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MURRAY G. H. PITTOCK. Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685-1789. New York: St. Martin's, 1997. Pp. x + 189. $69.95.
A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c. 1750-c. 1850, ed. Lawrence Brockliss and David Eastwood. Manchester: Manchester (distributed in the U.S. by St. Martin's), 1997. Pp. xviii + 222. $69.95.
Mr. Pittock shows the extent to which Scotland, Ireland, and Wales in the seventeenth century maintained a good degree of independence from politically and culturally dominant London and its environs. Wales, ever considered more barbarous by the powerful neighbors to the east, was less distinct because it was the original Britain of ancient myth. Unlike most recent studies of British identity, Mr. Pittock' s places Jacobitism at the core of the debate, but avoids the excesses of his fellow travelers. And along he goes, holding that his period is "the Jacobite century," which is moot, and then suddenly "Those who adopted the High Church position arguably realized that 1688-9 represented a serious decoupling of the Church from legitimist caesarosacramentalism." His study shows, more clearly than this example, how Jacobite vocabulary was maintained, not necessarily in a pro-Jacobite movement, but in antiWilliamite literature. Thus Dryden's "The Lady's Song" contains coded identity that would be co-opted by the Jacobites, yet it is primarily a celebration of simple, local custom - no more...