The Devil from over the Sea: Remembering and Forgetting Oliver Cromwell in Ireland

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Sarah Covington

The Devil from over the Sea

Remembering and Forgetting Oliver Cromwell in Ireland

Sarah Covington

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English

Oxford University Press
16 June 2022

History; British & Irish history; Early modern history: c 1450 to c 1700; Social & cultural history; Colonialism & imperialism

In Ireland, few figures have generated more hatred than Oliver Cromwell, whose seventeenth-century conquest, massacres, and dispossessions would endure in the social memory for ages to come. The Devil from over the Sea explores the many ways in which Cromwell was remembered and sometimes conveniently 'forgotten' in historical, religious, political, and literary texts, according to the interests of different communities across time. Cromwell's powerful afterlife in Ireland, however, cannot be understood without also investigating his presence in folklore and the landscape, in ruins and curses. Nor can he be separated from the idea of the 'Cromwellian': a term which came to elicit an entire chain of contemptuous associations that would begin after his invasion and assume a wholly new force in the nineteenth century. What emerges from all these memorializing traces is a multitudinous Cromwell who could be represented as brutal, comic, sympathetic, or satanic. He could be discarded also, tellingly, from the accounts of the past, and especially by those which viewed him as an embarrassment or worse.

In addition to exploring the many reasons why Cromwell was so vehemently remembered or forgotten in Ireland, Sarah Covington finally uncovers the larger truths conveyed by sometimes fanciful or invented accounts. Contrary to being damaging examples of myth-making, the memorializations contained in martyrologies, folk tales, or newspaper polemics were often productive in cohering communities, or in displaying agency in the form of 'counter-memories' that claimed Cromwell for their own and reshaped Irish history in the process.

By: Sarah Covington
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 241mm, Width: 162mm, Spine: 26mm
Weight: 766g
ISBN: 9780198848318
ISBN 10: 0198848315
Pages: 432
Publication Date: 16 June 2022
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Introduction 1: Aftermath 2: Religious Cromwell 3: Political Cromwell 4: Propertied Cromwell 5: Ruinous Cromwell 6: Folkloric Cromwell 7: Migrated Cromwell Conclusion

Sarah Covington is Professor of History at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City of New York, and the Director of Irish Studies at Queens College. She is the author of The Trail of Martyrdom: Persecution and Resistance in Sixteenth Century England (2003) and Wounds, Flesh and Metaphor in Seventeenth-Century England (2009).