| Popis: |
‘Each person in Ulster’, Seamus Heaney famously remarked, ‘lives first in the Ulster of the actual present and then in one or other Ulster of the mind.’ While explicit reference to the Middle Ages may seem conspicuous by its absence in the litany of formative dates which pepper contemporary political and popular narrative in the North of Ireland – whether 1690 (the Battle of the Boyne), 1798 (the Rebellion of the United Irishmen), 1801 (the Act of Union), 1912 (the signing of the Ulster Covenant), 1916 (the Easter Rising) or 1998 (the signing of the Good Friday Agreement) – this essay argues, through examination of three case studies – of Cú Chulainn, the Hound of Ulster; the Red Hand; and St Patrick – that medievalism is at the very centre, both chronologically and conceptually, of the historicising reflexes of Irish politics. |
