Periods are made up. I don’t mean that the Middle Ages didn’t happen, but that the ways we categorize historical time are artificial. Periods like the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the early modern – all of these are defined after the fact in ways that attend to specific places and phenomena while neglecting others. The Renaissance, for instance, is a periodization that makes a lot of sense in Italy, but not so much in, say, Norway. That’s because, like all periodizations, the Renaissance isn’t just a start and end date. It’s a narrative that is rooted in place and in a particular relationship between past, present, and future. One of the effects of periodization is to construct centers that draw disproportionate historical attention while relegating other regions to the periphery.
As a result, our use of periodizations like medieval and early modern is loose. Periods are a convenient shorthand for broad historical moments, but we recognize that they don’t always map neatly onto the moments of rupture and discontinuity that have had the biggest impact on Ireland. Premodern is a handy umbrella term.
That said, is there anything that constitutes a rupture between premodernity and modernity in Ireland? Ireland was undeniably transformed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the period we often conceive of as the “early modern.” It experienced changing social, political, and economic systems, especially following the 1641 rebellion and Cromwell; changes to religious praxis in the face of the Tudor reformation, the dissolution of the monasteries, and eventually the penal laws; and changes to landscape with mew industries and new models of landholding, particularly during and following plantation. These changes escalated rapidly over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
But between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries, many of the characteristics historians associate with modernity change more in scale than in nature. While Ireland’s presence on the global stage grew substantially and consistently from the sixteenth century onwards, medieval Ireland also had commercial, religious, and political ties to the Continent and beyond that were not contingent on England – and often were means of triangulating against England. The late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also saw Ireland take on a more active role within the British Empire – as colonial administrators and soldiers enforcing empire; as planters, enslavers, and investors monetizing empire; and as displaced and disenfranchised subjects of empire. But these dynamics weren’t entirely new either. Centuries of Irish and Anglo-Irish people had simultaneously participated in and resisted English conquest and colonization in Ireland.
Periodization inherently focuses on rupture and on breakages. But the continuities, the points of resistance to change - these are just as interesting! “Premodern” allows us to think across some of those chronological boundaries, while also acknowledging the genuine transformations occurring across the period we usually think of as the early modern.
