HIS42970

This module will examine the significance of gender in Irish society between 1500 and 1800, looking in particular at the ways that men and women understood the roles, responsibilities, identities and expectations that attended their gender. This was a period characterised by significant religious and political upheaval, and economic, social and cultural change. Students will interrogate ideals of masculinity and femininity within different ethnic (i.e. Gaelic Irish, Old English and New English) and socio-economic (i.e. aristocracy, gentry, middling sorts and ‘lower orders’) groups. They will also consider the ways that gender was constructed, interpreted, challenged and subverted, particularly within the context of the English conquest of Ireland. How were ideas of masculinity and femininity upheld and undermined in periods of rebellion and war? What were the expectations and experiences of men during episodes of war and rebellion? Did women’s roles and responsibilities change during periods of conflict? How were the gendered conventions of Gaelic Irish society understood by New English settlers in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century? How did English settler narratives employ gender as a tool to justify the colonisation of Ireland? And how did Irish men and women understand, engage with, and participate in British and European imperialism and colonialism? Students will also be asked to interrogate the parameters of the ‘private sphere’, focusing in particular on marriage, sex and sexuality and parenthood, to interrogate the roles of men and women within the family. What was expected of a husband and father, and a wife and mother? How did such roles evolve? How did they differ depending on socio-economic status? How did they change across the life cycle? How did men and women challenge accepted gender norms by living outside prescribed roles, including through gender non-conformity and/or same sex desire, sexual intimacy and relationships? And what were the consequences of such non-conformity?

Students will be introduced to a broad base of primary source material (e.g. legal documents, petitions, correspondence, diaries, pamphlets, woodcuts) and use different methodologies (e.g. palaeography, diplomatics, close reading and textual analysis), to explore and understand early modern Ireland as a gendered space. As well as engaging with the extant historiography on Ireland, students will consider scholarship on early modern Britain, Europe, colonial America and the Colonial Southern Hemisphere, to explore different approaches to writing gender history, including post-colonialism, post-structuralism and queer theory.