Final year seminar topics: descriptions

2007/08

Semester 1

The Reign of Henry VIII, 1509-1547
Steven Ellis

Henry VIII (1509-47) is the first English monarch for whom we have sufficient evidence to assess his quite complex personality.  This seminar will focus on his ambitions and achievements in the territories he ruled or claimed (England, Ireland, Wales, France and Scotland), analysing his foreign policy, relations with the church including the Henrician Reformation, his reorganization of crown government in the 1530s, the succession problem, faction at court, and socio-economic changes during this period.  King Henry was seen by contemporaries as a great king; his marrying in turn six wives, his judicial murders of many nobles and ministers, and his appointment of himself as pope and arbiter of the faith in his own kingdom certainly attracted a good deal of attention; but they also prompt the question of how he avoided being deposed like previous English kings for failing to govern acceptably.

Introductory Reading: John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford, 1988); J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (2nd ed, Yale, 1997); Diarmaid Mac Culloch (ed), The reign of Henry VIII (Basingstoke, 1995)

The First Crusade
Kimberly LoPrete

Without two military victories won against seemingly impossible odds, the c. 90,000 armed and unarmed Latin-Christian pilgrims who set out from western Europe for the Holy Land in 1096 might merit a minor footnote in history books.  Yet because those near-miraculous victories led to the remaining c. 15,000 capturing Jerusalem in 1099, the movement that came to be known as crusading was born.  This seminar examines the so-called ’first crusade’ in its eleventh-and early twelfth-century context.  

Students will first attempt to understand the participants’ motivations, aspirations and experiences as construed in the 1090s.  Tracing the short-term effects on western Europeans (to c. 1148) of the crusaders’ establishment of a ’Latin Kingdom’ in Syria-Palestine follows.  A two-pronged approach is used: 

• Discussion of causative factors, such as population growth, the peace movement, penitential pilgrimage, and papal reform within Europe, and realignments among competing Muslim polities and the Orthodox-Christian population of the Byzantine empire in the ’middle east’ after Sunni-Muslim Seljuk Turks ’purified’ Baghdad in 1059 C.E.
• Close analysis of contemporary documents and narrative accounts of events (in translation), including several written by crusaders and some by Muslim commentators.  

Introductory Reading: J. Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (London & Philadelphia, 1986); or J. Riley-Smith, What were the Crusades?, 2nd ed. (1992).  More detailed overviews are in J. Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, 1095-1131 (Cambridge, 1997), and in the relevant chapters of P.M. Holt, The Age of the Crusades: The Near East from the Eleventh Century to 1517 (London & New York, 1986).

THE END OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE , 1945-64
Simon Potter

This course will examine British official policy during the retreat from colonial rule in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.  In the two decades that followed the Second World War and the handover of power in India, the British Empire was largely wound up, under the pressures of financial constraint, Cold War diplomacy and Asian and African nationalism.  The course will explore how successive governments between 1945-64 dealt with these pressures, and look at the development of British policy in a range of diverse regional settings, from the retreat in Sri Lanka to the handover of power in Nigeria.

Students will be expected to approach the subject through primary source material, supplemented by further secondary reading.  Seminars will provide a forum for the discussion of these sources, and give basic guidance on how to approach the sources.  Students will be expected, however, to conduct much of their study for the course on an independent basis, through their own reading.  

Introductory Reading: B. Porter, 'Ronald Hyam , Britain's Declining Empire (Cambridge, 2006); L.J. Butler , Britain and Empire (London, 20 02).'

VICHY FRANCE
Dr. Gearóid Barry

The varying responses of the French to their country’s defeat and occupation by the Germans in 1940 form the mainstay of this seminar course. Of course, what Marc Bloch called the ’strange defeat’ of 1940 has to be understood in the context of the deep divisions of the 1930s in France. The ramifications of the Spanish Civil War and the Popular Front government of 1936-37 form an important background to this course. However, once defeated France is divided into an occupied zone and a notionally independent zone under Marshal Pétain at Vichy, a whole new range of questions emerges.

· Were Vichy politicians attempting, as Pétain asserted, to ’avoid the worst’ by blunting the effects of German hegemony?
· To what extent was the regime enthusiastically collaborationist on the ’Jewish question’?
· What was the ideology of Pétain’s Révolution Nationale?
· How did it relate to the specifically French fascism of the 1930s?

As well as examining specific policies of the regime (such as the corporatist Labour Charter of 1941), we shall also explore the concerted efforts of the new regime to mould a counter-revolutionary intelligentsia, in particular at the Ecole nationale des cadres at Uriage. The varying degrees of support given to the Marshal by the Catholic hierarchy, particularly with regard to education, also demand attention. The fate of those regarded as alien by the regime (Jews, Masons) deserves particular regard, as do the widely contrasting motivations of those who engaged in resistance, whether socialist, communist or Gaullist. 

The identification of collaborators and resisters is not always easy in this period, giving rise to rich historiographical debates. Robert Paxton’s classic Vichy France (1972) shattered some of the mythology of French self-liberation from Nazi occupation and caused great controversy. In light of recent scholarship, the course aims to challenge some of the over-simplifications of the collaboration-resistance nexus in order to reveal the complexities and contradictions of the era, personified by figures like the philosopher Emmanuel Mounier. 

Later seminars in the series will also consider the afterlife of this ’guerre franco-française.’ With the liberation in 1944 came the épuration or vengeance on collaborators, from Pétain to petty officials. The Gaullist and resistance mythologies emerged, offering the French a narrative of redemption from the shame of collaboration. French film – notably François Truffaut’s Le Dernier Métro – perpetuated the memory of these ’dark years.’ Finally, the publication of Pierre Péan’s Une jeunesse française in the 1990s about François Mitterand’s contested Vichy experience lengthened further the shadow cast by the experience of defeat and occupation. 
Documents under scrutiny shall include Marshal Pétain’s speeches, clandestine publications and oral testimony gathered from veterans of the resistance.

LOCAL HISTORY SOURCES AND METHODS
Ciarán Ó Murchadha

This seminar deals with the practice of local history in Ireland, the concerns and interests of local historians and their approach to research and writing. It introduces students to the secondary and primary sources used by local historians, and the various libraries and repositories, both in Ireland and abroad, where these sources may be consulted. Students are given the opportunity to examine and analyse relevant documents for themselves. 
An important objective of the seminar is to acquaint students with the work of Irish local historians working in different regions of the country, through a number of recently published studies. These case studies range widely over geographical location, thematic approach, and time span from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and deal on the local level with such themes as the social structure of rural Ireland in the eighteenth century, the 1798 rebellion, the Great Famine and the Land War. Each case study is accompanied by selected documents, perusal of which is an integral part of the course.

Introductory reading: Raymond Gillespie and Myrtle Hill, Doing Irish Local 
History, Pursuit and Practice (Belfast 1998); William Nolan and Annagret Simms
(eds.), Irish Towns, A Guide to Sources (Dublin, 1998); Jonathan Bardon, A Guide to Local History Sources in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (Belfast, 2000); Toby Barnard, The Abduction of a Limerick Heiress: Social and Political Relations in Mid-Eighteenth Century Ireland (Dublin, 1998); Liam Chambers, Rebellion in Kildare, 1790-1803(Dublin,1998).

Semester 2

Iona, Columba & Kells: The History & Literature of an Early Irish Monastery

Daibhi O Croinin

The island monastery of Iona (founded by St. Colm Cille in ad 563  off the western coast of Scotland) was of central importance in the history of early Christianity in Ireland, Scotland, and the north of England. This was acknowledged in 1997 by centenary celebrations in all three countries marking the death of Columba in ad 587.  In the last few years a steady stream of publications has appeared, which allows the study (in unique detail) of the monastewry's early history from its foundation down to the period c.800, when it produced the high-point of Irish manuscript and artistic culture, the Book of Kells.  However, Kells was only the pinnacle of Iona achievement; the monastery and its community produced a wide variety of compositions, in prose and in verse, in Latin and in Old Irish, that together form a unique monument to irish culture in the early Middle Ages.

State & People in Ireland 1820-1845

Niall O Ciosain

The quarter century after 1820 saw the establishment of some of the most fundamental state interventions in the lives of ordinary people in ireland.  They included a primary education system, a national police force, a network of local courts and a system of poor relief.  These projects were underpinned by a simultaneous development, the centralisation of knowledge and information about Irish society.  The first full population census was taken in 1821, the country was mapped by the Ordnance Survey in the 1820s and 1830s, and a series of state reports examined a comprehensive range of issues concerning economic, social and religious life.

This course examines this question by taking the more important state reports of this period as a starting point.  For seminar discussion and for the written project, students will read the reports and analyse them both as official discourse about Ireland and as blueprints for policy initiatives. 

Civil War and Society in France, 1572-1598

Alison Forrestal

This module analyses the ferocious violence of the civil wars (the Wars of Religion) which convulsed France during the final four decades of the sixteenth century.  It explores the new ideologies of sectarian hatred and opposition which shattered local communities and destabilized society, while also assessing the faction politics of the royal court and the nobility.  It then examines the new political doctrines of resistance and toleration promoted by the warring Catholic and Protestant parties, with special emphasis on the views of major political writers such as Jean Bodin and Michel de Montaigne, both of whom profoundly shaped the political, social and religious orders in France and the development of western political thought.  The module then systematically tracks the ways in which, following a decree of toleration (the Edict of Nantes) in 1598, the monarchy and society sought to recover from the dislocation of the crisis of the Wars.

ORAL HISTORY & PERSONAL TESTIMONY
Dr. Caitríona Clear

THE HOME RULE QUESTION IN BRITISH POLITICS, C. 1870-1914
Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh

During the period of the Union (1801-1922), the ’Irish Question’ was regularly – if not continuously – a difficult and disruptive issue in British politics, at Westminster and among the political classes in general. Between 1870 and 1914 the Home Rule demand – i.e. the demand of Irish nationalists for some form of devolved self-government for Ireland – proved hugely disruptive in British politics, leading to a major split in the Liberal party and a significant realignment in British party politics, at an elite level and also at the level of popular political allegiances.
This Seminar will investigate the reasons why, and the ways in which Irish Home Rule had such a profoundly disruptive impact on British politics. The Seminar will address the complex themes – Empire, property and law and order, leadership and political mobilisation, high politics and low prejudice – which provided the framework of political conviction and sentiment within which the Home Rule issue came to be discussed and determined.
The examination of primary documents will form the basis of the Seminar, and a documents pack will be available to students at the commencement of the Seminar. The Seminar will be informed throughout by the consideration of historiographical issues present in the secondary literature. Students will be required to make presentations at the Seminar and to participate actively in discussions in class.

Introductory Reading: Jonathan Parry, The Rise & Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1993); Alan O’Day, Irish Home Rule 1867-1921 (Manchester, 1998)

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