The subtitle of this monograph, the paradox of two worlds, is doubly revealing. The dualism to which it alludes could relate to the structure of the book itself, which is devoted to two quite distinct enterprises. The first is to discover the position and prevalence of the French language in medieval English Ireland, the other to examine representations of Ireland and the Irish in medieval French literature. The first project is a more historical endeavour while the second is largely a work of literary criticism, though Busby skilfully mixes historical and literary approaches throughout. In essence, this book provides not one, but two ground-breaking and very welcome contributions to Irish medieval studies.

The subtitle more directly refers to the core argument of the latter half of Busby's study: that, in his words, ‘there were two Irelands in medieval Francophonia, the country revealed to the colonists in the decades following 1169 and the land of marvels indispensable to authors and writers of romance’. He shows that, even as the English colonisation of Ireland progressed and the island was increasingly drawn into the Norman/Anglo-Norman world from the later 1160s onwards, the presentation of Ireland in literary works as otherworldly, unknown and strange persisted. A great deal was known about Ireland and the Irish, and knowledge of its geography and topography – of the city of Limerick, for example – was evident in French literature, but this familiarity did not prevent Ireland from being the literary home to marvels like giants, dragons, and people and places with unnatural healing powers. These parallel understandings of Ireland coexisted in the imaginations of Francophone authors, and presumably audiences, for centuries. In crafting his argument, Busby demonstrates the admirable breadth and depth of his knowledge about the literature of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in French and Latin, as well as, occasionally, English and German.

Busby's second key conclusion is that the French language had a ‘long and tenacious reach’ in the English colony in Ireland, and that historians have long underestimated how long it survived in the colony and how widely it was known (either in spoken or written form). Well-known literary sources like the Song of Dermot and the earl and Walling of New Ross are analysed in detail here, but a range of lesser-known sources are also used to good effect. Busby identifies some thirty gravestones in French from later thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Ireland, most of which have never before been analysed by scholars and cites the commentary of friar John Clyn to show that French survived in the colony for well over a century after the English invasion.

Even more impressive is his use of administrative sources from the colony to demonstrate that Servais Copale, an associate or perhaps co-author of Jofroi of Waterford, was resident in Waterford. It had hitherto been assumed that Jofroi, translator of several important Latin texts into French, had been resident in Paris when he made his translations, but Busby's painstaking archival detective work shows that he and Servais almost certainly conducted their collaboration in Waterford. This discovery helps to reposition Waterford, and by extension the colony generally, from a marginal position into the mainstream of the Francophone literary and cultural worlds. Opening up the study of medieval Ireland by using wider geographical and comparative frameworks has been a project of the last several decades, and the ‘British Isles’ and ‘frontier’ contexts have been particularly popular, but Busby has shown that in a literary sense at least, this positioning of Ireland in the broader Francophonia is also fruitful and justifiable. His conclusions about the parallel use of English, French, and Irish vernaculars also fit well into the growing consensus among medievalists that much of Europe was multilingual in this period.

There were some matters about which I would have welcomed greater discussion, like the audience for and dissemination of literary works and the nature of the relationship between the written and spoken word. Irish merchants who specialised in trade between Ireland and Bristol and elsewhere in western Britain would indeed have probably learned some French to facilitate their trading relationships, but I see no reason to assume that some English and Welsh merchants did not also learn Irish. The complexity of the Statutes of Kilkenny is underestimated here; hostility between the English and Irish is only one element of this famous set of legislation, which also sought to deal with the problem of ‘English rebels’ and protect the lives and property of the Irish who were at peace (among other things). Finally, readers may find that the level of detail and the very extensive quotation from and close analysis of the literary sources makes the monograph, at times, a rather dense read. Yet, this extensive quotation includes many extended passages from literary works not published in English translation, and these are undeniably valuable. Through his translations and in calling attention to these literary works, Busby provides great assistance to other scholars, especially anyone interested in perceptions of Ireland and the Irish. These minor quibbles detract little from the effectiveness of this deeply erudite, well-evidenced and wide-ranging monograph, which will become staple fare for Irish medievalists for many years to come.