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Civil wars of words: from classical Rome to the Northern Ireland troubles

ABSTRACT The title of the final chapter of David Armitage’s Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (2017), ‘Civil Wars of Words’, encapsulates both a fundamental argument of the book and a key aspect of its interpretative methodology. In this review essay, I consider the importance of linguistic and literary evidence to Armitage’s method of intellectual history in his global study of civil wars, and suggest how this method can offer a foundation for a new cultural and literary history of civil war. I consider and connect literary representations of civil war from classical Rome, Shakespearean England, the British Civil Wars, the American Civil War and the Northern Ireland Troubles.