The sixteenth century was a century of widespread change across Europe. Not only were countries beginning to create extensive empires and shape their own boundaries, but changes to the very core religious beliefs of society gripped the continent. The spread of Reformation from Germany to the British Isles caused widespread change to the confessional identity of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. With the almost contemporary plantation of Munster, Ulster and other Irish regions by at first, English, and later, British settlements, the emergence of a distinct Protestant religion and community in Ireland followed suit. This course aims to examine the emergence of these Irish Protestant traditions, charting the history of the Irish Protestant traditions from the Reformation to the modern era. The module will investigate Irish Protestantism as a distinctive Irish culture shaped by internal divisions and by its uneasy relationship with the dominant Irish Catholic culture.

• The Reformation in Ireland • The emergence of an Irish Protestant identity • The dissenting tradition • Baptists and Congregationalists • The Church ‘As By Law established’ • The culture of the Protestant Ascendancy • Republicanism and dissent • Methodism • Evangelicalism and the Protestant community • The erosion of privilege: Disestablishment • The politicisation of Protestantism • The Protestant traditions in a partitioned Ireland.