Seventeenth-century interpretations of the past: the case of Geoffrey Keating

Abstract

The study of history at both national and local levels featured prominently among the intellectual activities of early modern Europeans. The desire to know more of their own countries (as evidenced by the growth of mapmaking) and the use of history as a political tool both played important parts in the emergence of the past as a vital force in the present. The same was true of early modern Ireland. Settlers coming to a new environment looked to the past both as a way of understanding their new home, and as a way of legitimising current political realities. Sir James Perrott noted in the introduction to his Chronicle of Ireland ‘the use of reading histories is twofold: either private for a man’s particular knowledge and information, or public for the application of it to the service of the state’ Thus Sir John Davies’s treatise on the Discovery of the true causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued was as much a justification of existing royal policy in Ireland as an explanation of Irish history Each, for his own reasons, was looking to the past to explain the present.