The 1641 rebellion is unique in early modern European violence and armed struggles because of the vast collection of over 8,000 eyewitness accounts known as the 1641 depositions. My dissertation seeks to utilize the depositions to uncover the religious worldviews of early modern Irish men and women. Through close readings of the depositions, as well as polemical literature which cited the depositions as source material, the following chapters analyze how survivors and polemicists alike invoked religious language to despicted confessional differences and the workings of divine providence in seventeenth-century Ireland.
In particular, this dissertation focuses on two related themes: how refugees described the conflicts and violence they had experienced and how eyewitness accounts were co-opted and edited by later authors to serve as propaganda. The depositions clearly portray deponents' understandings of differences in religious identity and their familiarity with providential explanations of the crises to which they had f victim. While much subsequent polemical literature presented the conflict in strictly confessionalized terms, a comparative analysis of contemporary propaganda alongside the depositions shows that strategic editing of source materials betrayed the deponents' nuanced depictions of religious identity and their providential interpretations of the progress of the violence of the 1640s. Broadening the context of the rebellion to include similar providentialist propaganda from the Thirty Years War, this dissertation shows the extent to which providential imagery in eyewitness accounts and war propaganda polarized religious identities in print. In making this point, my research contributes to broader interests in the over-simplification of religious language and imagery to define in-groups and out-groups in wartime rhetoric.