This is the first overview of the Tudor Reformation in Ireland to appear since R. Dudley Edwards’s Church and State in Tudor Ireland (Dublin, 1935). Given the number of writings on the Irish Reformation since the 1970s, the survey was badly needed. Henry Jefferies is also very well qualified to write it, having previously published a fine monograph on Reformation Armagh and many articles on other aspects of Irish ecclesiastical history in the Reformation period. The book is indeed much more than a summary of recent research: throughout, it takes issue with the findings of other specialists, regularly reinterpreting the evidence so as to develop an argument about the prospects for the Reformation that is in some respects quite distinctive. The book is divided into three parts: the first section, on the pre-Reformation, provides an analysis in three chapters of, respectively, pastoral care, diocesan administration, and the laity. The second and final parts are structured more chronologically and treat of the early Tudor Reformations (Henry VIII’s reformation, Edward VI’s reformation, and Mary’s restoration, across three chapters), and the Elizabethan reformation (four chapters).

Broadly, Jefferies’s argument is that previous historians—at least the so-called revisionist ones—have underestimated the importance of religion for sixteenth-century society and that “the Church in late medieval Ireland was in far better shape than has conventionally been assumed” (38). He also believes that “the impact of the Henrician reformation on religious belief and practice was very limited, most especially beyond the [English] Pale” (85). In the 1560s, however, no fewer than eight bishops of Mary’s reign were prepared to serve the Church of Ireland, so that, by contrast with England, “the Elizabethan settlement enjoyed a surprising degree of acceptance,” however unenthusiastic, among the bishops (127). Yet he is unimpressed by the authorities’ ability to impose more than “a superficial veneer of conformity” (165) in the Pale, southern Leinster, or the towns and cities in the 1570s and pessimistic about the prospects for Protestant reform without preachers. Thus when, in the 1580s, Elizabeth intervened to forbid attempts to impose Protestantism by coercion because the political costs were unacceptably high, the chances of a Protestant breakthrough disappeared with the emergence of general recusancy. Indeed, Jefferies argues that Old English involvement in the revolts of 1579–83 and from 1594 onward was much wider than has previously been supposed, reflecting support for Catholicism and a settled hatred of the English and of Protestantism. In some ways, therefore, this interpretation is redolent of the old Catholic nationalist view that regarded conformity as mere time serving rather than as the first step on the road to conversion. Jefferies certainly makes a strong case concerning the very patchy enforcement of the oath of supremacy among clergy and officials and the tolerance of conservative clergy who conducted mainly Catholic rites alongside occasional use of the Book of Common Prayer in English or Latin. But such laxity was perhaps not wholly different from conditions in the English north, at least into the 1570s, although clearly the later experience was very different.

The most satisfying part of the book is the opening analysis of the pre-Reformation church, which deploys a wide range of sources to assess the state of religion and the initial impact of reform. It is, however, not really Jefferies’s fault that the later sections are less satisfactory: the sources are simply not there. In default, he is forced to rely on frequently ambiguous, or ex parte statements in the State Papers. Meaty quotations are made to serve in two or three different contexts: not everyone will agree with his particular exegesis of key texts (made apparently more personal by his widespread use of the first person singular), but Jefferies displays a reassuringly magisterial knowledge of the secondary literature. The present reviewer would contest Jefferies’s rejection of “church papistry” as characterizing “the general response to the Elizabethan reformation in anglicized Ireland” (139): his own evidence (see, e.g., 141, 175, 186–87, 190–91, 203, 239) suggests that Catholic recusancy was not the norm until the 1580s. And if, already by 1566, the churches in Armagh, Dublin, and Meath dioceses were “universally in ruin (and some wholly down)” (173), it is hard to believe that all this had happened after 1560.

Around two-thirds of the book relates to developments in Elizabeth’s reign. These were, as Jefferies argues, the decisive years for the local reception of the Tudor Reformation, but the heavy focus on the political aspects of the struggle under Elizabeth means that other topics get very short measure. It is of course a moot point, given the scrappy nature of the evidence, how much could have been written about doctrine, the liturgy, or the “scenic apparatus” of worship. The sweeping changes implied by the Elizabethan settlement emerge clearly enough, but on the Catholic side the reader is left wondering how much of pre-Reformation practice and tradition still survived by 1600—the annual shriving and houseling at Easter together with the election of churchwardens, the Sarum missals, the public recitation of matins and evensong, the pageants and Rogationtide processions, and the rood screens and lofts. Overall, however, this is an effective and convincing survey of the failure of the Irish Reformation. It will not need to be replaced for another generation.