Cultural transformations in early modern Ireland, an archaeological perspective

DOCUMENT Citation Only Audrey Horning.

Mimesis involves the interpretation and imitation of behaviour. Crucially, it is a strategy employed not only by the ‘colonised other’, but also by those in authority engaging with and endeavouring to understand the behaviour of those over whom they wielded power. Far from settling an unpopulated colonial wilderness, those few planters who made their way to Ulster in the early seventeenth century were thrust into a populated Gaelic world where their survival depended upon a process of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nick F Brannon.

As with many Irish towns, Coleraine commemorates the 400th anniversary of its borough status in 2013. Born of Patrician myth origins, there was evident medieval settlement, its inland port (despite access issues) being central to its success. Re-invented in the early 1600s, under James I’s ‘Plantation’ of Ulster, the Renaissance street pattern survives. Urban myths, perpetuated by the Irish Society, as to Coleraine’s imported English flat-pack timber housing frames are exploded; this is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colin Rynne.

This an interdisciplinary (history/archaeology) study of the colonial landscapes created by Richard Boyle (1566-1643), the 1st Earl of Cork, in 17th -century Munster, Ireland. Viewed by his contemporaries and by subsequent scholars as an exemplary English planter who, above all his contemporaries, best realised the aims of the Munster Plantation by forging a model English Protestant ‘commonwealth’ on his estates, this study will examine - and question - the extent of his achievement. Utilising...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joe P Nunan.

The benefits that attracted the East India Company and its associates to the Bandon River area were the availability of land, cheap rents, and cheaper timber. Land and timber were valuable commodities. It was principally the growing English maritime and iron industries that took advantage of this resource. The Bandon River was one of the regions where the supply of timber was adequate to justify the introduction of the blast furnace and related works. Settlement and industry provided in varying...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rolf Loeber.

The paper summarizes the new architecture in three areas of Ireland during the early seventeenth century: the Ulster plantation, the Midland plantations, and the large areas outside of the plantations. A new but a distinct architecture of semi-fortified plantation houses emerged in this period. These houses sometimes had mannerist classical details of entrances, but usually no overall classical design. However, increasingly, the major plantation houses were set in impressive symmetrical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Clutterbuck.

My PhD research, funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, investigates of how Irish rural landscapes developed from 1650 to 1850, looking in particular at four case studies, in counties Clare, Tipperary, Meath and Derry. I explore how later historic rural landscapes reflect the massive social changes of the 17th to 18th centuries, and how archaeologists can contribute to understanding these changes. This paper will examine how rural landscapes inform our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eve J. Campbell.

In the opening section of his Gaelic language text The history of Ireland (1632), the Munster cleric Geoffrey Keating took English writers to task for their misrepresentations of Ireland. Keating was particularly aggrieved by their conflation of the habits and material culture of the Irish nobility and the ‘inferior people’. His explicitly class conscious rebuttal of outsiders’ accounts of Ireland forms part of a broader discourse among the native Irish literati concerned with social hierarchy...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James I. Lyttleton.

The degree to which cultural, economic and social change in early modern Ireland was inspired by English colonial models can be questioned, though it is undeniable that material practices were evolving among the native and planter communities under the influence of capitalism, humanism and religious change. Such processes impacted upon both vernacular and formal architecture, with changes in the materials, forms, and layouts of buildings marking the degree to which people of different cultural...