'Joy among the Irish children that […] there will be war': Irish Children and Seventeenth-Century Wars

During the tumultuous wars and rebellions in early modern Ireland, children were inevitably drawn into conflicts that spread far from battlefields and into homes, farms, and villages. While most of the evidence about children in these wars depicts them suffering from violence, hunger, and disease, there were also many reports of violence perpetrated or threatened by Catholic Irish children. Such violence was presented by Protestant witnesses and commentators as evidence of the barbarity of their Irish Catholic parents as well as of the children themselves. This paper will examine the emotional work that these narratives performed for the Protestants in Ireland and the English readers of anti-Irish propaganda.