An important trend in recent historiography of the 1641 rising in Ireland has been an assessment of the gap between the conflict as experienced in Ireland and as represented in England. Both Eamon Darcy's The Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and John Gibney's The Shadow of a Year: The 1641 Rebellion in Irish History and Memory engage with these issues by exploring contestation over the significance and meaning of the conflict. The two books overlap in analyzing the work of partisan writers connected to the Dublin Castle administration who presented the rising as a unified conspiracy of Catholic interests bent on inflicting horrific violence on Protestant settlers. This representation of the rising affected policy decisions in the 1640s, including the Cromwellian invasion and seizure of Irish Catholic lands under the terms of the 1642 Adventurers' Act, and helped frame anti-Catholic stereotypes that endure in some circles down to the present.

Eamon Darcy's book engages most directly with the use and abuse of the 1641 depositions. In the same vein as scholarship pioneered by Nicholas Canny and Raymond Gillespie, Darcy treats the depositions as social history documents. Sections of the book explore the grievances that drove some men into rebellion, the interrelationships between rebels and plantation settlers, and the meanings imbedded in acts of symbolic violence. Darcy proposes a slightly modified version of Canny's “two-tier” characterization of violence during the rising, concurring that a gap emerged between Irish elites, who hoped to achieve political leverage through the disarmament of planters, and their followers, who used the rising as an opportunity to settle long-standing grievances. Darcy confirms the existence of these tensions within the rebel camp, but he persuasively demonstrates shared grievances and uncovers the ways that rebel leaders played roles in legitimizing some acts of violence. In this, Darcy does solid work in highlighting evidence of Irish Catholic anxieties that can be gleaned from the 1641 depositions, with fears of a puritan crackdown repeatedly invoked by participants in the rebellion.

One of Darcy's main concerns is to reconstruct the various lenses through which survivors and observers made sense of the hostilities in 1641. Although the book title suggests a “three kingdoms” approach to the rising, Darcy's book does not address Scotland or Wales in any detail (a point that he acknowledges in the introduction), but primarily focuses on the Irish and English contexts. Darcy engages in a deep analysis of the depositions, demonstrating the ways that the rising created its own context as rumor, fear, embellishment, and outright fabrication perpetuated stories of extreme violence among survivors, who often referenced and appropriated biblical accounts of violence to describe their suffering. From the English side, Darcy discusses the ways that pamphleteers alluded to John Foxe's accounts of popish persecutions against the godly as well as more recent printed accounts of attacks on noncombatants by Catholic forces during the Thirty Years' War. In an important contribution to scholarship on the 1641 tracts and pamphlets, Darcy finally discerns connections between the Irish material and accounts of violence from a transatlantic context, particularly elements of the “Black Legend” of Spanish cruelty and early publications describing Anglo-Powhatan conflicts in Virginia. Darcy concludes this analysis of atrocity literature with the suggestion that “reports on the 1641 rebellion in Ireland were exceptional only in the scale of what was published, not in their content” (130). English audiences had for decades been inundated with atrocity literature from the European wars of religion and the New World. Accounts of Ireland's miseries were thus neither unique nor particularly shocking to English audiences.

Darcy's reconstruction of the cultural framework through which English audiences tried to make sense of the violence would benefit from a deeper analysis of responses to the 1641 rising as revealed outside of the tracts, pamphlets, and newsbooks that he focuses on in this section of the book. Although reader response is difficult to assess in the early modern period, the evidence of petitioning campaigns, London street protests, and local responses to calls for relief to Protestant victims of the 1641 rising suggests that events in Ireland elicited unprecedented activism on the part of at least some English people. In part, this reflected fears that arose out of early accounts and correspondence from Ireland that presented the rising as a conspiracy involving the continental Catholic powers, English recusants, and ill-affected advisors to Charles I. The fears for England's safety and the activism inspired by the content of the pamphlets and tracts, it can be argued, did make accounts of the Irish rising exceptional.

John Gibney's book in many respects picks up where Darcy's work ends by exploring how representations of the rising by contemporary writers such as Dr. Henry Jones and Sir John Temple shaped historical memories of the rising into the twentieth century. Gibney follows the reverberations of clearly biased accounts of the rising through writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He finds ample evidence of the longevity of the inaccurate claim that the rising was carried out by a unified and bloodthirsty Catholic population. Gibney persuasively suggests that these accounts served the interests of the Ascendancy, with a static and negative view of popery justifying policies that marginalized Ireland's Catholic majority. Consistent with what T. C. Barnard and others have argued in assessments of Protestant identity in post-1641 Ireland, Gibney finds that antipopish accounts of the rising tended to reappear during moments of political strife. Formal commemorations of the rising coincided with the Restoration, and publications flourished during the crisis years of the 1680s–90s and the 1790s. In these later contexts, the invocation of acts of violence from 1641 supported an overarching claim that “popery remained unchanged” (62) and created a powerful argument for Protestant unity and Catholic repression.

Gibney's work also addresses Catholic responses to the Protestant narrative. Although politically disempowered, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Catholic writers did try to push back against the dominant representation of the rising. These writings maintained that partisan Protestant writers distorted or manufactured accounts of rebel violence and neglected episodes of state-sponsored violence against Catholic communities both before and during the rising. Equally important in these Catholic retorts was an attempt to discredit the 1641 depositions. Although the manipulative and selective use of the depositions represented the fundamental problem with early partisan works by Jones, Temple, and others, nineteenth-century Catholic writers attacked the reliability of the depositions themselves, claiming that they were at best fatally biased and at worst pure fabrications by the most rabidly anti-Catholic interests in Ireland. Gibney includes a detailed account of the culmination of the debate on the depositions as it played out in the late nineteenth century, including several exchanges in the earliest volumes of the English Historical Review. Ironically, the debate on the depositions did not lead to a blossoming of scholarship on this difficult and complicated archive. Rather, Gibney recounts the years of neglect that followed the melee, broken only by an abortive attempt to transcribe and publish parts of the archive in the 1930s and a tentative and sadly unfinished reassessment of the depositions by Walter D. Love in the 1960s. Only in the 1990s did this trend come to an end, with Darcy identifying Nicholas Canny's Making Ireland British (Oxford University Press, 2001) as the most thorough and successful rehabilitation of the depositions as reliable and useful historical sources.

Gibney's research primarily focuses on published accounts of the 1641 rising but also makes some gestures toward an analysis of historical memory in a broader sense. Beginning in the 1660s and 1670s, 23 October saw commemorations of the outbreak of the rising in Dublin. References to the conflict in the works of canonical writers such as Defoe, Swift, Voltaire, Hume, and Burke suggest that the rebellion remained firmly embedded in the popular consciousness, and Gibney is persuasive in arguing that a largely static interpretation of the rising can be discerned across Protestant writings from the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries. He also argues that in the long view, historical memories of the rising based on this interpretation were integral to Protestant group identity in Ireland, and he finds evidence of simplistic anti-Catholic versions of the rising present in sectarian propaganda in Northern Ireland as recently as the late 1990s. Gibney's focus on written accounts helps to illuminate some of the ways that these memories endured, but this is not the complete story. It would be helpful to know more about the intersections between the printed sources and other kinds of evidence such as folklore, oral traditions, music, and communal commemorations. This is an underexamined but integral part of the story if we hope to fully understand historical memory and the connections between early modern and twentieth-century discourses on the 1641 rising.

Both Eamon Darcy and John Gibney remind us of the importance of seventeenth-century writers such as Henry Jones and John Temple, whose manipulation of the 1641 depositions transformed highly complicated, inconsistent, and often contradictory individual accounts of experiences during the rising into a simple story of Catholic atrocity and Protestant victimization. Both works also remind us that the legacies of these seventeenth-century discourses linger on. Gibney's book begins and ends with reference to Mary McAlese and Ian Paisley's joint appearance at the 2010 launch of Trinity College Dublin's exhibition on the rising and the release of the digital edition of the 1641 depositions. McAlese's and Paisley's very different understandings of the rising—and the archive through which historians have attempted to make sense of it—underscore the necessity of asking not only “what really happened in Ireland in 1641?” (to borrow Nicholas Canny's phrase) but also “what did people think happened in Ireland in 1641?” Gibney's and Darcy's respective works go a long way in beginning to answer that important question.