The Tudor discovery of Ireland

Christopher Maginn & Steven G. Ellis

‘This work serves a very useful purpose not only in making available important sources of information on early Tudor Ireland in a scholarly milieu but also in contextualising them within the discourse of contemporary reform literature … the authors raise important issues to do with the aims and objectives of English policy in Ireland at this crucial time in its evolution. Captured here is the early phase of Tudor thinking on Ireland’, Colm Lennon, Studia Hibernica (2016).

'An extremely important book ... Maginn and Ellis have done a great job of presenting the text of an invaluable compendium from a critical time in Tudor policy formation in Ireland. The importance of this book lies primarily in its consideration of how Tudor policy was formulated ... [The book] shows that historians of Tudor Ireland have a great deal to discover yet!', Henry A. Jefferies, Irish Economic and Social History (2017).

‘In this book, Christopher Maginn and Steven Ellis set out to explore the process by which the English state gathered knowledge about Ireland as well as how that knowledge was then applied (or not) to the realities of life there from the late fifteenth century … Maginn and Ellis have produced an extremely important volume for early modern Irish scholars … the chapters tracing the outline of the “discovery” of Ireland will undoubtedly prove very influential in subsequent thinking about Tudor approaches to Ireland … Maginn and Ellis’ account of the evolution of surrender and regrant in the context of this knowledge-gathering is highly stimulating, and the interweaving of areas of research including record-keeping, the process of knowledge acquisition and its frequent almost-accidental nature, together with the already-established questions concerning Tudor policy in Ireland, will only serve to enrich early modern Irish scholarship’, Joan Redmond, Liverpool Postgraduate Journal of Irish Studies (2017).

‘An impressively well-written work of exceptional scholarship that is enhanced with the inclusion of illustrations, an eight-page bibliography, and a nine-page academic library of Irish History, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies and Irish Archaeology reference collections and supplemental studies lists’, Jack Mason, Midwest Book Review (January 2016).

‘Those wishing to understand the genesis of the tortured Anglo-Irish relationship will find many rewards in this beautifully produced book’, Thomas M. Truxes, The Historian (2017).