Hospitality in Medieval Ireland, 900–1500

Bibliographic Data

ID9800000
AuthorsH B Clarke (0000-0002-0341-9785, University College Dublin, corresponding author)
Year2005
Volume120
Issue489
Pages1358-1360
Publication date2005-12-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe English Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-8266 • E-ISSN: 1477-4534
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/ehr/cei396
OpenAlexW2081974051
LanguageEN
Citations received11

Hospitality in Medieval Ireland, 900–1500. By CATHERINE MARIE O'SULLIVAN (Dublin: Four Courts P., 2004; pp. 272. Eur 55). POLITICAL history has long dominated the writing of Irish history, as befits a nation whose political identity is relatively new (in the Republic) and still a bone of contention (in the ‘province’ of Northern Ireland). The majority of the chapters in A New History of Ireland—recently completed in nine very substantial volumes, having first been advocated publicly by one of its founding joint-editors, Theo Moody, back in 1962—tell the political story of Ireland. Much of that story, of course, relates to the deeds and the misdeeds of the English in Ireland. It is a story that is often misunderstood or misrepresented in Ireland and little known in England. In many ways it is a brutal story with uncountable casualties, most of them Irish. One of the casualties of Irish historiography has been other approaches to the writing of history—cultural, economic, local and social to list the most obvious. The last quarter of a century or so has witnessed serious attempts to remedy this defect and the work here under consideration is a notable example in the ‘yet much neglected field of Irish social and cultural history’ (p. 11). The author acknowledges the influence of the social anthropologist Marcel Mauss, whose ideas were first published in the early 1920s and ‘have largely served as the theoretical underpinning for this study’ (p. 13). A more recent source of inspiration is Felicity Heal's Hospitality in Early Modern England (1990), while O'Sullivan justly draws attention to the life-long and ground-breaking work of her mentor and research advisor at Trinity College Dublin, Katharine Simms. One of the many strengths of this book is the author's awareness of other cultures and of other historical periods. Its theoretical underpinning recognises from the start and throughout its course that, in the middle ages, ‘the practice of hospitality was an inescapable obligation that formed the nexus of people's most important relationships, making it both fundamental and indispensable to the functioning of medieval Irish society’ (p. 14). Yet this social practice is scarcely, if ever, mentioned in the standard political narratives, which, equally inescapably, offer only a superficial view

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