Seventeenth Century: Selected Readings
A. Britain
A short up-to-date overview:
Jenny Wormald (ed), The seventeenth century (Short Oxford History of the British
Isles, 2008)
An outstanding, but very long, study of the civil wars:
Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution 1625-60 (Oxford University Press, 2004)
Still the best synthesis on the Glorious Revolution:
W.A. Speck, Reluctant revolutionaries: Englishmen and the revolution of 1688 (OUP,
1988)
Two useful short think pieces:
Angus McInnes, ‘When was the English revolution?’, History, 27 (1982), 377-92
Lawrence Stone, ‘The bourgeois revolution of seventeenth-century England
revisited’, Past & Present, 109 (1985)
B: Ireland
New text books:
Raymond Gillespie, Seventeenth-century Ireland (Gill & Macmillan, 2006) – the case
for ‘normalcy’.
Padraig Lenihan, Consolidating conquest: Ireland 1603-1727 (Longman, 2007) –
more traditional in approach.
Two very long surveys:
S.J. Connolly, Contested island: Ireland 1460-1630 (OUP, 2007)
S.J. Connolly, Divided kingdom: Ireland 1630-1800 (OUP, 2008)
The latest big book:
Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British 1580-1650 (OUP, 2003)
Ulster Plantation
Philip Robinson, The plantation of Ulster (1984; reprint, UHF, 2000) – emphasises
geography and environment over formal plantation.
W.J. Smyth, Map-making, landscapes and memory: a geography of colonial and
early-modern Ireland c.1530-1750 (Cork University Press, 2006) – restates
the colonial perspective.
Violence
David Edwards, Padraig Lenihan & Clodagh Tait (eds), Age of Atrocity
Violence and political conflict in early modern Ireland (Four Courts Press,
2007)
Religion
Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Reformation in Ireland (OUP, 2001)
Brian MacCuarta, Catholic revival in the north of Ireland 1603-41 (Four Courts Press,
2007)
Alan Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland 1590-1641 (Four Courts Press,
1997)