Kathleen Middleton
IRCHSS CARA postdoctoral fellow
Biography
I studied History at Trinity from 2001 to 2005, and completed a PhD in 2010 ‘Religious Revolution and Social Crisis in Southwest Scotland and Ulster, 1687-1714’ under the super-vision of Robert Armstrong. In 2010-2011 I moved to UCD to work on Dr Marc Caball’s IRCHSS funded project ‘Protestants, print and Gaelic culture 1567-1722’ at the UCD Hu-manities Institute. My current postdoctoral fellowship is jointly hosted by the Centre for Irish, Scottish and Comparative Studies / School of English at Trinity, and the University of Dundee.
Research
My present project concerns the work of the Presbyterian historian Robert Wodrow, best known for his influential History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland (1721-2).
A generation after the Williamite Revolution, Scots were still bitterly debating the signifi-cance of the Restoration period. Presbyterians had developed a narrative of cumulative tyr-anny under Charles II and James II/VII, while episcopalians contended that government se-verity toward religious dissent had been justified. Wodrow’s 1700-page text was meant to bury the episcopalian narrative under a mountain of documentary evidence and oral testi-mony, much of it illustrating the misfortunes of individual presbyterians between 1660 and 1688. I intend to re-evaluate Wodrow’s motives, historical methods and cultural legacy in a mono-graph and in an edition of two of his shorter unpublished texts. More details are on the www.wodrowproject.net (external).
Publications:
- ‘Exploiting jurisdictions: perceptions of the political boundary in southwest Scotland and Ulster, 1688-1715’, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies 3 (2009), pp. 193-211.
- Deliverance and disillusionment: the Williamite revolution in the presbyterian heartlands (book manuscript in progress).