History Studies: University of Limerick History Society Journal Vol (24)
In our call for papers in Volume 24 we did not set a theme, and yet the articles presented herein are united by a focus on ethnic conflict and religious tension.
Two of the articles in this volume explore aspects of Irish local history. Another essay interrogates the broader concept of Celtic identity, while the other three deal with early modern European history. This volume opens with Sarah Nunan’s exploration of the impact on life at the French court of the pious and philanthropic Francoise de Maintenon, and her influence on her husband, Louis XIV. Next, Charlie McEvoy introduces us to Fanny von Arnstein, the bourgeois Jewish salonnière who successfully navigated Christian ritual in early nineteenth-century Vienna. Théo Wouters’ essay looks at how Alexander Farnese employed reconciliation strategies to pacify the Spanish Netherlands during the Eighty Years’ War. Noel Murphy describes the eighteenth-century creation of the town of Mountshannon, Co. Clare as a linen village with the joint aims of economic development and promotion of the Protestant religion in Ireland. David Broderick, meanwhile, introduces us to the ‘Ultachs’, or Ulstermen, who fled religious persecution in the Ulster Borderlands in the late eighteenth century to find a new home in the Sliabh Aughty Mountains of southeast Galway. The final essay in this collection, from Trevor Mark Hanley, examines Celtic identity and how it has been used to create imagined glorious histories across many nations which claim Celtic origins.
We wish to sincerely thank each of the contributors to this volume. Through publication of historical research, analysis and writing we add, not only to our knowledge of the past, but to our understanding of our own time and place. Thank you to each of you for the diversity of your areas of interest. Thank you also to Dr David Fleming for all his guidance and support, especially in our first year as editors, and to Dr Robert Collins for sharing his knowledge and experience as a previous editor of this journal.
Rachel Beck and Lisa McGeeney
