Notes
1. The history of modern Ireland has invested the term "Anglo-Irish" with profoundly nationalistic overtones that are anachronistic in the early modern period. In this essay, the term "Anglo-Irish" will refer simply to the English community in Ireland.

2. Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland 1625-1642 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 16.

3. Aidan Clarke, "Colonial Identity in Early Seventeenth-Century Ireland," in Nationality and the Pursuit of National Independence, ed. T. W. Moody (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1978), 57; R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (London: Penguin, 1988), 50; Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Ireland of the Reign of James I, eds. C. W. Russell and John P. Prendergast (1872; Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1974), 4:289; Nicholas Canny, "Early Modern Ireland c. 1500-1700," in The Oxford History of Ireland, ed. R. F. Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 114.

4. Foster, Modern Ireland, 45.

5. Foster develops this argument in the second chapter of Modern Ireland 1600-1972, entitled "'Nationalism' and Recusancy."

6. Ibid., 49, 51.

7. Ibid., 51.

8. Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures (London: Longman, 1985), 13. In articles published in Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism 1938-1994, ed. Ciaran Brady (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994), Stephen Ellis and Brendan Bradshaw debated the nature and purpose of Irish historiography in the early modern period. In "Nationalist Historiography and the English and Gaelic Worlds in the Late Middle Ages," Ellis critiqued the Whiggish character of early modern Irish historiography. "[T]he concern with the pre-history of Irish nationalism," he argued, "has been allowed to prejudge the issue of the island's separate development in the late middle ages." In this essay, he sketched the outlines of a Revisionist manifesto that applied Foster's interpretative approach to the general historiography of early modern Ireland. Rejecting the attempt of nationalistic historians to find in this period historical justification for their outlook, Ellis has interpreted the Anglo-Irish identity as a regional variant of a larger English identity and of Irish colonial life as a local manifestation of the larger trends of English life. The conflict between the crown administration and the Old English community, he suggested, played out as little more than a local feud, similar to the regional feudal conflicts of fifteenth-century England. Tensions between the Old and New English communities involved no nationalistic implications because of their provincial scale; a common English identity ultimately subsumed all regional biases and loyalties. "[N]ationalist interpretations necessarily reveal steady 'progress' towards an independent Ireland," Ellis has written. "But the validity of such concepts can only be tested by discussing developments in English and Gaelic Ireland in their respective contexts of the English and Gaelic worlds."

Brendan Bradshaw's response, "Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland," suggested the flaws of this Revisionist project. The attempt to establish an inviolable barrier between the intellectual climate of the present and the events of the past, Bradshaw argued, served to obscure rather than to elucidate the dynamics of that past. "'Separatism' well describes an important current that developed within the political consciousness of the colonial élite in the late medieval period," Bradshaw explained. "That a clear distinction was made between the colonists and any such regional sub-group is indicated by the contemporary designation which applied to [the Old English community] the qualifying epithet 'by blood,' thus setting them apart from the normal English 'by birth.'" The Revisionist attraction to "value-free" history, Bradshaw suggested, involved sins of commission and omission. By actively purging modern values and convictions from their assessment of historical events, Revisionists, Bradshaw charged, disguised a powerfully destructive ideology in the guise of benign explanation. In response to the nationalist attempt to establish long lines of continuity between the modern Irish nation and its historical predecessors, Bradshaw alleged that the Revisionists have with equal zeal interpreted "the past as a foreign country." In this approach to the past, he argued, the Revisionists have neglected a central aspect of it. "It is . . . in responding to the interpretative challenge posed by the catastrophic dimensions of Irish history," Bradshaw has written, "that the sins of omission of the value-free school are to be observed.

The reluctance of Revisionist historians to make recourse to value judgments, Bradshaw argued, has marginalized, and even excluded, a central aspect of Irish history from the historical record. Though at times disturbingly presentist in orientation, Bradshaw has valuably emphasized the importance of personal values and biases for early modern Irish historiography. Sensitivity to the catastrophic dimensions of Irish history, he suggested, permits a clearer comprehension of the choices and forces that shaped it.