The corpus of Irish legal texts dating from the seventh century to the ninth century is extraordinary for its sheer size, yet the complexity of form, language, and subject matter has meant that few historians outside a core of dedicated specialists have had the opportunity to use its riches. It is not only the stylized language and structure of the materials themselves that make analysis difficult but also the complete lack of documentation of the actual workings of the law, as opposed to theoretical or pedagogical texts, that is a major impediment to our understanding of this legal system. Robin Stacey has achieved a considerable feat in applying her specialist knowledge of these legal texts to produce interpretations and analysis relevant to a wide audience in European history and legal studies. In doing so, she has taken an imaginative approach to the difficulties of using this material. Stacey's approach enables the surviving material to provide insights into the workings of the law and different levels of society, even if we can never know how actual cases were decided. She has examined early Irish legal texts not just for their content but for what they might reveal about the making and use of law in early Irish societies. Her basic premise is that the surviving written laws point to legal judgments being enacted on occasions and in venues that were saturated with meanings. This argument takes her confidently into the shifting sands of theories about speech and the ways that language was used to codify status.

The five substantive chapters of the book analyze different groups of texts through the lens of performance and uses of language. Chapter 1, “The Play's the Thing,” analyzes three legal practices that were inherently performative in their construction and execution. Distraint, tellach, and “sick-maintenance” all involved carefully orchestrated procedures that, Stacey argues, underpinned the legal process itself. Chapter 2, “Jurists on Stage,” focuses more on the precise language used in the legal texts and contends that different registers of language denoted different meanings as well as the venues within which legal judgments were delivered. Chapter 3, “The Power of the Words,” analyzes how types and registers of language indicated social and political status and power for jurists, kings, and poets. This chapter includes a lively discussion of the political use of satire. Chapter 4, “Voicing Over,” closely reads the texts for evidence of those who were excluded from legal and political power and thus needed others to speak for them. This chapter also presents discussions of status and power. The evidence for different legal schools in Ireland is analyzed at length in chapter 5, “Voices within the Law.” Here the varying threads of meaning within related legal texts are teased out to suggest that at the time there were regional schools competing for influence with kings and one another. The volume's conclusion, “The Dangers of Performance,” takes a step back from intense textual scrutiny and applies arguments based on early Irish texts to contemporaneous European texts. This is a welcome attempt to incorporate the findings of analysis of early Irish materials into a wider context.

The author has brought to her argument not only an impressive expertise with the language and content of Irish legal material but also an intellectual curiosity and depth of reading in the fields of anthropology and linguistics that offer insights into both what the Irish material meant and how it was used. She takes ideas of performative actions and speech theory and applies them to the highly stylized Irish material. While she readily admits that the connection between speech, language, power, and early medieval Irish societies has been made before, her use of approaches from outside the field of early Irish history opens up a wider yet at the same time more precise lens through which to view the material.

The book is complemented with extensive endnotes and a bibliography that point the reader to more of the specialized material on Irish sources. For readers who are not familiar with early Irish societies, this book will reveal the riches that those societies have left behind and, hopefully, ensure that Ireland is no longer relegated to the peripheries of study of the development of early European legal traditions. For the growing band of dedicated students of Old Irish language and history, Stacey's arguments will stimulate discussions that go beyond the meanings of words and phrases into the intoxicating arena of deep textual and societal analysis. Specialists in Old Irish law, literature, and history will find in this book much that provokes thought and discussion. The author's findings on the value of analyzing speech and records of performance will henceforth have to be taken seriously by scholars working on the full range of early Irish material, particularly poetry and hagiography. No doubt some of her arguments will be debated vigorously, but this is to be welcomed, indicating as it does that the study of early Ireland is important to the history of Europe.