The Irish Tower House: Society, Economy and Environment, c. 1300–1650. Victoria L. McAlister. Social Archaeology and Material Worlds. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. x + 278 pp. £80.

Abstract

whose distinguished pedigree he clearly hoped his sons would continue to uphold. What does this say about the role of factors such as gender, status, family, religious affiliations, and personal networks in shaping what and how people chose to remember? This is a well-written and thought-provoking study. A tension emerges, however, between a book whose core material is bounded by the existence of the republican regimes and a concluding chapter on “post-war states.” Although it succeeds in offering up a more “nuanced picture” of memories of a “catastrophic event” (7), the book provides no extended treatment of how these insights affect historiographies of republican England and its people. One implication is that the jarring of “official” narratives with “heterogenous reconstructions of the past” did little to help people come to terms with what had happened to them. The book’s conclusion instead takes us in a different direction. It seeks to align mid-seventeenth-century England with “post-conflict states” from across time and space, as a means of challenging histories of memorial culture that stress its essential modernity. The comparisons, for me, reinforced why the book was at its best when it focused on historicized social contexts. People in mid-seventeenth-century England did not remember conflict through the prisms of colonialism, as in Zimbabwe, or fascism, as in General Francisco Franco’s Spain, or ethno-religious difference, as in Croatia. Peck’s final sentence asserts that people in the past “did not do things so very differently there” (202), but I think she shows that they did, and there is much in this fine book that will help readers toward a better sense of why.