Survivor Testimonies of the Irish Rebellion of 1641

This book explores how different kinds of traumatic wartime experiences were remembered and recorded by survivors of the Irish rebellion of 1641. A literary-critical methodology is used to re-examine the 1641 Depositions, a collection of approximately 8,000 testimonies of mostly Protestant settler-colonists of English and Scottish descent who recorded their experiences of the Irish rebellion in the 1640s and 1650s.

Through a series of thematic chapters, the book establishes: first, that there were distinctive ways in which the different experiences of exposure, hunger, sexual violence, burning, and drowning were remembered by deponents; and second, that these memories were shaped by the material, social, cultural, religious, and political conditions of colonial Ireland and the victims’ lived experiences of gender, age, socio-economic status, ethnicity, and religion. The book makes the case that attending to these different kinds of traumatic expression gives us a more nuanced understanding of the workings of traumatic memory and recall in the early modern period as well as a richer understanding of survivors’ lived experience of colonial conflict.

Survivor Testimonies of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 is the perfect resource for scholars and students of early modern history, literature, memory studies, trauma studies and Irish history.