a series of major articles by some of the most prominent historians currently active in seventeenth-century political history. The essays explore the nature of the political world under Charles I through Wentworth's career, challenging some of the categories and presuppositions which characterise recent work on the pre-Civil War period.
This collection of nineteen early English charters, in Old English and Latin, was formed in the eighteenth century, lost from sight for one hundred years in Ireland, and sent for auction in the early 1890s, when it was purchased by the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It includes original charters of Anglo-Saxon kings including Aethelstan and Aethelred, and refers to estates as far apart as Cornwall and St Albans. The documents were edited by A. S. Napier (1853–1916) and W. H. Stevenson (1858–1924), and published in 1895. The book contains thorough notes on historical and philological aspects of the texts, and a detailed index. The editors set new standards, voicing stern criticism of the pioneering works of Kemble and Birch (also reissued in this series) as regards authenticity and dating. Their work inspired new editions of the Anglo-Saxon charters, one in the first half of the twentieth century, the other still ongoing.
The main theme of this book is religion and identity - not only national identity, but also regional and local identities. David Hempton penetrates to the heart of vigorous religious and political cultures, both elite and popular, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He brings to life a diverse and variegated spectrum of religious communities in all of the British Isles. With so much new British history really an extended version of old English history, Hempton has devoted more attention to the Celtic fringes, especially Ireland. It is an exercise in comparative history, but he also shows how richly coloured is the religious history of these islands. He demonstrates that even in their cultural distinctiveness, the various religious traditions have had more in common than is sometimes imagined. The book arises from the 1993 Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham.
This 2000 book brings together the published information on the Quaternary cold stage flora of over 80 sites in Britain and Ireland to present a factual cold stage flora from the fossil record. The data provides a basis for an interpretation of the flora, vegetation and environments of some of the most extraordinary periods in the earth's most recent history, now only seen in the imperfect mirror of today's Arctic. This important study aims to reveal the nature of an environment, relatively stable, but totally different to that of today. As such it will be significant not only to those interested in the Quaternary, but also to a wider audience of those studying the present flora, fauna and environment, including climate and climatic change.
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have long been seen as a foundational period for modern Irish political traditions such as nationalism, republicanism and unionism. The Case of Ireland offers a fresh account of Ireland's neglected role in European debates about commerce and empire in what was a global era of war and revolution. Drawing on a broad range of writings from merchants, agrarian improvers, philosophers, politicians and revolutionaries across Europe, this book shows how Ireland became a field of conflict and projection between rival visions of politics in commercial society, associated with the warring empires of Britain and France. It offers a new perspective on the crisis and transformation of the British Empire at the end of the eighteenth century, and restores Ireland to its rightful place at the centre of European intellectual history.
This revisionist history of convict transportation from Britain and Ireland will challenge much that you thought you knew about religion and penal colonies. Based on original archival sources, it examines arguments by elites in favour and against the practice of transportation and considers why they thought it could be reformed, and, later, why it should be abolished. In this, the first religious history of the anti-transportation campaign, Hilary M. Carey addresses all the colonies and denominations engaged in the debate. Without minimising the individual horror of transportation, she demonstrates the wide variety of reformist experiments conducted in the Australian penal colonies, as well as the hulks, Bermuda and Gibraltar. She showcases the idealists who fought for more humane conditions for prisoners, as well as the 'political parsons', who lobbied to bring transportation to an end. The complex arguments about convict transportation, which were engaged in by bishops, judges, pries
