The Annals of the Four Masters, compiled in the early seventeenth century, were established two hundred years later as the text which perhaps best encapsulated the vitality and precociousness of the indigenous civilization swept away by English conquest. Bernadette Cunningham in her meticulous study shows why the later reputation was acquired. It owed much, she suggests, to cursory – or even no – reading of the work. This is not a failing of which she can be accused. Better than any previous scholar, she uncovers the complex processes through which the Annals emerged and the multiplicity of sources on which they were based. Moreover, the compilation is set assuredly in the ideological, confessional, and political contexts of its time. The result is an analysis which, if occasional details may subsequently be amplified or modified, is likely in all essentials to prove definitive.

The contribution of one of the quartet of ‘masters’, Michéal Ó Cleírigh, overshadows that of the other three. Cunningham patiently establishes the nature of the collaboration between compilers and scribes, and indeed between the annalists and the custodians of the documents on which they relied. Ó Cleírigh combined several of the characteristics that underpinned the entire enterprise. He belonged to a dynasty of scholars and so inherited a familiarity with the materials from which any authoritative history of Gaelic Ireland was to be constructed. In addition, the family, although its branches stretched across much of the island, was rooted in the North West. And, indeed it was to that region, in the friary of Bundrowes (County Donegal), that the compilers headed by Ó Cleírigh returned to complete their history. As a consequence of these connections, the dominant family of the area, Uí Domhnaill (O’Donnell), featured prominently, notably in the sixteenth-century sections, with their struggles against their nearest rivals, the O’Neills.

Ó Cleírigh's position within the hereditary learned caste helped his researches. Cunningham offers a detailed account of the manuscripts used by Ó Cleírigh, their owners, and the contemporary scholars whose expertise was enlisted. What emerges is an interest shared across the deepening confessional fissures in Ireland. Scholars committed to the promotion of Protestantism, such as Archbishop James Ussher and Sir James Ware, assisted. On their side, the Four Masters eschewed the aggressive polemics that marked other literary efforts to rehabilitate an earlier Ireland. Nevertheless, the Counter-Reformation, with its redefinitions and revitalization of Catholicism, is seen as important to the conception and writing of the Annals. The Ó Cleírighs had long-standing links with the Franciscan order. Michéal Ó Cleírigh himself became a lay brother, in which capacity not only could he tap into the network of Franciscan houses within Ireland, but benefit from the dynamism pulsing through its continental institutions. Among the latter, the most important was St Anthony's College, founded at Louvain in 1607. The college was intended to energize Catholic Ireland. To that end, it sponsored a programme of instruction, which included the composition and publishing of devotional helps. More ambitious still was the intention to create an authoritative account of Christianity in Ireland, with appropriate stress on its many saints and scholars. Cunningham demonstrates that the Annals belonged to this project being overseen by John Colgan.

As well as deploying formidable technical and linguistic skills, Cunningham has a sure grasp of the secular and cultural politics of the seventeenth century. In the face of a more assertive and effective Protestant state in Ireland, the older worlds of Gaelic lordship were shrinking. Yet, throughout much of Europe, including the Spanish Netherlands, Protestantism lost ground and worshippers were recovered for Catholicism. If one function of the completed Annals would be to celebrate a vanishing order, another was to engage not just the sympathy but the active support of Catholics across Europe. For this reason, it is probable that the Annals of the Four Masters were intended for publication at Louvain. Indeed, one of the two surviving original manuscripts may have been meant for the printer's copy. However, the scale of the edition and the intervention of other priorities delayed any printing. Only in the nineteenth century, thanks to the foundation in Dublin of learned societies and the urgency in some quarters to work through an avowedly nationalist agenda, was an edition published: an edition, by John O’Donovan, which, as Cunningham gently hints, is ripe for replacing.

So, with exact scholarship and speculative brio, the minutely local, the resonantly national, and the international dimensions of the Four Masters’ work are set out. As in her earlier study of another leading Catholic historian in seventeenth-century Ireland, Seathrún Céitinn (Geoffrey Keating), Cunningham has cut away the thickets of luxuriant verbiage that have grown up to obscure these influential but complex histories. Now, thanks to her efforts, anachronism and nationalist mythologizing are banished. In the clearer light, the achievements of the Four Masters, so far from being diminished, are enhanced, as is Cunningham's reputation as the foremost expositor of these Irish historical traditions.