Lola Stakenburg

Project title:  

Violence, Masculinity, and Victimhood in 17th-century Ireland: the 1641 Depositions

Project Summary:  

In 1641, a major rebellion swept through Ireland when Old English and Irish Gaelic Catholics rose up against English and Scottish Protestant settlers. Both during and in the immediate aftermath of the ‘Irish Rebellion’, the British government in both Dublin and London attempted to understand what had happened across the island. To this end, groups of Protestant clergymen collected roughly 8,000 depositions, which were later brought together into one archive known as ‘the 1641 Depositions’. While highly controversial for its one-sided, and sometimes exaggerated, Protestant perspective, this collection is our most extensive source for the uprising. Widely reproduced in printed commentaries that circulated during and after the Rebellion, the Depositions both reflected and created cultural discourses that would influence communal identities in Ireland for centuries to come.

Especially since the archive was made available online in 2010, gender historians have fruitfully analysed the 959 depositions by women in the collection. Building on this work, this project studies men’s depositions, roughly 7,000 in number, through a gendered lens. Such an approach is long overdue not merely because a sole focus on women yields only a partial understanding of gender, but because historians have argued that masculinity was central to Britain’s colonial project in Ireland and the ethno-religious violence that followed in its wake. In studying these depositions through a gendered lens, I attend to the process of their production, about which much remains unknown. Using the archive’s digital tools, I study the Depositions in chronological order rather than according to their eighteenth-century, county-by-county reorganisation, allowing me to trace their creation ‘in real time’.