Why the Reformation failed in Ireland is a question to which historians have devoted a good deal of attention over the past forty years. Various explanations have been advanced, some more plausible than others, but a basic difficulty in answering the question is the shortage of hard evidence. For Ireland, the many episcopal registers, visitation records, and churchwardens’ accounts, from which the impact of the Reformation in the parishes can be charted in England, are almost wholly lacking. Irish historians have instead relied heavily on the State Papers, with their largely impressionistic ex parte statements by government officials about the state of religion, but these are really no substitute for the kind of detailed account possible for English regions and dioceses. James Murray's careful study of the Diocese of Dublin is very mindful of these difficulties. His effective use of the rather more substantial evidence concerning the basic structure and workings of the Diocese of Dublin at the start of the Reformation movement offers a reassuringly solid foundation for the early chapters of the book. Serving as a backdrop to his account of the Reformation, there is also a convincing analysis, focusing on the senior English clergy of the diocese, of the deep-seated differences in outlook between the two nations of late medieval Ireland. This discussion usefully identifies and explores in respect of the late medieval Diocese of Dublin an ecclesiastical counterpart among the senior clergy to traditional English attitudes to the “wild Irish” that promoted a rhetoric of difference between “English civility” and “Irish savagery.” The church in Gaelic Ireland was castigated for its pervasive secularization and its failure to observe canonical norms, especially in regard to marriage and sexuality. The evident failings of Gaelic Christianity in turn inspired the mission of English clergy, such as Dean Aleyn, to defend and preserve English ecclesiastical order and canonical rectitude in line with the supposed papal bull Laudabiliter, which granted lordship over Ireland to the English crown in return for reforming the church there.

The impact of the Henrician Reformation was to call in question this traditional English mission. Murray charts the struggle of Lord Deputy St. Leger to persuade conservative senior clergy, such as the chapter of St. Patrick's cathedral, that the royal supremacy was fully compatible with the essential elements of their religious and cultural ethos. Most historians have seen the more radical phases of the Reformation, under Edward VI and Elizabeth, as presenting more serious problems of enforcement, but Murray's general argument is that the Englishry of the Pale, led by the senior clergy, ultimately rejected Protestantism and the Reformation because they saw this reform movement as irreconcilable with the Palesmen's traditional English culture and medieval Catholic identity. Certainly Murray's findings tend to undermine traditional arguments for a common devotion to Catholicism and to Ireland (faith and fatherland) as a solvent of traditional Anglo-Gaelic antagonisms in explaining the emergence of a common sense of Irish identity in the early modern period. But why should the Palesmen reject a reform movement that trumpeted its very Englishness while preserving striking liturgical continuities with pre-Reformation Catholicism if it were not that under Elizabeth they were being edged out of power in church and state? And in any case, how far may developments in the Diocese of Dublin be seen as typical of the situation elsewhere?

To be fair, Murray is very aware of these problems of interpretation. The book's later chapters are more wide-ranging. There are, for instance, lengthy sections on relations between the crown, Archbishop Dowdall, and the problems of the Reformation in the Diocese of Armagh. For the most part, however, these chapters are more directly political, placing heavy reliance on the same State Papers that have recently been interpreted so differently by other historians. And as regards some of the more striking revisions offered by Murray— for instance, his assertions about Lord Deputy St. Leger's use of canon law as a transitional legal medium for reducing Gaelic Ulster, about the particular role of Dowdall in the Marian restoration in the Diocese of Dublin, and about the close personal interest that Lord Deputy Sidney had in religious reform—the evidence offered for these arguments seems rather thin. The overall impact of the book, therefore, may well be to fuel further debate among historians rather than to provide a series of authoritative answers to some long-standing questions. We badly need a new overview of the Irish Reformation, but meanwhile Murray's painstaking analysis of the evidence for one of the—by Irish standards—best-documented, and politically the most influential, diocese will have a lasting influence on Irish Reformation studies.