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In 1615 Richard Stanihurst gave an account of the torture and death of the Catholic archbishop of Cashel, Dermot O'Hurley at the hands of his Protestant gaolers in 1584: The officials put the archbishop's bare feet in boots which they filled with oil, tied his legs to the uprights of the stocks, and then lit a fire underneath. The boiling-hot oil worked its way up from his feet to his shins and other parts, torturing him unbearably, so that bits of skin fell away from the flesh, and pieces of flesh from the bare bones. The official in charge of the torture, unaccustomed to such bizarre mutilation, rushed suddenly from the room not wanting to continue looking at such monstrous barbarity, worse than that of wild beasts, nor to hear any longer in his fleeing ears the cries of the innocent archbishop which resounded in the vicinity. The Calvinist torturers feasted for a while on these extraordinary cruelties, but were clearly not satisfied. Accordingly after a few days they took the mangled archbishop early in the morning, almost dying from his continual torture … to a field not far away from Dublin Castle … and there hanged the innocent man from the gallows with a noose roughly made from brushwood… In 1646 Sir William Temple described Catholic atrocities in the 1641 rising: Others they buried alive, a manner of death they used to severall British in severall places: and at Clownis within the Countie of Fermanagh, there were seventeen persons, having been hanged till they were halfe dead, cast together into a pit, and being covered over with a little earth, lay pittifully, sending out the most lamentable groanes for a good time after.[…] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are plenty of reminders in this book of how gross and disfiguring were the confessional hatreds and acts of violence carried out in the name God in early modern Ireland. The rack dislocated the joints and the screw splintered the thumbs of Catholic priests and Catholic conspirators in Elizabethan and early Jacobean England (although the reign of terror lasted barely twenty-five years), and the boot splintered the shinbones of Covenanters in later Stuart Scotland (although the reign of terror was briefer still), but the intention was always to secure information that could lead to the capture of co-conspirators. And it was usually accompanied by that most chilling of all oxymorons – an instruction to the interrogators to use ‘the gentler tortures’ first – as in the case even of Guy Fawkes. One does not suspect that the efficient collection of information was foremost in the minds of those who tortured Dermot Hurley, archbishop of Cashel, as described by Alan Ford in the toe-curling opening to this volume (above). And in Ireland torture and gross humiliation for the sake of it, resulted both from confessional self-righteousness and a desire for revenge escalating over many decades, and, again as Ford points out, is still with us. Equally unfamiliar to historians of England would be the stories of the heads of enemies being posted off coarsely packaged, or corpses being dug up and roughly reinterred in unconsecrated ground (above, pp. 00–00). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter offers an interpretation of Irish history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by a historian who was trained in the German historiographical tradition. This is a tradition which is in many respects different from that of Ireland, Britain and North America: ‘German historians have an industry they call ‘Periodisierung’ (periodisation) and they take it very seriously’ – thus the English historian C. H. Williams in 1967. ‘Periodisation’, the definition of historical periods and the discussion of their usefulness in historiographical debate, has a long tradition in German historiography. In order to justify their interest in periodisation German historians argue that, as Wolfgang Reinhard has put it, ‘even the most pragmatic and rather arbitrary selection of two years to identify a portion of history could result in the smuggling of some theoretical concept into apparently factual statements’. For example, choosing dynastic dates as limits for a book on the history of any European country in the early modern period implies different things: that the rule of a certain dynasty constitutes a unified epoch in this country's history or, more generally, ‘that crown and dynasty are the factors which really matter’. Consequently, German historians argue, periodisations and their underlying concepts and interpretations have to be constantly discussed and, if necessary, revised. This is the other ‘industry’ of German historiography: the development of theoretical concepts in order to explain and categorise historical phenomena and processes, which is often closely connected with discussions on periodisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]