Medieval and modern Ireland

All the papers in Medieval and Modern Ireland were presented at the eighteenth annual international conference of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies, held at Calgary, Alberta, in February 1985. The conference theme, Medieval and Modern Ireland, was chosen by the organising committee for its intrinsic merits, and as a reasonable extension of the theme of the previous conference which focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Readers of this volume will be struck by the pervasiveness of the connections between the medieval and the modern in Ireland and the Irish, artists in particular, and realise why James Joyce could hardly avoid linking the modern Irish artist with the medieval Irish monk, as he does in the bitter musings of Stephen Dedalus, who walks alone into eternity along Sandymount Strand: ‘You were going to do wonders, what? Missionary to Europe after fiery Columbanus.’