Paolo Giovio’s Descriptio Britanniae, Scotiae, Hyberniae et Orchadum presents several problems for the historian of early modern Ireland. Published in 1548, but composed for the most part during the early 1540s, it offered a comparatively detailed portrait of Irish geography, culture and politics to an international audience whose appetite for Irish affairs had been whetted by the recent Henrician Reformation. Yet the text offers scant commentary on Irish politics; its geographical information is often confused; its ethnography is evocative but rarely moralising; and its focus on Ulster and the lifestyle of Conn O’Neill is suggestive but tantalisingly so. The author’s sources are as obscure as his intentions. Nevertheless, Giovio’s text was still being read and cited by leading European and even Irish authors up to a hundred years later. It was a seminal treatment of Ireland and the Irish that found few parallels in international print-houses until the gradual emergence of the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis towards the end of the sixteenth century. This article sets the Descriptio in the twin context of early modern geographical humanism and the international fallout of the Henrician Reformation.

In recent years our understanding of the attempts of the Irish Protestant élite to convert and ‘civilise’ Ireland in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries has increased substantially. Some historians have examined the various campaigns to convert the largely Irish-speaking Catholic native population to Protestantism, through schools, the employment of Irish-speaking clergy and the publication of key religious texts in Irish. Others have explored Protestant efforts to civilise Ireland by bringing its governmental and legal infrastructure into line with those of England and through the spread of English dress, language, industries and agriculture.

The Universal News was published in London for nine years between December 1860 and December 1869. It originated as a co-operative effort between Irish and English Catholics to produce a newspaper which, though essentially secular, was to be imbued with a religious sensibility. The great majority of Catholics, however, were by this stage overwhelmingly Irish and wanted news of Ireland and Irish politics. This was not necessarily to the taste of all, so from the outset a balancing act was required between the wants and needs of English and Irish Catholics. This was not to be without its problems, for as the decade progressed and the struggle developed between a secular Irish nationalism and church and state, divisions deepened. The Universal News quickly became a paper for Irish Catholics, spanned a turbulent decade and mirrored in its own history both the internal and external struggles of the Irish in England. Furthermore, the history of the Universal News demonstrates the centrality, in Irish journalism in England, of the influence of the church, and the central question for the press of the migrants was how, in a hostile political environment, to produce and sustain newspapers that were at the same time secular but operated within a system of distribution particularly sensitive to clerical control.

Why certain Irishmen came to use violence to obtain their political objectives during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–21 has proved a difficult question. A number of local studies of the experience of volunteers, following the example of David Fitzpatrick, have provided insights into the process of radicalisation but have not dealt with this aspect of the subject explicitly. A more systematic approach has been taken in the attempt to explain the strong variations in the intensity of activity throughout the country. What caused these variations has indeed been a matter of contention ever since the Anglo-Irish War itself. Michael Collins often voiced complaints about ‘slack’ areas in language that left little to the imagination. Since the publication of Erhard Rumpf’s Nationalismus und Sozialismus in Irland in 1959 historians have sought to explain the unequal distribution of violence by comparing the level of I.R.A. activity in a particular county with certain geographically distributed social and economic variables. Hitherto these attempts have been unable to produce a full explanation for regional variations.

In his article ‘Venereal disease and the politics of prostitution in the Irish Free State’ Philip Howell argues that in 1926, following the submission of the Report of the interdepartmental committee of inquiry regarding venereal disease, the Irish government was confronted with ‘a series of proposals to regulate prostitution in the Free State’ These proposals are associated with the influence brought to bear by the army on the committee’s deliberations, and it is suggested that this preferred military solution to venereal disease falls into a European pattern in which state formation was frequently accompanied by such regulation. The example of Italy is offered as the most pertinent. However, Howell suggests, the government rejected the regulation of prostitution in favour of ‘a moral regulation of sexuality marked by elements of Catholic social purity’.

The purpose of this article is to make generally available for the first time a document whose content and context introduce their peculiar leaven to our understanding of a pivotal moment of early modern Irish history, the eve of the collapse of the authority of the ruling peace faction within the Kilkenny-based Confederation of Irish Catholics. The occasion of the document was the official visit to Kilkenny of James Butler, marquis of Ormond, some time near the end of August 1646. This took place at a time when rivalries within the Confederation were running high and the struggle to determine the Confederation’s effective political constituency was coming to a head. While a good case could be made for publication of the document on other grounds — in comprising Ireland’s earliest known surviving example of a speech of civic welcome addressed to a visiting dignitary, it is of special interest to the department of Irish social history concerned with civic performance, pageantry and public display — this is not the aspect chiefly pursued here. Rather, in addition to publishing the speech, this article attempts to reconstruct the circumstances of its delivery and some of the elements of the larger event in which it centrally participated, before considering the construction that the speech and its circumstances strove to put upon a volatile political situation in the hope — vain, as it proved — of containing it. As an adjunct to its interest in the Confederation’s large-scale public dimensionings of party policy, the article also presents in an appendix another document similarly hitherto unpublished, a set of verses posted upon the gates of Kilkenny at a time when the General Assembly was sitting. The assembly in question, probably the seventh, ran from January to April 1647. The city-gate verses appear with the civic entry speech in the unique manuscript in which it has been preserved.