The History-Mad Irish

This year while I was teaching I was sent a number of catalogs from academic publishers, most of which got only a brief glance on their way to the recycle bin. One in particular held my attention, from Four Courts Press in Dublin, Ireland. The 48-pages of this document list 418 different titles, almost all of them on the history, literary history, folklore, and archaeology of Ireland. Some of them take up obvious topics, like Adomnan of Iona, Ireland and the Second World War, and Women and the Church in Medieval Ireland. Some cover sensational topics with obvious readerships, like 1972 and the Ulster Troubles, or Age of Atrocity: Violence and political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland. But many more cover subjects of breathtaking obscurity, like, The Irish County Surveyors, 1834-1944, The Congested Districts Board of Ireland, 1891-1923, Marsh's Library -- A Mirror on the World, 1650-1750, or The Virtues of a Wicked Earl: John Foster, 1740-1828. Several lovingly consider small parts of the Irish landscape -- like Medieval Lough Cé or Glendalough, City of God. Many cover the relationship between Ireland and the rest of Europe, as in Ireland, Germany, and the Nazis, The Ulster Earls and Baroque Europe, and The Irish College at Santiago de Compostala, 1605-1769. I find myself astonished by the number of titles and the minute examination of small places and really inconsequential topics.

Ireland is about the same size as West Virginia and has 6 million inhabitants, taking north and south together, about the same number as live in metropolitan Washington, DC. And yet this one publisher offers far more works on Irish history than are in print for the history of Maryland and Washington. Why?

Certain topics in Irish history have a very broad appeal. Ancient Irish literature is one of the world's oldest literary traditions, as well as one of the weirdest, so it is studied around the world. Books on Irish immigration and the independence struggle are widely read among the 50 million people around the world who identify their ethnicity as Irish. But Four Courts Press does not specialize in such things. No, they prefer titles on the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, biographies of minor writers and political figures -- this catalog include no biography of a person I would consider famous -- or examinations of small places and tangential themes (e.g., Subversive Law in Ireland: from "Unwritten Law" to the Daíl Courts, 1879-1920). There is an almost willful avoidance of topics likely to appeal to outsiders not deeply immersed in Irish history.

It is true that history is a major subject of study in all the European countries, and one could produce long lists of wonderfully obscure books on the minutiae of any part of the continent. But I find the Irish preoccupation with these matters striking. Ireland is much smaller and poorer than England, France, or Italy, and yet Irish scholars can match those of much larger places in the detail and sophistication of their research. I think there really is something remarkable about all of this effort poured into the history of such a small place, and that the Irish really do have an obsession with the past of their homeland.