The Devil from over the Sea: Remembering and Forgetting Oliver Cromwell in Ireland

Oliver Cromwell's conquest, massacres, and dispossessions in Ireland have generated hatred and been remembered and forgotten in historical, religious, political, and literary texts. His powerful afterlife in Ireland cannot be understood without investigating his presence in folklore and the landscape, in ruins and curses. Sarah Covington uncovers the larger truths conveyed by sometimes fanciful or invented accounts, which were often productive in cohering communities or displaying agency in the form of counter-memories that claimed Cromwell for their own and reshaped Irish history.

Format: Hardback
Length: 432 pages
Publication date: 24 March 2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press

Few figures in Irish history have generated as much hatred as Oliver Cromwell, whose seventeenth-century conquest, massacres, and dispossessions would endure in the social memory for ages to come. The Devil from Over the Sea delves into the diverse ways in which Cromwell was remembered and, at times, conveniently forgotten in historical, religious, political, and literary texts, according to the interests of different communities across time. Cromwell's powerful afterlife in Ireland, however, cannot be understood without also investigating his presence in folklore and the landscape, in ruins and curses. Nor can he be separated from the concept of the Cromwellian, a term that came to evoke an entire chain of contemptuous associations that would begin after his invasion and assume a wholly new force in the nineteenth century.

What emerges from all these memorializing traces is a multifaceted Cromwell who could be represented as brutal, comic, sympathetic, or satanic. He could also be discarded, tellingly, from accounts of the past, particularly those that viewed him as an embarrassment or worse. In addition to exploring the many reasons why Cromwell was so vehemently remembered or forgotten in Ireland, Sarah Covington ultimately uncovers the larger truths conveyed by sometimes fanciful or invented accounts. Contrary to being damaging examples of myth-making, the memorializations contained in martyrologies, folk tales, or newspaper polemics were often productive in cohering communities or in displaying agency in the form of counter-memories that claimed Cromwell for their own and reshaped Irish history in the process.

Weight: 762g
Dimension: 375 x 477 x 33 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780198848318