Essays: This volume, a posthumous Festschrift in honour of Albert Lovett, a lecturer in British and European History who died at the age of 50, organised by his colleagues in the strong history department of UCD, will stimulate readers with broad historical interests, writes Martin Mansergh
Like its subject, whose contribution is celebrated by Hugh Gough, many articles are not Ireland-centred at all, but focus on episodes of European history. Others treat of Ireland's involvement in America and Europe.
They span from early Christian and Norman times to the Counter-Reformation, the Wild Geese, Irish migration to America, and later 20th-century attempts in many countries to overcome the legacy of history.
Howard Clarke, in '1066, 1169 and All That', ironises about past Trinity historians who regarded the Norman conquerors as superior by right of conquest. A later essay by John McCafferty on Daniel Maclise's famous painting, Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife, depicts from a 19th-century perspective a forced and unhappy marriage in the midst of plunder and slaughter. Seymour Phillips attempts some rehabilitation of Edward II, who like Louis XVI was good with his hands, which did not impress the nobility.
Edward Coleman's essay on the original Lombard League against Emperor Frederick Barbarossa highlights the possible deeper roots of the Berlusconi government's anti-German outbursts! Elva Johnston concludes that for the monastic author of the Brendan-like Voyage of Máel Dúin (c.900AD), Ireland's conversion to Christianity was skin-deep, and that society was "violent, venal and chaotic".
Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin attributes the success of the Counter-Reformation in Ireland to the superiority of the Irish colleges abroad "in outperforming the State's institution" at Trinity. Giving Irish resistance to the Tudors a religious motivation was the most convenient selling-point for Catholic Europe, with mixed long-term consequences.
Declan Downey highlights the Irish integration in Europe which the Irish colleges facilitated, with few barriers to the highest careers facing "the Spanish of the North", and traces it back to the Treaty of Dingle of 1529 between the Earl of Desmond and Emperor Charles V, at a time when his aunt, Katharine of Aragon (and, with her, the Catholic Church), was being divorced from Henry VIII.
James McGuire's study of Sir Richard Nagle, speaker of the "Patriot Parliament" of James II in 1689, shows how Nagle's career as a land lawyer fitted him for the prospective role of overseeing the partial overthrow of the Cromwellian settlement. Eamon O'Flaherty, in his study of 18th-century medicine, shows that while much impetus to scientific enquiry came from the new Protestant establishment, physicians were not subject to the penal laws.
Maurice Bric and David Doyle study early Irish migration to America, the discouragement of Catholics and the encouragement of Presbyterians to free themselves from the bondage of the rackers of rent and screwers of tithes.
Doyle points out that the Irish-descended political élite of revolutionary America was largely Protestant and republican, and never shed its anti-imperial republicanism, posing some intellectual challenge to latter-day Ulster-Scots promoters, who want their tradition to stand as a bastion of loyalty.
Ronan Fanning sketches early 20th-century US sympathy for Irish independence, contrasted with the subsequent pro-British position hostile to neutrality and Irish grievances on partition. Intelligence co-operation in the second World War, it would seem, counted for nothing in public attitudes all round. He dwells cursorily on the Clinton era as one of the catalysts for peace and assumes its legacy is gone.
Elgar's Dream of Gerontius, seen by Richard Aldous as Newman's Dream, is credited with softening English attitudes towards Catholicism and inspiring the Beveridgean welfare state as a "new Jerusalem", though not converting my maternal great-grandfather, Dr Haydn Keeton, organist of Peterborough Cathedral, who flung the score at his famous pupil, Malcolm: "Sargent, this might appeal to you; I can't understand the fellow."
Mary Daly writes about the lack of interest in preserving landscape and much of our heritage in the early decades of the Irish State. It was not interested in acquiring Russborough, which was not considered "distinctively Irish", and even Muckross House was not leased to An Óige, "because the Commissioners would be unable to control young people of both sexes who might be expected to lodge there". Only latterly has heritage policy with far greater access to funds taken in landscape and big houses.
Jane Toomey, in her study of Britain's second EEC application, shows how neither Britain nor Ireland wanted to be left behind, noting that Ireland barely avoided disqualification in 1963. David Kerr's study of "the revolution of 1968" on the streets of Paris finds only tenuous links with the earlier revolutionary tradition. Raymond Aron observed that "removing a president elected by universal suffrage and removing a king are not the same thing". The French Communist Party preferred de Gaulle to the students. Barricades were apparently an attempt to encourage fraternisation with the forces of order.
A volume full of interest concludes with William Mulligan's essay on the divisiveness of the Wehrmacht exhibition of the late 1990s, which showed up the German army's role also in eastern- front atrocities during the second World War, and with a fascinating essay by Judith Devlin on the historical and ideological reconstruction of Russia, on a basis not too far removed from a minister of Tsar Nicholas I's motto of "orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality", comfortably incorporating the more positive Soviet legacies.
Senator Martin Mansergh, a former adviser to the Taoiseach, has a D.Phil for research on 18th-century French history, and is author of a forthcoming volume, The Legacy of History for Making Peace in Ireland, to be published by Mercier Press in the autumn.
European Encounters: Essays in Memory of Albert Lovett. Edited by Judith Devlin and Howard B. Clarke, University College Dublin Press, 418pp, €50