3 September 1998 Edition
Irish history-writing after revisionism
Dr Brendan Bradshaw, Director of History Studies at the University of Cambridge and reader in history at Queen's College, gave a keynote lecture at last weekend's Desmond Greaves Summer School in Dublin.
He told his audience that as the millennium approaches, revisionism, so long favoured by Irish professional historians, is being superceded. Younger historians are increasingly following the lead of those of their seniors who adopted a more affirmative practice, one more sympathetic to and in tune with national sentiment.
In the 21st Century, Dr Bradshaw predicted, revisionism would be seen as a feature of a particular phase of independent Ireland's post-colonial development through which the community had passed in the course of the previous century. Accordingly, he suggested, there was a need to evaluate the rationale that underlay the new practice now coming into vogue.
The key features of the new mode, he predicted, would be threefold. These would stem from historians' consciousness of a public role: their responsibility for enabling the Irish community to `own' its own past as the condition on which it could identify itself as a distinct national community in the present, and could liberate itself from the legacy of prejudices and anger with which the catastrophic dimension of Irish history had burdened it.
The first distinctive feature of the new history, therefore, he argued, must be its present-centredness, a capacity to address the needs of the Irish community in the present, in contrast to the past-centredness - `history for its own sake' - of the Revisionist school.
However, before the historians could convey the historical experience of previous generations of Irish people to the present community, he or she needed to be able to enter into it for themselves. Therefore the two other dominant features that must characterise the new practice were qualities of imagination and empathy, replacing the detachment and scepticism that marked the old.
In addition, Irish historians must attend to the gaps in historical research and writing which have come to the notice of the profession in consequence of developments on the international stage.
Women's history was one such, particularly apt in the Irish case because of the feminine theme that had been central to the culture of the Celts from earliest times. More pertinently, women had played a notable and largely unacknowledged part in the struggle for national liberation and in responding to the social needs of the community through the ages.
Second, without disparaging the contributions of the great historical figures of whom the Irish could justly be proud, historians must engage more fully with the history of `the people' as such and adopt a more populist - in the best sense - style in accordance with the `subaltern' movement now gaining ground among historians in countries such as India, undergoing the same process of post-colonial maturation as ourselves.
Finally Dr Bradshaw urged the need to address a particular challenge presented to Irish historians in virtue of the island's precise circumstances in consequence of its historical evolution. This was the necessity to address the consequences of the island's location as one of the two constituent islands of the Atlantic Archipelago.
Ireland's historical destiny had been worked out for good and ill in interaction with the larger island of Britain. This `British dimension' must therefore be fully appreciated both in its positive and in its negative aspects, a dimension that has featured as part of the island's historical experience from the coming of St Patrick, and indeed before, to the `unfinished business' of the peace process of the present time.
Brendan Bradshaw's seminal article, `Nationalism and historical scholarship in modern Ireland,' criticising neo-Unionist interpretations of modern Irish history in the journal Irish Historical Studies a decade ago, is generally regarded as marking the beginning of the reaction amongst Irish historians against the ideological excesses of the so-called `revisionist' school.
He told his audience that as the millennium approaches, revisionism, so long favoured by Irish professional historians, is being superceded. Younger historians are increasingly following the lead of those of their seniors who adopted a more affirmative practice, one more sympathetic to and in tune with national sentiment.
In the 21st Century, Dr Bradshaw predicted, revisionism would be seen as a feature of a particular phase of independent Ireland's post-colonial development through which the community had passed in the course of the previous century. Accordingly, he suggested, there was a need to evaluate the rationale that underlay the new practice now coming into vogue.
The key features of the new mode, he predicted, would be threefold. These would stem from historians' consciousness of a public role: their responsibility for enabling the Irish community to `own' its own past as the condition on which it could identify itself as a distinct national community in the present, and could liberate itself from the legacy of prejudices and anger with which the catastrophic dimension of Irish history had burdened it.
The first distinctive feature of the new history, therefore, he argued, must be its present-centredness, a capacity to address the needs of the Irish community in the present, in contrast to the past-centredness - `history for its own sake' - of the Revisionist school.
However, before the historians could convey the historical experience of previous generations of Irish people to the present community, he or she needed to be able to enter into it for themselves. Therefore the two other dominant features that must characterise the new practice were qualities of imagination and empathy, replacing the detachment and scepticism that marked the old.
In addition, Irish historians must attend to the gaps in historical research and writing which have come to the notice of the profession in consequence of developments on the international stage.
Women's history was one such, particularly apt in the Irish case because of the feminine theme that had been central to the culture of the Celts from earliest times. More pertinently, women had played a notable and largely unacknowledged part in the struggle for national liberation and in responding to the social needs of the community through the ages.
Second, without disparaging the contributions of the great historical figures of whom the Irish could justly be proud, historians must engage more fully with the history of `the people' as such and adopt a more populist - in the best sense - style in accordance with the `subaltern' movement now gaining ground among historians in countries such as India, undergoing the same process of post-colonial maturation as ourselves.
Finally Dr Bradshaw urged the need to address a particular challenge presented to Irish historians in virtue of the island's precise circumstances in consequence of its historical evolution. This was the necessity to address the consequences of the island's location as one of the two constituent islands of the Atlantic Archipelago.
Ireland's historical destiny had been worked out for good and ill in interaction with the larger island of Britain. This `British dimension' must therefore be fully appreciated both in its positive and in its negative aspects, a dimension that has featured as part of the island's historical experience from the coming of St Patrick, and indeed before, to the `unfinished business' of the peace process of the present time.
Brendan Bradshaw's seminal article, `Nationalism and historical scholarship in modern Ireland,' criticising neo-Unionist interpretations of modern Irish history in the journal Irish Historical Studies a decade ago, is generally regarded as marking the beginning of the reaction amongst Irish historians against the ideological excesses of the so-called `revisionist' school.