Frontiers, States and Identity in Early Modern Ireland and Beyond

Despite determined efforts, the Festschrift as an art form is not yet dead, as this volume demonstrates. However, it is not always an easy art to display. Steven Ellis’s career is one whose essence is difficult to capture in one volume of essays. While primarily a historian of Ireland in the sixteenth century, he has tried to set that Irish experience in a wider context. In the main, this has been a ‘British’ context, but his approach has not simply been to discuss developments within a generalised three kingdoms setting but rather to compare particular types of social formations in Ireland with apparently similar social worlds in England. Thus Tudor borderlands, whether on the edge of the Pale in Ireland or the borders of Scotland, have become Ellis’s stamping ground. More recently he has also extended his interest to other borderlands across sixteenth-century Europe in the quest for meaningful comparisons. For editors of a Festschrift the breadth of this research presents the challenge of having to reflect a wide range of interests in a short space, and in this task Christopher Maginn and Gerald Power have succeeded admirably

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