Re-Imagining Ireland’s Early Modern Past

2021 ◽  
pp. 221-256
Author(s):  
Nicholas Canny
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
English Verse ◽  
Past Injustice ◽  
National Sentiment

Historians—Protestant and Catholic—associated with the Nation newspaper who were identified as members of Young Ireland constructed a romantic narrative of Ireland’s history in English verse that lauded heroes who had created an Irish nation by resisting English intrusion. This successful venture was designed to cultivate national sentiment among people with limited schooling. The more serious intellectual endeavour of Young Ireland was to sponsor a reasoned prose narrative of Ireland’s past to honour all—regardless of origin or denomination—who had fashioned an inclusive Irish nation. This proved less successful because it required their Catholic members to suppress memories of past injustice. Also, Catholic Church authorities, suspicious of the liberal agenda of Young Ireland, encouraged a counter-narrative that would dwell on past sufferings and celebrate those who had become martyrs for Catholicism rather than heroes of some imaginary Irish nation state.

Place, People, Texts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Nowakowska
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Nation State

What is Poland? If the meaning of apparently stable words such as ecclesia has been anything but stable historically, the same is of course true of ‘Poland’, a simple noun which masks multiple possible meanings and polemical intents. For the sixteenth century, Poland should be defined not as an ethnic people (a nascent nation state), but rather as a political phenomenon. As such, this study will consider all the peoples and territories under the authority of the Polish Crown in the reign of King Sigismund I, regardless of their ‘ethnic’ or linguistic status. Twenty years ago, John Elliott coined the phrase ‘composite monarchies’, pointing out that most early modern monarchies were patchworks of territories acquired at various times by different means (marriage, conquest, inheritance), held together by one monarch....

Church, State and Secularism in Asia: The Public Nature of the Church in Timor-Leste

2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-348
Author(s):  
Joel Hodge
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Public ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Practical Examination ◽  
Timor Leste ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Church

Abstract The Western discourse and norms around secularism, particularly Church-state relations, are foreign in many ways to the majority world, especially Asia. However, as the modern nation-state has taken root in Asia, different models of secularism have developed with interesting relationships to the particular cultural and religious context of each country. In the difficult course of forming a secular nation-state, Asian nations have had to address the dominant religious traditions and institutions of each nation, including Christian churches. This process has occasionally provoked conflict and has presented a particular dilemma to Christian churches in how to respond and relate to the developing nation-state. In order for theology to adequately address this situation (particular the context of modern secular discourses) and conceptualise the public shape and role of the church, a practical examination of the church’s relationship to and formation of culture and politics is required. To explore this process, this essay examines the case of Timor-Leste (or East Timor) and its relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, particularly in regards to the state-building process that has occurred after independence. The Church’s influence, which grew rapidly during the Indonesian occupation (1975–1999), has been contested since independence by some in the political sphere, such as in the 2005 dispute with the Government. By examining the 2005 dispute, the essay analyses the nature of the Catholic Church’s influence on Timorese cultural and political identity and her relationship with the new Timorese nation-state. The essay identifies the different models of secularism operative in Timor as they have relevance to the Asian context more generally.

Ottoman Sources and the Question of Their Being Purged

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taner Akçam
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Diverse Groups ◽  
Vast Territory

This chapter discusses how the demise of the Ottoman state led to a succession of ethnic and religious groups playing out their struggles for independence on its shrinking stage against a backdrop of forced population exchanges, deportations, massacres, and ethnic cleansing. As the last of the great early modern empires, the Ottoman state entered its long nineteenth century trailing the heritage of Byzantium but lacking the means of modernization. Without the requisite political and social structures and public consensus of a nation-state, “the Muslim Third Rome” could no longer bind together the diverse groups that peopled its vast territory. The logic of the nation-state utterly contradicts that of empire. Whereas an empire, by definition, encompasses a number of territories and diverse peoples, a nation-state is circumscribed by two clearly defined boundaries: geographical and social.

Past Belief

2019 ◽  
pp. 13-40
Author(s):  
Anthony Grafton
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Saint Augustine ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Early History ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Royal Road ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Church

This chapter examines the centrality of early modern ecclesiastical history, written by Catholics as well as Protestants, in the refinement of research techniques and practices anticipatory of modern scholarship. To Christians of all varieties, getting the Church's early history right mattered. Eusebius's fourth-century history of the Church opened a royal road into the subject, but he made mistakes, and it was important to be able to ferret them out. Saint Augustine was recognized as a sure-footed guide to the truth about the Church's original and bedrock beliefs, but some of the Saint's writings were spurious, and it was important to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. To distinguish true belief from false, teams of religious scholars gathered documents; the documents in turn were subjected to skeptical scrutiny and philological critique; and sources were compared and cited. The practices of humanistic scholarship, it turns out, came from within the Catholic Church itself as it examined its own past.

Fantasizing about Revenge

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-108
Author(s):  
Emily L. King
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Henry Vi ◽  
Poor Treatment ◽  
English Identity

Chapter three examines the relation between fantasy and civil vengeance through the figure of the vagrant. Insofar as vagrants are presumed responsible for major social problems, civil society justifies its poor treatment as retribution. Reading Jack Cade’s rebellion in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, the chapter proposes that normative society’s fantasy of its own victimhood produces vagrant bodies that are constructed to withstand extreme forms of labor and punishment, and the resulting bodies then sustain an expanding nation-state. Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton reveals the dynamic at work on the international stage in its attempts to define early modern Englishness against not only the Continent but also cosmopolitanism. While the impoverished vagrant offers social cohesion to normative subjects within the domestic project of nationalism, the affluent cosmopolitan vagrant and his eventual recoil from other cultures offers the fiction of a secure English identity.

The Birth and Early Demise of a Liberal Interpretation of Ireland’s Early Modern Past

2021 ◽  
pp. 326-355
Author(s):  
Nicholas Canny
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Past Injustice

Lecky, an Irish Protestant landowner, and liberal commentator on Irish affairs considered historians to be responsible to adjudicate between opposing views, having appraised the evidence. On this basis he condemned the English for harshness that provoked rebellion in 1641, insisted that no massacre had been involved, and that the Cromwellian confiscation had been falsely justified. However, he considered this injustice so ancient as to be irreversible, and he represented the government’s land reform measures as compensation for past injustice. Lecky’s call for moderation made no impression on the authors of Catholic county histories written to refute the elite narratives by insisting the landowners and Protestant were a foreign, malign presence in each county, and that memory was a surer guide to truth than documentary evidence. Protestant authors who insisted that a massacre in 1641 was well documented also decried Lecky’s views.

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