The author of this erudite work begins his exposition with a startling statistic. Over the course of the nineteenth century, around 10,000 books, along with hundreds of ephemeral items, were published in Welsh. In contrast, only around 150 books and a few dozen ballad sheets and very little political material were printed in the Irish language. The contrast between the two languages is all the more marked when it is remembered that in 1800, there were about 400,000 Welsh speakers as opposed to as many as 3 million speakers of Irish. Niall Ó Ciosáin calculates that approximately 500 times as many more books were published per speaker in Wales than in Ireland. Moreover, this contrast in terms of the production of print items is further heightened when the demographic trajectories of both languages are taken into account. By 1900, the number of Welsh speakers had increased to 930,000, while over the same period, the number of Irish-speakers decreased to 640,000. Indeed, in a characteristically perceptive observation, Ó Ciosáin proposes that the contrast between Wales and Ireland in terms of the impact of print raises questions as to established notions of cultural and linguistic integration within the British Isles. Essentially, it was assumed that proximity to the metropolitan centre more readily engendered assimilation and integration. On this basis, Welsh should have declined more rapidly than Irish.

Conventionally, it has been assumed that there was an axiomatic link between Protestantism and print. Importantly, however, Ó Ciosáin confidently questions such an assumption. It seems that a Catholic missionary emphasis might have been just as effective as Protestant evangelical activity in the case of non-official languages. For instance, Jesuit priests organised a series of missions among speakers of Breton in the seventeenth century which resulted in a printed devotional literature in Breton and engendered a considerable popular literacy which prevailed down to the twentieth century. Astutely, Ó Ciosáin highlights how a comparative context of interpretation suggests that it was not so much a particular Christian denomination which was critical in terms of literacy but the degree to which a denominational cohort deployed a vernacular print culture in the service of devotional or evangelical objectives. Therefore, the broader value of Ó Ciosáin’s work derives from its focus on the relationship between print cultures of four Celtic languages and those of western Europe more broadly, as well as relationships between Irish, Gaelic, Welsh and Breton. Hitherto, most of the studies of print in the Celtic languages have engaged with a specific language and culture on a discrete basis. Accordingly, Ó Ciosáin argues that a critical rationale for such a comparative exercise in the case of the Celtic languages centres on the fact that the immediate comparison is between local vernaculars and metropolitan languages (English or French). In effect, this study is premised on what is termed a ‘broad similarity’ (5) between the phenomena of minority language communities during the period 1700–1900 within two of Europe’s most advanced and centralised states.

In respect of literacy in the Celtic languages, Ó Ciosáin provides new historical insights through his analysis of comparative literacy levels across the four languages in question. For instance, he makes a convincing case for the concept of biliteracy where reading ability can be transferred across languages on account of relative similarity between orthographic conventions. For example, Irish speakers who learned to read in English consequently acquired greater literacy in Irish. Moreover, Ó Ciosáin argues shrewdly that the supply of texts was crucial to the exercise of literacy. Importantly, he maintains that popular material published in Irish in the nineteenth century was produced with a biliterate readership in mind. Such texts did not emulate the distinctive orthography or manuscript format characteristic of Gaelic scribal culture. In their deployment of roman rather than Gaelic script, they appealed to Irish speakers who had first learned to read in English. By way of confirmation of this point, Ó Ciosáin observes that in the preface to one edition of Tadhg Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin’s highly popular and frequently reprinted early nineteenth-century work in Irish known as the Pious miscellany, it was asserted that Irish speakers who were able to read English could ‘master the work in its present form’ (16). Interestingly, Ó Ciosáin argues on the basis of data collected under the auspices of the 1841 census that there was a significant potential reading public in Irish already by the late eighteenth century in the southern counties of Cork, Limerick and Waterford where Irish was widely spoken. It is no coincidence, therefore, that almost all the editions of Ó Súilleabháin’s collection of religious poems in Irish were printed in Munster. Niall Ó Ciosáin is to be congratulated on the publication of this learned and nuanced study which will be of considerable interest and utility to scholars working in areas as diverse as Celtic studies, cultural and social history and the history of the book more generally.