British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707

by Edited by Brendan Bradshaw , Peter Roberts

• ISBN13: 9780521433839
• ISBN10: 0521433835
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-05-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The historical resonances of the concept of 'Britain' for the communities of the Atlantic Archipelago in the early modern period are explored here in terms of the ideological demands made upon it. Various and competing concepts of Britishness are examined, from the Henrician legislation which united Wales with England and which created the kingdom of Ireland, to the Act of Union of the realms of England and Scotland. The chequered history of the consciousness of Britain as a polity which embraced the united kingdoms is discussed in relation to the distinctive national identities of the constituent countries, and the question of the impact of 'Britain' on English policy-making under the Tudor, Stuart and the first Hanoverian monarchs is addressed. The puzzling resistance of the Irish to assimilation in contrast to the docility of the Welsh and - eventually - of the Scots is also explored.

Table of Contents

Notes on the contributors	ix	(2)
Preface	xi
Introduction	1	(7)
BRENDAN BRADSHAW
PETER ROBERTS
1 Tudor Wales, national identity and the British inheritance	8	(35)
PETER ROBERTS
2 The English Reformation and identity formation in Ireland and Wales	43	(69)
BRENDAN BRADSHAW
3 Faith, culture and sovereignty: Irish nationality and its development, 1558-1625	112	(28)
MARC CABALL
4 From English to British literature: John Lyly's Euphues and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen	140	(19)
ANDREW HADFIELD
5 The British problem in three tracts on Ireland by Spenser, Bacon and Milton	159	(26)
WILLY MALEY
6 James Ussher and the creation of an Irish protestant identity	185	(28)
ALAN FORD
7 Seventeenth-century Wales: definition and identity	213	(23)
PHILIP JENKINS
8 Scottish identity in the seventeenth century	236	(23)
KEITH M. BROWN
9 The Gaidhealtachd and the emergence of the Scottish Highlands	259	(42)
JANE DAWSON
10 `No remedy more proper': Anglo-Irish unionism before 1707	301	(20)
JIM SMYTH
11 Protestantism, constitutionalism and British identity under the later Stuarts	321	(22)
COLIN KIDD
Index	343