Curtis, Edmund (1881–1943), historian, was born 25 March 1881 at Bury, Lancashire, England, fifth child among five sons and a daughter of Francis Curtis, architectural draughtsman, of Rathmullen, Co. Donegal, and Elizabeth Curtis (née Elliott) of Belfast. The family's circumstances were initially fairly comfortable but experienced drastic decline; Curtis's mother died while he was a small boy, and by 1896 the family were living in Silvertown in the East End of London. He had left board school at the age of 13 to work to support the family, but his father (now reduced to ‘occasional employment’) had tried to give him some tutoring. Curtis already showed an interest in reading and storytelling, publishing his first verses in the Weekly Freeman's Journal in 1895.
While working in a rubber factory the 15-year-old Curtis published some melancholy verses in a weekly paper, London. These attracted the attention of two benefactors, Harry Leon and the Rev. Cecil Grant. Through their generosity he was enrolled (September 1896) at the Allhallows School, Honiton, Devon and later (1898) at Grant's co-educational boarding school at Keswick, Cumberland (Cumbria), where he was head boy; his younger sister Mary was also enabled to study at Keswick. Curtis played a significant role in the school's early days and his experiences of Cumbrian life and dialect began to turn his interest from poetry to history. He appears to have first visited Ireland c.1899 and thereafter stayed regularly with relatives at Kilmacrennan, Co. Donegal, in close proximity to the Donegal Gaeltacht (though one source states that Curtis spoke of having visited Donegal at the age of seven). He started learning Irish, in the Donegal dialect, from as early as 1896 and had a working knowledge of it by 1914.
Winning a history scholarship (1900) to Keble College, Oxford, Curtis lived a frugal life, hindered by feelings of social inferiority. He graduated with a first-class honours BA (1904) and briefly attempted journalism before becoming a lecturer in history at Sheffield University (1905–14). Roger of Sicily and the Normans in Lower Italy 1016–1154 (1912), the first full-length treatment of the subject in English, established his reputation as a medieval scholar, and he also published two articles on medieval Ireland in the English Historical Review. He continued to make frequent visits to Ireland, studying Irish in the Glens of Antrim, Donegal, Ring, and Kerry; in 1909 he undertook a course in Old and Middle Irish at the School of Irish Learning, Dublin, with limited success. At this time he wrote for the Irish Review (a literary and cultural journal edited by Thomas MacDonagh (qv) and Joseph Plunkett (qv)) and the Journal of the Ivernian Society. He had a deep and abiding interest in the literature of Gaelic Ireland and edited an anthology of modern Irish poetry, Cuisle na hÉigse (1920). His respect for the people of the Gaeltacht reinforced his determination to provide an Irish history that would give due attention to the Gaelic and popular experience. (He was less enamoured of the Ulster Scots planter culture; in later life he agreed to finance the college career of a Donegal-bred cousin on condition that he changed his accent, becoming ‘Willy’ instead of ‘Wully’.) He was a practising member of the Church of Ireland, though some of his religious beliefs were unorthodox and he did not accept many of that church's historical claims; for example, he shared the view of J. B. Bury (qv) that the beliefs and observances of St Patrick (qv), as a Latin Christian of late antiquity, would have borne greater affinity to Roman catholicism than to protestantism.
After being defeated by Mary Hayden (qv) for the first lectureship in modern Irish history at UCD, Curtis was Erasmus Smith professor of history in TCD (1914–39) and Lecky professor of modern history (1939–43). At first Curtis felt slightly isolated at Trinity, and he was never to participate to any great extent in college administration, but he found its collegiate and residential ethos congenial throughout the rest of his life.
Curtis's initial isolation was probably due in part to his sympathy for Irish nationalism at a time when Trinity still prided itself as a bastion of unionism. Curtis is sometimes spoken of as a Redmondite, but although a supporter of home rule he was not particularly close to the Irish parliamentary party. His talk on ‘Irish history and its popular versions’ – Irish Rosary, May 1925 – associates the old home rule school of politics with the myth that the virtues of the Irish were their own while their vices were all due to their conquerors. The talk, inspired by painful experience of marking intermediate-certificate history papers, criticises popular idealisations of the Irish past and argues that greater benefit can be derived by seeing its heroes as human beings with their own limitations and having to make concrete choices. Its references to Owen Roe O'Neill (qv) appear to be partly inspired by the Catholic Bulletin’s contemporaneous publication of a translation of the memoir by the secretary of GianBattista Rinnuccini (qv), accompanied by a commentary equating Owen Roe and the nuncio with contemporary anti-treatyites and denouncing the Ormondists as seventeenth-century Free Staters.
Curtis was an habitué of the literary salon of George Russell (qv), and endorsed the poet–mystic's 1917 manifesto favouring dominion home rule, Thoughts for a convention. The ex-unionist and moderate nationalist advocates of dominion status combined support for Irish self-government with the view that the Irish parliamentary party had been an irresponsible populist protest group which had done little to educate the Irish public in the future responsibilities of self-government. Curtis's attempt to apply the ‘scientific’ scholarly techniques which he had learned at Oxford to the myth-encrusted and politically fraught terrain of medieval Irish scholarship can thus be seen as on a par with his political aspirations, and as resembling the Russell group's calls for greater honesty in Irish literature. (Curtis was an outspoken critic of the Censorship of Publications Act, 1929.)
The History of mediaeval Ireland (1923), his most important work of original research, and the History of Ireland (1936), his most widely known work, brought Curtis acclaim as one of the most renowned Irish historians. Showing familiarity with both Gaelic and Anglo-Norman sources, his work was central to the development of Irish scholarship in the fields of early and medieval history, bridging the gap between the learned but politically driven works of G. H. Orpen (qv) and Eoin MacNeill (qv). Though erudite and independent of mind, his writing was structurally weak and not always scrupulous in its attention to detail. Curtis's clearly expressed view that medieval Ireland would have been better off under the rule of a native dynast, than as a lordship under the English crown, informs his reading of medieval Ireland, and he has attracted much criticism for excessive willingness to see national consciousness in late medieval magnates’ relations with the crown (most notably his treatment of the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Kildare ascendancy as a period of ‘aristocratic home rule’, comparable in effect and ideology to Grattan's parliament). Historians such as George Osborne Sayles and Steven Ellis have accused Curtis of reading history backwards and projecting later nationalist ideology on to the intrigues of self-seeking particularist magnates. His most impressive scholarly defender, James Lydon, argues that this reaction has led to the overlooking even of Curtis's unquestionable scholarly achievements as editor of documents, explorer of neglected archives, and master of Irish-language as well as Latin and English sources; and that while Curtis was certainly influenced by his political views, it is not unreasonable to detect forms of ‘patriot’ ideology in late medieval Ireland.
Curtis's greatest contribution to Irish historiography, despite the technical deficiencies of his editing, is his Calendar of Ormond deeds (6 vols, 1932–43) for the Irish Manuscripts Commission. His other publications included the documentary collection Richard II in Ireland 1394–96 (1927) and, with R. B. McDowell (who did most of the work), Irish historical documents, 1172–1922 (1943), a useful resource for later historians. At TCD his lectures were interesting and amusing. He particularly liked to stress the importance in history of dinner parties, where (he said) most of the important decision taken by British governments were framed. He did not restrict his writing to scholarly journals but wrote many review articles for periodicals such as the Irish Statesman (1923–30; he covered Irish-language theatrical productions) and The Bell; Liam O'Flaherty (qv) also describes him as ‘a writer of ten-guinea reviews for the American press’ in 1925.
A private and taciturn man, he could be very sociable with those he knew well; his close friends included Stephen MacKenna (qv) and George O'Brien (qv). He married the brilliant Trinity graduate and budding litterateur Margaret Louise Barrington (qv) in May 1922. A fifteen-year age gap and personality differences rapidly troubled the marriage; in 1924 Barrington spoke of having had other lovers, though it is not clear whether these affairs preceded or followed the marriage. On 9 March 1924 Liam O'Flaherty paid his first visit to Russell's literary salon; Curtis, ‘a thoroughly hearty fellow’, discussed the Aran Islands with him while Barrington ‘made violent eyes’ at O'Flaherty. Matters developed rapidly, assisted by Curtis's absence at an academic conference in England. On 3 April O'Flaherty told his literary agent: ‘I have secured the wife of Professor Curtis’, and at the end of June Barrington and O'Flaherty eloped to England. This attracted widespread attention in Dublin. In September 1925 Curtis met O'Flaherty and Barrington in London and tried to persuade her to return to him; though dismayed at their blithe declaration that they planned to settle in Dublin (which could only cause him more unhappiness), he eventually agreed to a divorce if Barrington still desired it in six months’ time. The divorce case was reported in the papers on 20 July 1925; Curtis never remarried, and settled into the role of bachelor don, showing conspicuous politeness to lady students. In later life he slept in a nightgown and nightcap, with black silk cravat.
Curtis continued to visit Donegal, and always retained his love of turf-fire storytelling. In the last years of his life he suffered from leukaemia, but wrote and lectured almost up to the end; he had unfulfilled hopes of producing a history of early modern Ireland to develop further the themes of his medieval work. He died in Elpis nursing home, Dublin on 25 March 1943 (his sixty-second birthday), having bequeathed his estate (£3,929) to TCD as a fund for the benefit of college servants. A bibliography of his writings, compiled and with an obituary by T. W. Moody (qv), appeared in Irish Historical Studies in 1943.