You remember Edmund Burke’s condescending and sexist response to poor Mary Wollstonecraft’s measured and rational defense of the French Revolution, right? Well, of course not, because it was other way around—Wollstonecraft responding to Burke (of course), and Wollstonecraft presenting the establishment argument (most British initially supported the Revolution) in sexist language—as Katherine O’Donnell reminds us: “Presenting herself as the rationalist answer to Burke’s emotionalism, Wollstonecraft played on masculine, British sentiment to impugn the Catholic, Irish – and therefore suspect – character of her opponent. Burke had also famously argued against criminalising sodomy, ‘an argument he hadn’t won’, O’Donnell recalls. Whether or not Wollstonecraft was trying to remind her readers of this ‘effeminate’ or ‘sodomitical’ stance by the Irishman, O’Donnell says: ‘Wollstonecraft uses a sexist and nationalistic rhetoric to announce her voice as she attacks Burke…In giving an immensely influential misreading of Burke’s treatise on the sublime and beautiful where she accuses him of making beauty synonymous with woman and both characterised as ‘little, smooth, delicate, fair’, Wollstonecraft—quite unfairly—sets up Burke as the paradigm of the misogynistic patriarch.’”
A history of Ireland: “In his fine survey of the last half-millennium of Irish history, Dublin writer John Gibney makes the enormously complicated—and usually quite tragic—story of Ireland’s past understandable. A Short History of Ireland is a concise and highly readable account that starts with the Protestant Reformation and ends more or less in our own day. The book has five parts, one for each of the centuries he discusses, further divided into chapters exploring major themes. Each of the five parts closes with a section called ‘Where Historians Disagree,’ exploring points of scholarly contention. The first of these disputed historical questions is: ‘Why did the Reformation not succeed’ in Ireland?”
