Historians of early modern Ireland rarely benefit from a sustained body of archival material pertaining to a single individual; where these have survived, they tend to reflect the lives of Ireland's governors or the carefully-archived accounts of aristocratic families. Those historians who have done most to reconstruct the wider world(s) of the period have done so through skilled, careful contextualisation of what little remains, building with those few bricks that have been scattered by time and conflict.

Eamon Darcy's meticulous and fascinating look at the world of Thomas Ward, Church of Ireland dean of Connor, is a prime example of this sort of reconstruction. Shifting away from the deep well of the 1641 Depositions which formed the basis of his first monograph (The Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, Woodbridge 2013), Darcy adopts as his focus the ninety-eight-page abstract of the 1694 proceedings which resulted in Ward being stripped of his office for adultery (he died in the following year). Held in the rich archives of the Representative Church Body Library, Dublin, these proceedings have allowed Darcy vividly to detail the various, swirling elements of local and national life through the testimonials of those who knew (or at least, claimed to know) Ward and his reputation.

While only fifty pages in length, Darcy's analysis covers a commendable range of subjects. Successive chapters consider the local and religious contexts of Ward's operations, including the pastoral and institutional challenges of the Church of Ireland; the ‘fame’ (drawing from work by Fenster and Smail) which surrounded and defined Ward within Ulster through oral and written networks; and finally the dynamics of sex and scandal in early modern Ireland. The last of these, in particular, breaks new ground by looking at the languages through which Ward's conduct was condemned through local testimony. Glimpses of the women who had the misfortune of knowing Ward find voice in such accounts, adding to the scant surviving record of sexual assault, rape and bastardy in early modern Ireland.

Befitting a publication in the Maynooth Studies in Local History, Darcy is always careful to speak across geographical scales: the book will appeal as much to historians of Ulster as those of early modern Ireland or Europe generally. At times the brevity of the study begs further analysis: for instance, Darcy's description of Ulster as ‘cosmopolitan’ in composition by the end of the seventeenth century, and the subsequent impact of such a change on Ward's world, receives comparatively short shrift. Ward's apparent position at the coalescence of these worlds at times hints at more than it reveals. Such alluring questions, however, testify to the strength of Darcy's work in bringing together what little is known of the world which left us this rendition of Ward.