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Remembering
the Year of the French
Irish Folk History and
Social Memory
Guy Beiner
History of Ireland and the
Irish Diaspora
James S. Donnelly, Jr. and Thomas Archdeacon, Series Editors
Remembering the Year of the French has won the Ratcliff Prize 2007 for "an important
contribution by an individual to the study of Folklore or Folk
Life in Great Britain and Ireland"
Remembering the Year of the French is a model of historical achievement, moving deftly
between the study of historical events–the failed French
invasion of the West of Ireland in 1798–and folkloric representations
of those events. Delving into the folk history found in Ireland's
rich oral traditions, Guy Beiner reveals alternate visions of
the Irish past and brings into focus the vernacular histories,
folk commemorative practices, and negotiations of memory that
have gone largely unnoticed by historians.
Beiner analyzes hundreds of hitherto unstudied historical, literary,
and ethnographic sources. Though his focus is on 1798, his work
is also a comprehensive study of Irish folk history and grass-roots
social memory in Ireland. Investigating how communities in the
West of Ireland remembered, well into the mid-twentieth century,
an episode in the late eighteenth century, this is a "history
from below" that gives serious attention to the perspectives
of those who have been previously ignored or discounted. Beiner
brilliantly captures the stories, ceremonies, and other popular
traditions through which local communities narrated, remembered,
and commemorated the past. Demonstrating the unique value of
folklore as a historical source, Remembering the Year of the
French offers a fresh perspective on collective memory and
modern Irish history.
"A brilliant and original contribution not only to Irish
history, reconstructing the view from below, but also to the
study of social memory."–Peter Burke, Emmanuel College,
University of Cambridge
"A painstaking and pathbreaking study. . . . Through the
lens of 1798 in the West of Ireland, it focuses on the dynamic
interface between vernacular and official versions of history."–Kevin
Whelan, Keough–Notre Dame Center, Dublin
Guy Beiner is
lecturer in history at Ben-Gurion University in Israel. He has
been a research fellow at Trinity College Dublin and an NEH Keough
Irish Studies Fellow at Notre Dame University, and he is the
author of many articles on modern Irish history and memory.
For more information contact our publicity
manager, phone: (608) 263-0734, email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu
Of related interest
The Bible War in Ireland: The "Second
Reformation" and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic
Relations, 1800–1840
Irene Whelan
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December 2006
LC: 2006008619
DA
576 pp. 6 x 9
36 b/w illus.
9 tables and charts, 2 maps
ISBN: 0-299-21820-1 Cloth $49.95 s
(ISBN-13: 978-0-299-21820-1)
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