Allegations over atrocities committed in Ireland by the English throughout the early modern period have generated bitter debate but little genuine insight. The Cromwellian Wars of the 1650s, however, are widely acknowledged as one of the most traumatic episodes in Irish history. According to English accounts, Ireland suffered a demographic collapse in the face of total war, which included the widespread killing of captured soldiers and Catholic clergy, as well as the deliberate targeting of the indigenous community and the destruction of the country’s infrastructure. These brutal tactics triggered a major famine, which in turn enabled the spread of diseases such as plague and dysentery, killing tens of thousands in the process. Following their military victory, the English transplanted thousands of Catholic landowners, and their dependents, to make way for a new Protestant settler community, and forcibly transported significant numbers of men, women and children across the Atlantic to work in New World colonies. Few today would argue that the excesses of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland constitute a major war crime but to date nobody has specifically charged the government of the English republic with genocide. This chapter will determine whether in fact there is a case to answer.

Chapter 2 sets out the history of the Province from 1348 to 1559 showing first its resilience in the face of the Black Death with new foundations in Ireland and the establishment of the nuns’ convent at Dartford. Its resilence is then shown against theological attack in anti-fraternal literature, including writings by Wycliff, and the rise of Lollardy. The Province’s continuing value to key supporters is shown through the patronage manifest in church decoration, through lay burials and grants of confraternity, while their secure place in civic life before the Reformation is seen in relation to the guilds associated with their churches. The sudden collapse of the Province at the Henrician Reformation is then examined to identify several factors, the most important of which was the crown’s imposition of its agents as Provincials and Priors.

While Ruskin was in Italy, writing home to his father, his future mentor, Thomas Carlyle, was corresponding with individuals about their Cromwell letters and asking for information on the English Civil Wars of the seventeenth century. He was also keeping friends and family informed by letter about the agonies of editing and writing, as he wrestled with the difficulty of making Oliver Cromwell ‘legible’ to a modern audience. Meanwhile he seemed to be oblivious to the fact that his infatuation with a wealthy aristocratic woman was driving his wife Jane towards nervous collapse. In a letter of 17 April 1845, Jane Welsh Carlyle, famed for her wit and kindliness as an informal literary hostess and for her brilliance as a letter-writer, shared her agony with her own family in Scotland. She told John Forster that her husband was ‘too much occupied with the Dead just now to bestow a moment on the Living’. The emotional crisis Jane experienced that month proved to be the turning point in a protracted drama within her marriage, which played out between 1844 and 1846. At the heart of that drama lay conflicting ideas relating to life and death, both in reality and symbolically.

Milton's sonnets, which present Milton's self as a fictionalized persona, reveal the ways in which Milton's masculinity and his subjectivity interact in a highly masculinized poetic form. In his political and personal sonnets, Milton makes himself a vulnerable but also authoritative figure who makes his own authority through poetic form. Claiming public status while eschewing public alliances, creating enemies while claiming popularity, and naming friends while walking in solitary glory, Milton's sonnet-speakers confirm the ambivalent, tactical, and self-authorizing manhood which is Milton's default.

Several of the most remarkable political poems of the mid-seventeenth century, including Marvell’s ‘First Anniversary’ (1655) and Dryden’s ‘Astraea Redux’ (1660), belong to a genre which has not been clearly defined in English literature. These substantial poems, each of several hundred lines, derive elements from a range of panegyric forms, including the tradition of the political ode discussed in ; but the main generic model for poetry of this sort, which is little represented in English before Marvell’s ‘First Anniversary’, is the panegyric epic of the late antique poet Claudian: a genre, new to Latin when Claudian began writing, which combined the techniques of prose panegyric with contemporary (rather than mythological) epic. This chapter seeks to set the major seventeenth-century English examples of this form – as well as a handful of English-language precursors – within the wider context of a Latin genre which, though now obscure, was both widely understood and frequently composed throughout early modern Europe.

The Irish Sea has a singular and resonant place in a shared British and Irish imagination, and the simple question of its power both to connect and to divide has commanded political and cultural attention for centuries. This chapter investigates the cultural history of sea crossings, offering an analysis of their inscription in literature and the visual arts. In the process it describes a phenomenon that is possessed of both highly public and quietly intimate meanings, crossing centuries, countries, and lives in diffuse, extensive, and varied patterns.