Curators respond to views that history exhibition in Washington is offensive to the Irish

A strong defense of scholarship used in “Nobility and Newcomers in Renaissance Ireland”

By

NIALL O'DOWD,

IrishCentral Founder

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Illustration from the exhibition "Nobility and Newcomers in Renaissance Ireland" at the Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington

Photo by Folger.edu

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“The exhibit did not cover the period of the penal laws nor the Famine, and it is a disservice to fault us for ignoring later events. Rather, the exhibit covered a period when there was much opportunity for Irish and English actors on the scene, amid all the turmoil, and it was our desire to bring some of those stories to a wider audience, and thus to enrich our understanding of Ireland in the renaissance.

“To deny the trauma of early-modern Irish-English relations is gross error and one that we have not committed. Professor Owens does your readers, and us, a service by making sure that we don't forget that trauma. But it is also erroneous to overlook the fact that this history was more than a drawn battle between "English" and "Irish" with the latter always the loser.

“To try to tell part of that story -- in conjunction with, not in opposition to, the story of state terror and dispossession-- should not lead to our being compared to Holocaust deniers. The early modern Irish nobility were powerful, capable, and even hopeful men and women who wished to see themselves prosper on an international stage. Witness the painting, by Van Dyck, of the daughter of the O'Brien earl of Thomond, now hanging in the Baltimore Museum of Art and reproduced in our exhibit (and on the cover of our catalog). That few of the Irish nobility did so after Cromwell (a period not covered in depth by our exhibit) does not mean that history prior to Cromwell does not exist. Indeed, we end our exhibit with mention of the harp as a symbol of Irish movements for sovereignty and with (brief) discussion of the savagery of the Cromwellian transplantations.

“We encourage your readers to visit the exhibition, to read the catalog and to judge for themselves. Our interpretation will not be everyone's, but that is the purpose of public engagement: to spark discussion. We are disappointed to be so caricatured.”

Original article here - Irish insulted in major Washington museum exhibit claims scholar

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