In a telling concluding reflection to this interesting collection, John Morrill suggests that it might more accurately be titled Papists and Heretics: Debates within and between the Churches of Ireland, 1550–1660. In my estimation it might still more accurately be subtitled “perspectives on confessional development.” This is not to suggest that the symposium on sectarianism in early modern Ireland that give rise to the book was premature, or that the contributors do not contrive to relate their essays, delivered originally in 1998, to the theme. They do, but only with varying degrees of success and effectiveness, for while the premise of the book that the origins of Irish sectarianism in “the clash of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation” (i) demands examination in the light of the reconfiguration of the history of the emergence of rival confessions cannot be gainsaid, the reality is that this collection is more diverse and less focused than the title indicates.

The import of the establishment of the Church of Ireland and of the restructuring of Roman Catholicism along Tridentine lines was crucial to the emergence of religious sectarianism in Ireland. This is highlighted at the outset of the collection by Alan Ford's invocation of three arresting contemporary accounts of disturbing sectarian atrocities, two dating from the period covered by this book (1584 and 1641), the third, less explicably, from 1994. The object, I assume, is to demonstrate the destructive character and persistence of sectarianism, but since the only other reference to the 1994 incident is a passing mention in the conclusion (229), it stands in isolation and does, perhaps, suggest a tradition of sectarian atrocity (1798 and other occasions of sectarian atrocity notwithstanding) whose nature and endurance requires more investigation. More significantly, insofar as the focus of this book is concerned, is Ford's contention that religious sectarianism did not commence with the state reformation in the 1530s, as the great Catholic propagandists of the seventeenth century and the only slightly less partisan Catholic nationalist historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries contentedly assumed, but dates from half a century later when the Church of Ireland and Tridentine Catholicism locked horns in an intense contest for the confessional allegiance of the population, as the churches set about creating separate, and antagonistic, faith communities by asserting denominational control of education, marriage, death, and other areas of life that they defined in explicitly denominational terms. Similar contests, with similar results, can be identified elsewhere, of course, and one of the values of this book, as John Morrill points out, is that it suggests that parallels for the “confessional excesses” that were a consequence of the emergence of sectarianism in Ireland are more easily identified on continental Europe than in Britain.

In view of this, it is appropriate not only that several of the essays possess a strong continental dimension, but also that the book includes a detailed explication by Ute Lotz-Heumann of the rationale of the “confessionalisation” model developed in Germany and of her application of this approach to Ireland (see Ute Lotz-Heumann, Die doppelte Konfessionalisierung in Ireland: Konflikt und Koexistencz in 16 und in der ersten Hälfte de 17 Jahrhunderts [Tubingen, 2000]). This approach has not been afforded universal acceptance (and there is evident dissent in this collection not least from the senior editor who prefers the concept of sectarianism), but it is observable in its defense that it does provide a useful interpretative framework in which one can locate Ford's previous findings as to the significance of the decades from the 1580s for the Church of Ireland and Colm Lennon's trajectory for the spread of “Counter-reformation Catholicism.” Moreover, as Morrill's suggestion of a modified chronology for Catholicism suggests (239), its full potential has yet to be revealed, and it may be that it has still more to offer with respect to the particular histories of other Protestant denominations whose trajectory, and whose relationship with Catholicism differs from that of the Church of Ireland. The history of Presbyterianism, curiously entirely absent from this book, is an obvious case in point, but the proliferation of radical sects imported from England in the 1650s that are also neglected are potentially no less interesting.

One evident difficulty with the confessional approach of this volume is that it does not take sufficient cognizance of the impact of demographic movement, particularly of the increasing numbers of New English into Ireland in the early seventeenth century. By contrast, the movement of English Catholics to Ireland in the sixteenth century has been virtually ignored, but David Edwards's ambitious and pioneering dissection of the flight of Catholics from the more repressive environment of England to comparative toleration in Ireland is revealing not just of the history of sectarianism, but also of migratory patterns and, over the longer term, of the impact of the rise of Protestant radicalism in Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Edwards's conclusion that religion was more important than ethnicity in determining people's behavior in the early modern period may hardly come as a surprise, but it must still be demonstrated empirically if we are to overcome the continuing tendency to apply the ethnic and nationalist paradigms that gained ascendancy in the nineteenth century. These still have a (subordinate) place, as Marc Caball's convincing exposure of the error of Samantha Meigs's identification of the Gaelic bardic elite as a barrier to Anglicization, Mícheál MacCraith's identification of the appeal of the Franciscan friar Hugh McCaughwell to the conception of an Irish nation in his exploration of Irish politic-religious thinking in the 1610s, and Declan Downey's rather slight contribution on Irish identification with Spain on the grounds of ancestry as well as faith. These essays dovetail with and expand on themes that have been addressed elsewhere by these writers, and they do not possess the freshness that is a feature of those referred to earlier. This is true also of John McCafferty's account of the Church of Ireland episcopate in the early seventeenth century, of Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin's positive assessment of the Catholic episcopate and Alan Ford's account of the emergence of a Protestant historiography and, even of Brian Jackson's assessment of rivalries within Roman Catholicism. Combined they bear ample witness to the fact that the confessional landscape of early seventeenth-century Ireland sustained the emergence of “a formidable intellectual superstructure of intolerance” (94). This is not quite coterminous with sectarianism, but it amply attests to the political, religious, social, and cultural downsides of denominationalism in early modern Ireland, and which generations of apologists and believers refused even to consider.