Music haunts Seamus Heaney’s poetry and criticism. The word music and its siblings – song, chorus, rhythm, note, etc. – appear throughout his work. Again and again, Heaney urges us to pay attention to words, to feel how they sound, to believe what we hear. The textbook distinction between sound and sense does little to elucidate Heaney’s poetry, where so often the sense is the sound, and vice versa: Gweebara, omphalos, rasp, nick, squelch. What gives music such force in Heaney’s work is its ability to coordinate a range of concerns. It troubles the primarily discursive function of language; it posits the body as an instrument of knowing; and it summons the powerful figure of Irish folk tradition. In short, music allows Heaney to reckon both with what it means to be a lyric poet, and what it means to be an Irish poet.

This chapter describes and explains the emergence of majoritarian decision-making in twenty-seven lower colonial assemblies in Ireland, mainland North America, and the Caribbean between 1619 and 1776. It documents the peculiar conditions under which majoritarian politics developed in the colonies while also registering the importance of attempts to imitate parliamentary practices. Colonial lower assemblies were created under conditions fundamentally different from those that prevailed in the Westminster House of Commons. Some were part of corporations and proprietorships, not royal colonies; and some initially admitted all freemen, not simply elected representatives. These factors led to distinctive institutional trajectories. In general and over the long run, these factors appear to have reinforced a tendency for the colonial lower assemblies to be or become majoritarian. By scrutinizing the available evidence, one is left with the overwhelming impression of a total embrace of majoritarian politics before the American Revolution and, in most cases, long before that time. As the colonial lower assemblies of North America became provincial congresses and then state lower assemblies, they predictably continued their majoritarian practices. This pattern continued in the first intercolonial assemblies and in the US House of Representatives.

The TPNW was welcomed at the UN General Assembly, under the participation of a wide range of humanitarian groups and civil society organizations, supported by a groundswell of nations around the world. The Treaty firmly implants new law into the international legal landscape for states who wish to ratify it, sowing the seeds of potentially new normative behavior within the global community more generally. Indeed, the TPNW purports to strive for universality, raising significant questions regarding its ambitions in achieving legal unity within the wider international legal order. The dedication to the spirit of the Treaty cannot be ignored, nor can the optimism to ban nuclear weapons.

A classic essay on the use of ethnic nationalism and nativism in the decades between Parnell’s death and the Good Friday agreement, this reflection on the Irish use of concepts such as race, nation, and territory in Irish literature and cultural memory (evinced by Thomas Davis, Matthew Arnold, Yeats, and Pearse) remains topical. The sense of an Irish cultural ancestry remains an artistic and intellectual challenge, as it was for Yeats, and as such one can commit to it.

The Vision of Tnugdal (1149) was written in Latin in Regensburg. It provides a case study for the genre of otherworld visions. The author, an Irish monk, shows the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux, in his treatment of divine mercy and justice as expounded by a guide who accompanies the visionary and explains the nature of the otherworld. Hell is segmented into eight locations for different punishments. The less grievous sinners, still redeemable, are at the top, with those eternally damned already in the pit of hell. Outside a segmented heaven two intermediate locations are designated for those neither particularly good nor particularly bad. This lengthy and popular work demonstrates considerable learning and a unique creativity with its vivid descriptions of punishments and demons and its spatial, intellectual, and spiritual vision of heaven. The vision expounds a theology of fear while extoling the redemptive power of both internal and external pilgrimage.

This chapter assesses the evidence from the medieval Celtic-speaking world for visions of heaven, hell, and the intermediary state. It begins with a critique of twentieth-century scholarship, which tended to focus its attention on the most fantastical vision texts at the expense of explicating a more representative sample of primary sources. The disparity is noted in the survival rate of texts from medieval Ireland as opposed to medieval Wales, and it is argued that medieval Welsh conceptions of the afterlife need to be pieced together from fragmentary references in religious poetry and other sources. By contrast, many extended descriptions of the afterlife survive from medieval Ireland – both freestanding vision texts and vision narratives embedded in sources of other genres. These are assessed in the context of an argument that more close readings of visions are needed before medieval Irish and Welsh geographies of the afterlife can be fully understood.

The fourth chapter argues that Dean Mahomet’s English memoir, The Travels (1793), and Abu Taleb Khan’s Persian travelogue, Masir-i Talibi-fi-Bilad-i-Afranji [“Travels of Talib in the Lands of the Franks”], are bookend ruminations on Ireland before and after the 1798 revolt. Their ambivalent feelings about war are implicated in the dense web of social relations that link India to Ireland. I first examine Mahomet’s account of the 1781 British capture of the Rajah of Benares Chayt Singh, as mediated by newspaper reports about Irish MP Edmund Burke’s condemnation of unmanly colonial abuses in India during the Hastings impeachment trial (1788–1796). Then I discuss Abu Taleb’s reaction to the 1799 British defeat of the sultan of Mysore Tipu Sultan, as celebrated in the Dublin circus production of Philip Astley’s The Siege and Storming of Seringapatam. These writers’ patriotic responses to the theatrics of power imply a kinship with Irish hosts who, in their minds, belong to an Indo-Celtic Eurasia.

This chapter highlights the potential of domestic constitutional law to curtail the legal 'othering' of non-citizens at the national level, using Ireland as a case study. The chapter begins by looking at Irish national identity as enshrined in the text of the 1937 Constitution. It finds that, despite the strong Catholic and nationalist influences on the constitutional text, it should be flexible enough to accommodate new perceptions of Irishness in what is now an immigrant-receiving society. The second part of the chapter explores domestic constitutional case-law on the rights of non-citizens, focusing on a recent Supreme Court decision which clarifies that constitutional rights must extend to non-citizens where to find otherwise would contravene constitutional principles of dignity and equality. It is argued that this reasoning effectively collapses the distinction between citizen and non-citizen as rights-bearers in the constitutional order.

With a focus on Edmund Spenser, this chapter explores representations of ruined monasteries within (New) English protestant writing of c.1590-1642. Monastic ruins are visible mnemonics of British-Irish reformation, and Protestants express surprisingly broad motivations for their remembrance, from sorrow for, to celebration of, monastic dissolution – a breadth of opinion reflecting the breadth of beliefs and practices within the Elizabethan/early Stuart church. Recognition of this confessional latitude is leading to reappraisal of Spenser’s own ‘puritan’ credentials, and to realisation that Spenser was as anti-Presbyterian as he was anti-Catholic. The chapter is the first to translate Spenser’s Presbyterian anxieties to a Scottish context, arguing that Spenser’s famously fractious relationship with James VI was prompted as much by Spenser’s anxieties over James’s seeming support for Scottish Presbyterians as by Spenser’s attack on James’s Catholic mother. The chapter shows how, in Faerie Queene VI, Spenser evokes memories of monastic ruins to warn his generation against the prospect of further, Presbyterian-led ruination in England and Ireland under a future Scottish king. This perspective on monastic ruins – as memories of past, and monitories against future, reformation – serves as a salutary reminder that ‘reformation’ was a protracted and by no means universally popular process for Spenser’s generation.

During the last half of the war each of the European powers experienced a serious crisis on its home front. Britain resorted to conscription and suppressed a rebellion in Ireland. In both France and Italy, morale wavered when the army suffered mutiny and defeat. In Germany, the militarization of the home front under the Hindenburg Program coincided with the struggle to feed the civilian population during the “turnip winter.” Meanwhile, the death of Francis Joseph accelerated revolutionary thinking among the nationalities of Austria-Hungary. Amid growing sentiment for peace on the European home fronts, the international socialist movement held a peace conference at Stockholm which attracted more participants than the earlier effort at Zimmerwald but was just as fruitless. In the last half of the war strong civilian leaders emerged to rally the home front in each of the leading European Allies – Lloyd George in Britain, Clemenceau in France, and Orlando in Italy – while in the United States, Wilson’s ideals lent a veneer of unity to a degree of domestic upheaval not seen since the American Civil War. Women’s contributions to the war effort bolstered the cause of women’s suffrage, with Britain granting it in March 1918, to take effect in the first postwar elections.