Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield's edited collection on the early modern Irish Book in English is the first contribution to Oxford's five-volume history of the Irish Book. It appears four years after volume 4 of Cambridge's History of the Book in Britain, the section edited by John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie, with Maureen Bell, and concerned with the period 1557–1695. In its geographical scope the Irish volume is evidently less ambitious, though it has many concerns in common with the British study: it is a large interdisciplinary project encompassing—and blurring the distinctions among—bibliography, literary criticism, history, and sociology. As such, much of the resulting volume has tremendous value for scholars from any disciplinary or geographical perspective interested in the development of print and its trade, the nature of the book, and its readers.

Taking the book to be “both an object and a repository of ideas” (6), the contributors to this history offer essays on print culture, the print trade, libraries and collectors, reading, the impact of print on religious change, politics, historical writing, literature, theater, and science. They also consider the presence of foreign language books and the sources used for the study. These sources are listed in a large indispensable bibliography. The most erudite and enlightening contributions come from Raymond Gillespie and Toby Barnard in their section on print culture. However, and it is difficult to interpret how problematic this is for a work that will usually be used as a reference tool, their essays inevitably cover issues that are also addressed in later contributions. Gillespie reflects on the impact of print (22–23), having already done so with Andrew Hadfield in the introduction (9–13), preempting the largest of the study's five sections: “The Impact of Print.” He also anticipates material that could be, or should have been, used in the later sections on history and religion, respectively. Barnard does the same for libraries and collecting, religious print, and print and politics—or the politics of print—though this should not detract from the high quality of his whistle-stop tour of eighteenth-century print culture, which considers all levels of print, down to the level of ballads and broadsides. Printed gallows speeches appear fleetingly in Barnard's study, as is the case throughout the essays, though there is little sustained inquiry into what is an important and fascinating genre. Repetition, anticipation, or recapitulation will not trouble the majority of readers who will no doubt reach for the volume to check facts or peruse individual entries; it may become irksome for those who read the history cover to cover.

Another frustration is the reluctance—understandable as it may be sometimes—to engage in analysis over description or to offer confident and concise conclusions. In chapter 6, for example, we end with the somewhat unedifying notion that the “prize” of the early modern Irish library lay “in the content of the collections” (110). The book would also have benefited from tighter sectional introductions and conclusions, especially to part 3 on collecting and reading. Each contributor would not then have felt the need to repeat basic background concerns, for example, that “until recently most studies … have concentrated on matters of book production and distribution” (146). Also, this would have allowed the collective well-rehearsed angst of the book scholar (the problems of measuring literacy, the variability of language [9], the personal experience of reading, understanding [or misunderstanding] that “allowed for multiple re-fashionings” [12], how print was used “in a wide variety of ways” [28], and how “it is impossible to generalize” [146]) to be cordoned off neatly, instead of diffusing and distracting throughout the text.

As ever, and this is testimony to a study that offers a lot and leaves the reader asking for more, there are areas and ideas that could be expanded. For example, how did George Conyngham read Hobbes's Leviathan in its 1733–34 rather than 1651 context (128)? What were the motivations and nuances of the politics of reprinting? James Kelly's consideration of Thomas Wentworth's relationship with print (199) is fascinating and worthy of further analysis. There could have been more sustained investigation into the purpose and interpretation of illustrations. There are plenty of references to education and schooling, but such an important topic could have benefited from its own stand-alone study. Perhaps the same could be said for the undeniably important figure of James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, whose presence is felt throughout the essays. More could have been said about topographical works. The ubiquitous term “public sphere” is invoked, with little consideration of what it denotes or engagement with the ongoing debates over how it should be treated.

There is much still that is excellent. In both breadth and detail this is an undeniable achievement. Gillespie crucially relates print to scribal culture, for example, in his consideration of a manuscript copy of Bonaventure O Eodhasa's An Teagasc Críosdaidhe (Louvain, 1611) (27), while Máire Kennedy also recognizes the value of studying commonplace books (161). Gillespie's chapter on “Reading Print, 1550–1700” is impressive in its nuanced analysis of the variety of ways one could approach texts. There is much to be learned from Colm Lennon's study of the print trade, Thomas O’Connor's essay on religious change (though one wonders how easy it is to disentangle this from the chapters on politics), and Andrew Hadfield's analysis of historical writing between 1550 and 1660. The logistics of the Irish print trade and its development are also well elucidated, from its inception ca. 1550 to a projected readership of up to 750,000 for weekly Dublin newspapers in 1774 (229).

Between these two dates, the book—the growth of print—had an impact on every aspect of Irish life. This collection will be an indispensable reference tool for those looking for details of its influence on politics, religion, science, or society at large. It is testimony to the vibrancy of the “history of the book” that the footnotes themselves are flooded with references to existing high-quality studies. Volume 3 of the Oxford series on the Irish book thus takes stock of the field as it stands, provokes questions, directs, and encourages further research in such a stimulating interdisciplinary domain.