Appropriately enough for a volume in which the essayists grapple with the subject of elusive definitiveness in later seventeenth-century Ireland, the subtitle of this book has two separate sources. One usage, that of a contemporary legist, relates to the constitutional relationship between Ireland and England, while the other, employed by a nineteenth-century Irish historian, refers explicitly to possible reversals of the extensive land transfers of the early 1660s. The editor, who is commendably light-handed in terms of his synthesising of themes, prefaces the work apologetically by referring to a ‘lack of cohesion and centrality of purpose’, but, at the very least, it successfully conceptualises a hitherto rather interjacent period in Irish history.

Settlement is the leitmotif of the book, whether in terms of the political, ecclesiastical and landed arrangements under Charles ii and James ii, or in the broader, more intangible sense of ‘the settling of the minds’ (p. 170) of the inhabitants in circumstances of raised and dashed expectations from the 1660s to the 1690s. The source of these resentments and uncertainties was the fateful compromise represented by the 1662 and 1665 acts of settlement and explanation, which were designated by a contemporary as an ‘affair of policy rather than justice’ on the part of Charles ii. The authors approach the history of consequent loss and gain from a variety of perspectives and with multiple methodologies. Kevin McKenny's painstaking analysis of a database of the cadastral surveys of the 1650s and 1660s establishes the proportionality of the social and religious composition of the landholding groups in the Restoration period, something that was measured at the time with less precise results by Sir William Petty, the subject of a fascinating study by Ted McCormick. While the efforts of Roger Boyle, the earl of Orrery, to exculpate himself from association with Cromwell in the form of a drama written for the restored monarch are examined perceptively by John Cronin, more considered, if conflicting, versions of the historical past from near-contemporary to modern are surveyed expertly by Michael Perceval-Maxwell. And an assessment of the impact of the Restoration on the Quakers in Ireland by Sandra Maria Hynes offers an insight into how a non-established confessional grouping adapted to the prevailing climate.

A persistent question that runs through many of the essays is the extent to which the Restoration in Ireland was inherently sectarian and the landed settlements based solely on religious affiliation. A progenitor of these views was Bishop Nicholas French of Ferns whose contemporary pamphlets on the injustice and repressiveness of the Cromwellian and Carolingian settlements for Irish Catholics are analysed here by Jason McHugh. There is cause for reflection, however, in the evidence of the survival rate of Catholic Old English families as landowners in the eastern counties, for example, the membership of Catholics in the new landed interest after 1665, and the continuity at the apex of Irish society between the pre-rebellion period and Charles ii's reign. Coleman Dennehy's own essay on the Irish parliament, 1661–6, adumbrates a convergence of political interests based on regional and familial ties, which transcended confessional differences between Anglicans and Roman Catholics, and a similar conjuncture occurred in the parliament of 1689 according to Eoin Kinsella in his piece on land possession under the late Start monarchy. Although the volume lacks an essay specifically devoted to the Church of Ireland under the Restoration, there is no real suggestion herein of any evangelising dynamism on the part of established church figures. For Catholics, as for other non-conformists, including the Quakers, the regime was mainly one of de facto toleration, interspersed with bouts of repression, although there was a period of real hope for political and religious tolerance in the period 1667–73, as chronicled by Anne Creighton, and for full emancipation after 1685.

On the other hand, internal fissures within the main confessional groups are shown here to have been detrimental to supposed religious solidarity. Among the Catholic clergy, the repercussions of the controversy over the Remonstrance of 1661, which proffered toleration in return for acceptance of royal sovereignty and rejection of papal temporal claims, fuelled older contentions between Gaelic and Old English, and Jansenism and Romanism, and continued to cause division down to the 1670s. While Bishop French sought a full restoration of the Roman Church in his diplomatic campaign, other Catholic episcopal figures such as Peter Talbot and Oliver Plunkett subscribed to Catholic loyalism. The lay leadership too was riven with differences over the land settlement of the 1660s, with Catholic landowners who were part of the new interest, led by Colonel John Fitzpatrick and Nicholas Taaffe, the earl of Carlingford, opposing the efforts of those such as Richard Talbot, duke of Tyrconnell, who wished to overturn the arrangement on behalf of the unrestored proprietors. These conflicts flared particularly bitterly during the Jacobite period down to 1690. There was a similar lack of cohesiveness on the Protestant side, caused notably by the rise of strong Presbyterianism in Ulster during these decades.

While the instances of confessional fissipariousness no less than those of inter-denominational collaboration adduced herein are suggestive of very tentative patterns at the most, the essays do indicate the complexity of social, political and cultural relations in the period. The collection is framed by a problematising introduction by Tim Harris who sets Restoration Ireland in a wide geographical and historiographical context, and by a reflective afterword by Toby Barnard. The former posits many external forces that could be productively studied in order to cast Restoration Ireland into higher relief, while the latter points to many lines of scholarly enquiry into non-élite groups and milieux that could broaden an understanding of Irish society in the period. A collection of essays such as this, which originated in a series of conference papers, will inevitably contain lacunae, but it undoubtedly stakes out the ground for a major, multi-faceted study of later seventeenth-century Ireland.