History Studies: University of Limerick History Society Vol (19)

We have excellent articles presented here in the most recent volume of History Studies. Together they show that by re-examining old questions with new evidence, and by applying innovative approaches to carefully selected topics, history may continue to enlighten and inform. The areas that are discussed in these essays include religious history, representations of gender and identity, high politics, cultural perceptions, social reform. What is common in all of them is a freshness of interpretation that allows the reader to think of apparently familiar subjects in new and interesting ways.Talitha Maria Schepers has considered Antonio de Salazar y Frías’s rational approach to the business of investigating allegations of diabolic heresy in seventeenth-century Navarre. Her essay conveys an idea of the beneficial role of the Inquisition in limiting the spread of witch persecution south of the Pyrenees. Gillian Sarah Macdonald, meanwhile, has provided a vigorously written examination of the uncertainties of the Williamite revolution in Scotland at a time when the new government had its back to the wall in dealing with Jacobite insurgency. Her essay provides an important contextualization to the more familiar events surrounding the battles of the Boyne and Aughrim. This emphasis on contextualization is also to the fore in Stephen Griffin’s analysis of the process behind the selection of John Walkingshaw of Barrowfield as the Jacobite representative in Vienna in 1716. It is set within a wider discussion of the requirements and practices of diplomacy in the early eighteenth century, and the use of social relationships as a means of obtaining practical ends. These authors’ achievements are echoed in the three essays dealing with more recent history. Triona Waters has examined the limited provisions made to take care of the poor and insane during the years before the passing of legislation for the establishment of district lunatic asylums in Ireland. Her research into travel journals and the records of Houses of Industry, as well as the report of the 1817 Commons Select Committee on the Lunatic Poor in Ireland amounts to a harrowing account of pre-famine poverty and the mistreatment of the mentally ill. The essays by Holly O’Farrell and Lynda Ganly are concerned with the exclusion of subordinated viewpoints from academic study. Holly O’Farrell has looked at the ways in which museum curatorship in the late nineteenth century has been responsible for creating and defining artificial hierarchies of cultural identity whilst all but ignoring the contributions of non-western civilisations. In a not dissimilar way, traditional narratives of Irish independence have tended to leave out the part played by women. Lynda Ganly has reconstructed the role of Alice Ginnell as a supporter of the 1916 rebellion, advocate of gender equality, diplomat’s wife in South America, and agent for the perpetuation of the original egalitarian ideals of the Irish struggle for freedom. Taken together, these six essays show graduate research in history at its very best, and are a delight to read.