The Irish Parliament 1613 89

The Irish parliament was both the scene of frequent political battles and an important administrative and legal element of the state machinery of early modern Ireland. This institutional study looks at how parliament dispatched its business on a day-to-day basis. It takes in major areas of responsibility such as creating law, delivering justice, conversing with the executive and administering parliamentary privilege. Its ultimate aim is to present the Irish parliament as one of many such representative assemblies emerging from the feudal state and into the modern world, with a changing set of responsibilities that would inevitably transform the institution and how it saw both itself and the other political assemblies of the day.

In October 1641, violence erupted in mid-Ulster that spread throughout the whole kingdom and lasted for more than a decade. The war was neither unpredictable nor was it out of step with the rest of the Stuart kingdoms, or indeed Europe generally. As with all wars, particularly the multi-national and multi-denominational, the Irish wars of the 1640s and 1650s had many complex and interrelated causes. Law, the legal system and the legal community played a vital role in the origins and the development of the conflict in Ireland that took it from a dependent kingdom to becoming part of a republican commonwealth. Lawyers also played a fundamental part in the return of the legal and political "normality" in the 1660s. This collection of essays considers how the law was part of this process and to what extent it was shaped by the revolutionary developments of the period. These essays arise from a conference held in 2014 in the House of Lords at the Bank of Ireland, Dublin, under the auspices of the Irish Legal History Society.

"This book is an edited collection of nineteen essays written by a range of experts and some newer scholars in the areas of early modern British and Irish history and religion. In addition to English Catholicism, developments in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, as well as ongoing connections and interactions with Continental Catholicism, are well incorporated throughout the volume"--

Explores the emergence of majority rule in the elected assemblies of early modern Britain and its Atlantic colonies over two centuries.

Why were mercenaries such a commonplace of war in the medieval and early modern periods and why have they traditionally been so poorly regarded? Who were mercenaries, and how were they distinguished from other soldiers? The contributors to this volume attempt to cast light on these questions.

First performed in Dublin on St. Patrick's Day 1640, Henry Burnell's Landgartha was the last play produced before political unrest forced the closure of Dublin's only theatre. Staged the night before the Irish Parliament debated the introduction of laws against bigamy, the play weaves a complex tale of love and marriage. Norwegian Amazon Landgartha persuades the Swedish King to help overturn the Danish occupation of her homeland. As peace ensues, Landgartha reluctantly agrees to break the Amazon code and marry him, but Sweden proves unfaithful. The allegory is compelling: the strife between Norway, Sweden, and Denmark represents the brewing between Ireland, England, and Scotland. A robust Old English response to dominant colonial representations of Ireland, Burnell's Landgartha is a compelling fusion of English tragicomedy with Irish storytelling. (Series: Literature of Early Modern Ireland)