This article offers a critical analysis of the representation of early modern popular violence provided by the 1641 depositions. Exploring the problems of how reported ‘speech’ was produced and recorded in the 1641 depositions, the article challenges the tendency within the depositions to represent violence as a spontaneous and immediate act, explicable by a racialised reading of Irish ‘barbarity’ and Catholic treachery. Exploiting a large cache of depositions and examinations in the relatively resource-rich urban context of Galway, it offers a micro-historical narrative of two brutal episodes of popular violence there in 1642 to reveal the complex histories and politics that might lie behind acts of violence in the Irish rising. Examining the local impact of the state's policies of anglicisation and Protestantisation, the paper recovers the prolonged, but ultimately unsuccessful, negotiations that preceded popular violence. Contextualizing the episodes, the article locates that violence in the more complex (and divided) politics of the city and in the radical challenges it brought to traditional structures of rule in Galway. Referencing the developing body of work on the politics of early modern crowd actions in Ireland, the article argues that the popular violence was political, both a consequence of and contributor to political change there.

本文对 1641 年的证词提供的早期现代大众暴力的表现进行了批判性分析。本文探讨了在 1641 年的证词中如何产生和记录所报道的“演讲”的问题，文章挑战了证词中将暴力表示为一种自发和直接的行为的趋势，这可以通过对爱尔兰“野蛮”和天主教背叛的种族化解读来解释。利用资源相对丰富的戈尔韦城市环境中的大量证词和检查，它提供了 1642 年两起民众暴力事件的微观历史叙述，揭示了可能隐藏在暴力行为背后的复杂历史和政治在爱尔兰崛起。检查该州的英国化和新教政策对当地的影响，该文件恢复了在民众暴力之前进行的旷日持久但最终没有成功的谈判。结合这些情节，文章将暴力定位在更复杂（和分裂）的城市政治中，以及它给戈尔韦的传统统治结构带来的激进挑战中。参考爱尔兰早期现代人群行动的政治工作，文章认为，民众暴力是政治性的，既是那里政治变革的结果，也是其促成因素。