Hermathena

This edited collection explores the ways in which our understanding of the past in Dutch history and culture can be rethought to consider not only how it forms part of the present but how it can relate also to the future. Divided into three parts – The Uses of Myth and History, The Past as Illumination of Cultural Context, and Historiography in Focus – this book seeks to demonstrate the importance of the past by investigating the transmission of culture and its transformations. It reflects on the history of historiography and looks critically at the products of the historiographic process, such as Dutch and Afrikaans literary history. The chapters cover a range of disciplines and approaches: some authors offer a broad view of a particular period, such as Jonathan Israel's contribution on myth and history in the ideological politics of the Dutch Golden Age, while others zoom in on specific genres, texts or historical moments, such as Benjamin Schmidt’s study of the doolhof, a word that today means ‘labyrinth’ but once described a 17th-century educational amusement park. This volume, enlightening and home to multiple paths of enquiry leading in different directions, is an excellent example of what a past-present doolhof might look like.

This work is the study of a family's century long involvement with Irish self rule and political freedom. Joe Johnston (1890-1972), from a Tyrone Presbyterian small-farm background, had 3 elder brothers who made their careers in the Indian Civil Service. The family were 'Home Rule within the Empire' supporters in the Ulster liberal tradition. After studying classics and ancient history in Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and then in Oxford, JJ became a Fellow of Trinity in 1913. He then published his anti-Carson book Civil War in Ulster, attacking the process which culminated in the 1914 Larne gun-running. He contributed significantly to the emergent national movement. He wrote critically about 1930s economic policies, and went on the serve in the Irish Senate/Sennad from 1939 to 1954. His son RJ (b.1929) was a pioneer of the student left in TCD in the 1940s, and was associated with the post-war attempt to bring European Marxist thinking into the Irish labour movement, with the foundation of the Irish Workers League in 1948. After a period in London in the early 1960s, he returned to Dublin, this time as a research scientist, and helped Cathal Goulding in his attempt to get the 1960s generation of republicans to go political, in a democratic left-wing mode, decoupling from the Stalinist incubus. He helped set the stage for the emergence of the Civil Rights approach to reform in Northern politics, as a means of opening up an all-Ireland perspective. His opponents in the Republican movement, the Provisionals, opted for violence . In the ensuing decades he participated in various politicising processes which may, in the end, show the counter-productive nature of the role of the gun in politics, in Ireland and elsewhere. Roy Johnston lives in Dublin and continues to be politically active. "An important addition to any library of 20th century Irish Studies" Professor J.Skelly

The field of Hiberno-Latin literature, a term coined to describe the Latin literature written in Ireland, or by Irishmen abroad, between 400 and 1500, was first defined by the late Mario Esposito. His work, too, revealed its vast extent and range, so enabling a significantly better understanding of the importance of Irish scholarship in the cultural history of the Western Middle Ages. This volume concentrates on Hiberno-Latin authors, and on texts composed in Ireland; a second collection of Esposito’s articles contains studies on Irish learning and texts written on the Continent. The great strength of his research is that it is founded on unparalleled knowledge of the manuscripts - many of which, indeed, no longer survive. The articles, now provided with extensive indexes to facilitate their consultation, therefore form the essential basis and guide for any further enquiry into the authors dealt with or their works.