This collection makes a contribution to the development of the 'new British history', and represents a further corrective to the Anglocentric bias of traditional British history. The book also sheds light on current debates on 'the Union' and devolution as well as on the continuing 'Irish problem'.

Preface; Introduction; 1. Tudor Wales, national identity and the British inheritance Peter Roberts; 2. The English Reformation and identity formation in Ireland and Wales Brendan Bradshaw; 3. Faith, culture and sovereignty: Irish nationality and its development, 1558–1625 Marc Caball; 4. From English to British literature: John Lyly's Euphues and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene Andrew Hadfield; 5. The British problem in three tracts on Ireland by Spenser, Bacon and Milton Willy Maley; 6. James Ussher and the creation of an Irish Protestant identity Alan Ford; 7. Seventeenth-century Wales: definition and identity Philip Jenkins; 8. Scottish identity in the seventeenth century Keith M. Brown; 9. The gaidhealtachd and the emergence of the Scottish Highlands Jane Dawson; 10. Anglo-Irish unionist discourse, c.1656–1707: from Harrington to Fletcher Jim Smyth; Protestantism, constitutionalism and British identity under the later Stuarts Colin Kidd.