This project, funded by the European Research Council, was carried out between 2019 and 2026. It was aimed to show how classical models expose the shifting political structures of the nation through the politics of language, of conflict, of (post)colonialism, of gender, of identity. Infomation of the project's activities can be found on the CLIC project website. The project's Open Access publications can also be browsed here.
Research was structured around nine central themes, identified for their presence across both Irish language and English languages texts, for their exposition of polyphonic voices from different social groups, and for their persistent appearance across several centuries.
Data collected from relevant literary texts is being stored and made available on the project database.
Irish Identities and Political Thought in Early Modern Historical Writing: Greek and Roman Sources was a Marie Curie postdoctoral research project which was carried out by Feliks Levin at Aarhus University during September 2023-August 2025. The project investigated two foundational pieces of seventeenth-century Irish historical writing: the Irish-language Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (Foundation of Knowledge on Ireland) by Geoffrey Keating (1580-1644) and the Neo-Latin Cambrensis Eversus (Refutation of Cambrensis) by John Lynch (1599-1677), which provided extensive influential narratives of Irish history alternative to the English colonial version.
“Irish identities” contextualized the influence of Greek and Roman models on the emergence of Irish protonational discourse and on the vindication of the Irish past, with a focus on the plurality of Irish identities. It investigated how and why early modern Irish authors exploited the cultural capital of classical rhetoric, history, and political thought through both Irish and Latin languages in order to fashion a distinct representation of Irish history, which underlined connections between Ireland and Britain as well as between Ireland and Europe.
