Böcker utgivna av Four Courts Press

Country houses have always been a magnet for visitors. In early days individuals with the correct social credentials could gain entry, while visitors such as royalty were self-invited guests. With the rise of the railway and then the motor-car, houses became accustomed to mass visits, spawning the heritage industry of today. However, houses have also attracted less-welcome incomers: looters, arsonists, emigrés, revolutionaries, the politically undesirable, carpetbaggers, and even photographers whom one owner described as worse than burglars. This volume explores the many kinds of visitors who have crossed the thresholds of country houses, and how they have recorded their impressions--whether in sketches, journals, guest-books, works of fiction, or photographs.

Throughout the long history of Irish monasticism, the experience of women monastics has, until recently, been relatively sidelined. A desire to redress this inspired the decision in 2021 to dedicate the Fifth Glenstal History Conference to exploring the various ways in which women responded to the monastic and ascetic vocation in Medieval and Early Modern Ireland. Whether as practitioners or as patrons, women found creative and dynamic ways to pursue their calling as 'Brides of Christ' between the fifth and the seventeenth centuries, often in the face of tremendous difficulties and challenges. Their lives of prayer and service are sometimes hard to glimpse but the combined interdisciplinary perspectives of these essays brings them into sharper focus. The collection also demonstrates the current vitality of research on this topic and includes contributions by both established and emerging scholars. The volume is dedicated to Dr. Dagmar Ó Riain Raedel in recognition of her outstanding contribution to Irish and European medieval history and, in particular, to the study of medieval Irish-German monastic relations.

In the spring of 1919, UK Prime Minister David Lloyd George wrote: 'The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution. There is a deep sense not only of discontent, but of anger and revolt, amongst the workmen against prewar conditions ... In some countries, like Germany and Russia, the unrest takes the form of open rebellion; in others ... it takes the shape of strikes and of a general disinclination to settle down to work.' While comparative studies of revolution within the social sciences define revolution, in part, as necessarily involving mass participation, dominant narratives of the Irish revolution have left Lloyd George's 'spirit of revolution' by the wayside. The political content of the revolution is assumed to exclusively be the demand for national independence, while a focus on high-politics and military elites obscures the ways in which tens of thousands of people participated in diverse forms of popular mobilization. This collection of regional and local case studies, by contrast, shows that a 'spirit of revolution' was widespread in Ireland in the period 1917-23.

When the Dominicans arrived in Dublin in 1224, they established a house on the north bank of the river Liffey next to the bridge where the Four Courts are situated today. Anyone who wanted to enter the city of Dublin from the north, or leave across the bridge, had to pass the gate of the priory. It was in this priory in the mid-fourteenth century that a Dominican friar named Prior John de Pembridge wrote these Latin annals. This is the first modern edition of the annals of Pembridge (1162-1348), together with those of his anonymous Dominican continuator (1348-70). In 1884, in a two-volume work entitled The chartularies of St Mary's Abbey, Dublin, Sir John Gilbert printed these Latin annals without an English translation. Gilbert's was a rudimentary edition that did not make use of all available manuscripts. In this new edition, Bernadette Williams, the foremost expert on the Latin annals of Anglo-Norman Ireland, presents an authoritative modern edition of these manuscripts with facing translation. The annals, which cover the period 1162-1370, provide a unique window into the political, religious, and social character of the city of Dublin, and Ireland more generally.

From Viking trading place to modern hi-tech city, Limerick's long history as Ireland's oldest Atlantic port has been played out against its natural backdrop of limestone and river. The stone circles of Lough Gur, the Norman strongholds of Askeaton and Adare as well as King John's Castle, the Treaty stone, the Georgian quarter of Newtown Pery, Cleeves Factory, and Thomond Park all stand proudly within this landscape today as monumental testimony to the region's character, a place where the peoples of Ireland and Britain have clashed, meshed, and evolved into a distinctive whole. With such a vibrant cultural inheritance, it is hardly surprising that Limerick is also the home of one of the oldest and biggest of Ireland's local history societies, first founded as the Limerick Naturalists Field Club in 1892 and now the Thomond Archaeological and Historical Society (TAHS). This volume of essays on Limerick city and county has been put together in honour of Liam Irwin, retired Head of History in Mary Immaculate College and leading member of the society for forty years, by his many admirers and friends.