The Irish Brigade in the Pope's army, 1860: faith, fatherland and fighting by Donal Corcoran is the most recent published study of the 1,300 Irishmen who volunteered to defend the Papal States during the wars of Italian reunification. The book is made up of an introduction, eleven chapters and an immense appendix, running to sixty-two pages, nearly one-third of the book, a short bibliography and an index. The latter part principally comprises lists of 1,131 believed-to-be members of the brigade, and their passports, sponsors and awarded medals.

The aim of the book is to ‘encourage people to search for medals and research the ancestors’ involvement in the 1860 war’. The principal question answered is simply, ‘who were the members of the Irish brigade and why did they go to Italy?’ Thus, it seeks to provide a detailed account of the Irishmen who volunteered, their possible motivations and the facilitators of their endeavour, plus their experiences going to, in and coming back from Italy. To do this the author draws heavily upon four sources or source groups: the 1929 history of the brigade by G. F.-H. Berkeley; the 2008 chapter by Ciarán O'Carroll; three Irish, Catholic/nationalist newspapers; and several ecclesiastical archives in Dublin and Italy, all of which have been heavily utilised by past brigade histories.

This research is not overly original, with nearly fifty published works being produced since the 1910s, but especially in the last two decades. While the author can be forgiven for not referencing the 2018 Ph.D. dissertation of Florry O'Driscoll on Irish Risorgimento soldiers, he could have engaged with his several published essays. This would have reinforced the validity and timeliness of the book, instead it suggests a lack of awareness of the state of the art, as does the failure to engage with work of Anne O'Connor and Mary Jane Cryan's The Irish and English in Italy's Risorgimento (2011), which also details the exploits of the brigade and the political and religious context and provides a list of some of those who served.

Throughout the book is beset by one stark contradiction. This begins on page three, when the author declares that the Crimean War, 1854–6 ‘must have been the greatest influence on the men who went to Italy’ in 1860. However, the author summarises that ‘greatest influence’ into a half a paragraph before discussing several other motivating factors and then largely ignoring the Crimean War for the duration of the book. Neither David Murphy, Ireland and the Crimean War (Dublin, 2002) nor Paul Huddie, The Crimean War and Irish society (Dublin, 2015) are referenced. The former is a comparable survey of the Irish soldiers in the period (some of whom served in 1860), while the latter paints a more complex picture of post-Famine Irish society (like those of brigade researchers Jennifer O'Brien and Anne O'Connor) than Corcoran does.

Two assessments can be made of this work. First, for a general audience it will be a useful text, offering an accessible and (through chapters one to four) informative, albeit oversimplified, introduction to this period. Its pre-revisionist tone and contextualisation will be familiar to many non-academics. The book also has the potential to be a useful starting point for genealogical research. Second, the book's tone may grate with some academics, and while the lack of novelty of this work will make it unappealing to those who research the period, its saving grace is that its bibliography provides the most recent, although in no way complete, focal point of sources on Ireland and the Risorgimento.

This book will be unusual to military historians and enthusiast readers because it contains lengthy social, political and religious contextual chapters but no images, either of the officers or soldiers, their uniforms or weapons or the battle sites. There is only a solitary, rudimentary map of Italy. This contrasts with most previous studies. The inclusion of detailed maps would aid comprehension of the very detailed manoeuvres of armies and battalions, the numerous cities, towns and regions, and the many defensive and topographical features of battle sites detailed by the author. The book is very well-written, with a coherent narrative and clear structure and flow. Unfortunately, the issues identified above are problematic. It is a commendable attempt to create not only a new but also a low-cost monograph on this subject of the Irish Brigade in the Papal army in 1860, which brings this subject out of the Irish military and local history journals to a broader academic and popular audience.