As any historian can attest, dead men do indeed tell tales. Crafting stories through extant documents of the “very dead” is, after all, what historians do for a living. Things often tell tales as well, and, as Horning’s Ireland in the Virginian Sea suggests, one set of tales can be at odds with the other. In this book, she surveys a heretofore conventionally accepted story—that English colonization of Ireland preceded and served as a model for English colonization of the Chesapeake—to make her point. Employing Renaissance humanist ideals of cultural difference that demonized the Irish, English adventurers planted themselves in Ireland. Their task, as they saw it, was to reduce the barbarous Irish unto civility. Many of the projectors of Irish plantation schemes also, or so we have been told, planned American colonization projects, and the ideology that they employed in Ireland to horrifying effect served them well in Virginia...

You do not currently have access to this content.