TIPPERARY HISTORICAL JOURNAL 1994 © County Tipperary Historical Society www.tipperarylibraries.ie/ths
[email protected] ISSN 0791-0655 Book Reviews Land, Politics and Society in Eighteenth-Century Tipperary. By Thomas P. Power. (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993).376 pp. IRf44. The traditional and still widespread view of the eighteenth century, from a Roman Catholic perspective, is one of persecution and suppression. With the increased assertiveness of the catholic nation after 1829, it became useful to emphasise the darkness of the eighteenth century and by contrast to highlight the distance an increasingly triumphant nationalism had come since those dark days. This view of the eighteenth century was in large measure created and propagated by concentrating on the savage letter of penal legislation, and not on the altogether more casual and at times haphazard spirit in which that legislation was enforced. This point of view can be seen in the work of such an important Tipperary historian as Canon William P. Burke. The book under review by the Waterford-born Thomas Power, and based on his 1987 Trinity College Ph.D. thesis, challenges popular assumptions about the eighteenth century, and for exposing one Irish county to academic scrutiny anyone interested in Ireland's past has reason to be grateful to him. It is a comment on the underdeveloped state of local or regional history in Ireland that it is still found necessary to justify such a study, even though the time is long past when comfortable national generalisations on certain topics adequately illuminate the past. By taking this county as his area for study, Dr Power has not only opened out a hitherto murky period but has also cast a new light on the better known nineteenth century.