This volume, in honour of the great historian Emmet Larkin, is organized around the two themes that have shaped his work on the Catholic Church in modern Ireland -- the role of the church in the creation of the modern Irish state, and the role of the church in defining a distinctive Irish national identity through the "devotional revolution". The various chapters explore different themes -- political, social, ecclesiastical, and literary -- but are united by their common engagement with aspects of Larkin's work on Irish culture and consciousness between the late eighteenth century and the...

During the tumultuous period of world history from 1660 to 1815, three complex movements combined to bring a fundamental cultural reorientation to Europe and North America, and ultimately to the wider world. The Enlightenment transformed views of nature and of the human capacity to master nature. The religious reawakenings brought a revival of heart-felt, experiential Christianity. Finally revolution, the political and social upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, challenged established ideas of divine-right monarchies and divinely ordained social hierarchies, and...