1. One good overview, with extensive bibliographies, is E. Muir, Ritual in early-modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997).
2. This process, in regard to British history, is usefully traced in K. Sharpe, ‘Remapping early-modern England: from revisionism to the culture of politics’, in idem, Remapping early-modern England: the culture of seventeenth-century politics (Cambridge, 2000): 3–37f.
3. Connolly, Religion, law and power; idem, ‘Eighteenth-century Ireland: colony or ancien régime?’, in D.G. Boyce and A. O’Day (eds.), The making of modern Irish history: revisionism and the revisionist controversy (London and New York, 1996): 15–33. Similar in approach are Hill, From patriots to unionists, and Barnard, A new anatomy, though the latter does not declare its position. The ‘colonial’ perspective is best represented by the work of Kevin Whelan: ‘An underground gentry? Catholic middlemen in eighteenth-century Ireland’. ECI, 10 (1995): 7–68, repr. in J.S. Donnelly and K.A. Miller (eds.), Irish popular culture, 1650–1850 (Dublin, 1998): 118–72; ‘The tree of liberty’: radicalism, Catholicism, and the construction of Irish identity 1760–1830 (Cork, 1996).
4. One sensible, but punchy, consideration of the matter is S. Howe, Ireland and empire: colonial legacies in Irish history and culture (Oxford, 2002), which argues that the colonial position provides insights, especially in literary studies, but does not embrace the totality of Irish historical experience.
5. D. Cosgrove, ‘Geography is everywhere: culture and symbolism in human landscapes’, in D. Gregory and R. Walford (eds.), Horizons in human geography (London, 1989): 118–35, p. 126.