Item 5 - Letters from Fr Brendan Bradshaw, Queens’ College, Cambridge, UK to Colum Kenny.

Includes two brief letters from Bradshaw. In the first letter dated 23 September 1988, he thanks Kenny for the ‘offprint and review both of which I read with considerable interest and much to my benefit.’ He notes that '[t]he revisionists here and elsewhere are simply exchanging one distortion with another. Your careful research goes towards correcting both.' In the second letter, with postmark dated 5 November 1990 [according to a pencil annotation by Colum Kenny], Bradshaw thanks Kenny for ‘the encouraging letter regarding my article in I.H.S. [Irish Historical Studies].’ Referencing revisionism again, he adds: ‘I realise that I am swimming against the current and have no doubt that a price will have to be paid in some form or another. For the moment, however, the strategy seems to be to allow the anti-revisionist flak to spend itself before mounting a counter-assault.’

Also includes Kenny’s journal article ‘The Exclusion of Catholics from the legal profession in Ireland, 1537-1829’ published in volume XXV, number 100 (November 1987) of Irish Historical Studies. This is possibly a copy of the ‘offprint’ that Bradshaw references in the first letter. Kenny references Bradshaw’s book The Dissolution of the Religious Orders in Ireland under Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1974) in this article.