The importance of the Irish Jesuit mission for the history of Catholicism is indisputable and it is generally accepted that, thanks to their training, organisation and flexibility, the Society of Jesus played a pastoral role out of proportion to their numbers. More recently it has become apparent that Irish Jesuits also contributed significantly to Catholic education and mission activity in Europe and elsewhere. Although Jesuit agency in Ireland is an accepted part of the early modern religious narrative, detailed examination of their activities has been hampered by the relative inaccessibility of surviving sources. Hogan’s Hibernia Ignatiana and the MacErlean transcripts in the Irish Jesuit Archives have traditionally been mainstays of work on early modern Irish Catholicism, and along with the work of Bellesheim, Theiner, Moran, Shirley, Pastor and others, have provided historians, who did not enjoy convenient access to the Archivium Romanum Societatis Iesu (A.R.S.I.), with transcripts, context and interpretation. More recently, the work of scholars like Thomas McCoog S.J., Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Brian Mac Cuarta S.J. (currently director of A.R.S.I.) and others has enhanced knowledge of the archival sources and demonstrated how they can be used to critique traditional narratives and to offer new interpretations. The pace of source-based reassessment quickened with the publication in Archivium Hibernicum (lxiii (2010), pp 7–263) of Vera Orschel and John Hanly’s calendar of the papers of the Jesuit-run Irish College in Rome. Taken together with the volume under review here and the imminent publication by the Irish Manuscripts Commission of an edition of Jesuit annual letters from Ireland, the stage is set for further and deeper reassessment.

The reviewed work is volume 16 in the Subsidia ad Historiam Societatis Iesu series. It falls in five parts. The first, the calendar of copy letters from Rome to Ireland preserved in A.R.S.I., concerns letters from the superior general to Irish Jesuits in Ireland and elsewhere, mostly from the early seventeenth century. The second part is the calendar of letters from Ireland to Rome, covering the period 1577–1758 and now housed in the Jesuit Archives Dublin, with some existing in copy in A.R.S.I. These two calendars, which form the bulk of the volume, are followed by a catalogue of the lists of Irish Jesuits and the canonical faculties granted to them. The fourth part calendars A.R.S.I. Anglia, 9, i–iii, a series of historical texts that includes seventeen of the twenty-five surviving annual letters. The final part consists of a number of appendices, including lists of superior generals, Irish superiors and of rank and file Irish Jesuits active on the mission. The introduction, which explains the arrangement of the calendared material, includes a succinct historical overview of the first Irish Jesuit missions. For every item treated, the calendar provides data on provenance, date and current location, along with a summary that includes all persons and locations named in the original.

Although there can ultimately be no substitute for the original, the level of detail provided here does allow access to some of the minutiae of the mission. Financial woes figure prominently, as do the frequently atrocious relations with other clergy, notably the Dominicans (p. 86) and the Franciscans. In contrast to their English confreres, the Jesuits in Ireland managed to retain generally good relations with the diocesan clergy and there was no equivalent to the Appellant controversy (p. 116). The survival of a native hierarchy helped. Like all good parents, the Society’s fathers worried about the formation and quality of new recruits and it is clear that there was no shortage of unsuitable material (p. 79). Given their international connections and their special loyalty to the pope, the Jesuits were subject to assiduous state harassment, a regular theme in the correspondence. In the mid-1670s, a particularly severe round of state repression necessitated their strategic retreat to the continent, leading to the foundation of the Jesuit college in Poitiers, about which this volume is especially revealing. At the same time, the periodic relaxation of state persecution was experienced as a mixed blessing, bringing as many challenges as benefits (p. 137). Unlike the diocesan clergy and other regulars, the Jesuits managed to develop and maintain a strong esprit de corps that was sometimes sufficiently robust to overcome the regional and national differences that bedevilled the others (p. 257). More mundane problems feature in the correspondence, including the reconciliation of pastoral duties with the care of octogenarian parents (p. 95), the licitness of using time pieces (p. 193), the necessity of mastering Irish (p. 500) and the need to discipline work-shy confreres (p. 518).

The material covered is ably summarised. The volume contains two excellent maps and also a reproduction, in colour, of a drawing of the 1600 capture of Thomas Butler, earl of Ormond, which includes James Archer S.J. Several black and white reproductions of documentary sources enhance the volume, as does the comprehensive index. This is a useful research tool for anyone interested in early modern religion and indispensable for scholars of early modern Ireland.