This collection makes a special contribution to the development of the "new British history"--which seeks to explore in a comparative framework the history of the national entities that constitute the two islands of the Atlantic Archipelago. The contributors represent the four constituent national communities, and their essays provide a further corrective to the Anglocentric bias of traditional British history. Generally the book sheds light on current debates concerning "the Union" and devolution as well as on Britain's historic and continuing "Irish problem."

Father Bradshaw examines the dissolution of the religious orders in Ireland as an episode of Irish ecclesiastical and political history, and of the English Reformation.

Historiography has highlighted Ireland's sixteenth-century rebellions and ignored its revolution. The transformation of the island's political personality in the course of the middle Tudor period must be the last remarked-upon change in its whole history. Yet it might be claimed to be the most remarkable. It provided Ireland with its first sovereign constitution, gave it for the first time an ideology of nationalism, and proposed a practical political objective which has inspired and eluded a host of political movements ever since: the unification of the island's pluralistic community into a...

This book assembles ten special studies, each devoted to an aspect of Fisher's multifaceted career.