2016/09/15 by Tomás Irish · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Central European national history #French Historical and Cultural Studies #World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact #Irish #Scholarship #Historiography #Context (archaeology) #History #Politics #Political science #Law #Philosophy #Archaeology
paper · doi:10.1111/1468-2281.12157
openalex publication_date 2016/09/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
This article examines the last twenty years of the life of one of Ireland's most controversial scholars, the polymath John Pentland Mahaffy. Mahaffy's name still has wide resonance in Irish historiography owing to his interventions in Irish cultural politics in the decades before 1919. He is frequently seen as an ‘anti-Irish’ figure. This article places Mahaffy in the wider context of international scholarship of the late Victorian era, arguing that he was a cosmopolitan whose overriding concern was not Ireland, or even Britain, but the fracturing of the republic of letters.