BERKELEY, IRELAND AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

Abstract

Eighteenth-century Irish intellectual history has enjoyed a revival in recent years. New scholarly resources, such as the Hoppen edition of the papers of the Dublin Philosophical Society and the recently published Berkeley correspondence, have been fundamental to that revival. Since 1986 the journal Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Iris an dá chultúr has sponsored a complex conversation on the meaning and legacy of the eighteenth century in Irish history. Work in the journal and beyond deploying “New British” and Atlantic histories, as well as continuing attention to Europe, has helped to enrich scholarly understanding of the environments in which Irish people thought and acted. The challenge facing historians of Ireland has been to find categories of analysis that could comprehend religious division and acknowledge the centrality of the confessional state without reducing all Irish experience to sectarian conflict. Clearly the thought of the Irish Catholic community could not be approached without an understanding of the life of the Continental Catholic Church. Archivium Hibernicum has been collecting and publishing the traces of that history for a hundred years and new digital resources such as the Irish in Europe database have extended that work in new directions. The Atlantic and “New British” contexts have been more proximately important for the Protestant intellectual tradition.