Peadar Slattery's Social Life in Pre-Reformation Dublin, 1450–1540 is a scholarly account of late medieval Dublin that will appeal to both academic and general readerships: not only does Slattery successfully bring the city to life by evoking its sights, sounds and smells, and its varied populace across the social spectrum, but his extensive research in a rich vein of urban records and recent studies of topography, archaeology, art, and architecture yields a wealth of detail on Dublin's administration, trade and commerce, social orders, and pre-Reformation religious culture. Slattery blends these two approaches together to provide a highly readable and engrossing urban portrait that is splendidly presented, delineated by many original maps, and lavishly illustrated in plates and photographs of aspects of the civic heritage.

The context for examining the city's social groups is set by Slattery's depiction of a thriving and dynamic economy in the late Middle Ages, calling into question perhaps suggestions in previous studies of late medieval commercial and demographic decline. Using the evidence of contemporary wills and franchise rolls, Slattery asserts the vibrancy of Dublin's hinterland as a source of food and labor. Particularly instructive is the innovative mapping of Dublin's rural fringe, showing the interplay of urban and farming interests and of commercial and credit dealings throughout the county.

A highlight of the book is the attention Slattery directs to Dublin's overseas trade with British ports, most notably that of Chester. Through a study of customs accounts and other records of the English city, Slattery documents the volume and types of cross-channel shipping; its crews and merchant passengers, both male and female; and the nature and value of its cargoes. Changes in both fashion and morphology in the earlier sixteenth century appear to have affected the role of Chester as both an entrepôt for Irish textiles and a conduit for trade between Dublin and the north midlands of England.

Slattery's examination of the role of Dublin's trade guilds reveals how order and discipline were imposed upon the urban workshops and markets and how a system of welfare was developed. Bestriding the institutions of exchange and charity was the mercantile patriciate whose ethos controlled and characterized the councils of the civic assembly. These leaders attempted to grapple with a range of issues (with varying degrees of success), including disposing of human and animal waste, providing a pure and plentiful water supply, and organizing a system of defense behind walls and towers through civic watches and through periodic forays against belligerent neighboring clans.

Slattery addresses the contribution of religious culture to forging a civic community in two chapters on the condition of the church in Dublin. Confirming the work of Henry Jefferies, the picture that emerges is of a traditional institution that was responsive to popular religious trends. This is seen in the pattern of endowment of parish churches and monastic houses by laypeople, the devotional tenor of arrangements for funeral rituals and obituary practices, and the pattern of foundations of chantries and religious fraternities that satisfied the zeal for intercessory services for the living and the dead. Slattery is particularly interesting on the development of liturgical music in the later fifteenth century, which enhanced the experience of worship in Dublin's two cathedrals and churches, and in the performance of religious dramas that spilled out into the public civic spaces in the form of processions, and mystery and morality plays. In presenting the material on ecclesiastical culture of Dublin city and environs, Slattery's own reconnaissance of buildings, belfries, and chapels is notable.

In his concluding chapter, Slattery adumbrates how the urban authorities and associations were circumstanced in facing the political and religious challenges of Tudor reform from the mid-1530s. The damage to the physical fabric caused by the dissolution of the monasteries, coupled with the iconoclasm visited on relics and shrines, no doubt affected the city, but its resources of professional and associational bonding, as Slattery points out, mitigated ecclesiastical and political changes. For example, religious fraternities were not officially abolished by royal decree in Ireland, and many managed to survive the early Reformation; these became instrumental in the adoption of counterreform and recusancy by the citizenry in the later sixteenth century.

Social Life in Pre-Reformation Dublin contributes to an understanding of how the social, economic, and cultural roots of the vibrant and successful early modern city of Dublin were strongly enough established in the decades prior to 1540 to withstand the political and religious imbroglio of the mid- to later sixteenth century. Slattery's understated arguments will undoubtedly encourage other scholars to pursue the issues as saliently and interestingly as he does in his eloquent study.