As the opening sections of this volume clearly illustrate, Colm Lennon has shaped significantly the trajectory of scholarship on early modern Ireland. Alongside the work of Aidan Clarke, Ciaran Brady, and more recently James Murray and Valerie McGowan-Doyle, Lennon has pointed to the importance of an ‘indigenous’ English-Irish culture, which sits out of kilter with the cultural dichotomy represented by the Gaelic Irish and the New English. The Old English had been upholders of English culture and thought in Ireland since the Norman conquest, but the community was also loyal to the traditions of medieval English Catholicism in opposition to an English crown and government which had turned to the Reformation. Here Lennon’s work has deepened our understanding of the persistent Catholicism of the Old English community through his exploration of one of its important forums in Ireland—religious confraternities. Lennon has also drawn our attention to the English patrician culture which shaped Old English values and allowed the Old English to develop a loyal but oppositional voice as the community fought for its own political and religious liberty. The present volume develops these two themes and in doing so illustrates the continued importance of Old English identity in Irish and English political culture.

The essays which address patrician culture, and the wider political languages available, demonstrate the way in which English common law and civic culture were reshaped by the question of religious division. Nessa Malone provides an account of the manner in which the lawyers Henry Burnell and Richard Netterville deployed the language of commonwealth and consent in opposition to crown prerogative powers in Ireland. Jacqueline Hill explores the way in which the different oaths, which served as tests of loyalty and trust, became a site of exchange in Dublin from 1660 to 1774. Through their practical application the space for Catholic participation in civic culture narrowed. Mary Ann Lyons engages in a finer grained vignette in examining the way in which medicine as a profession remained available to the Old English Catholic Thomas Arthur, until increased regulation closed this avenue in the 1670s. Similarly, Raymond Gillespie, in addressing Belfast and the development of its charter and the corporation there, details the manner in which Presbyterians were able to negotiate their participation in civil society and city government.

Ciaran Brady’s contribution jumps forward quite a bit, but continues to engage with the way in which ideas of liberty shaped Irish thought. The essay brilliantly illustrates the manner in which the historian Sir John Gilbert (1892–98) set about constructing a narrative of native liberty which passed from the Gaelic world to the civic communities of Ireland and was now aligned with a wider idea of progress which was bound up in contemporary English ideas of freedom.

Part of the volume, then, demonstrates how English ideas of commonwealth and liberty remained a crucial site for Old English and Irish arguments over freedom and civic government which were reshaped through use and necessity. An interesting question remains as to what this might say about how adaptive such ideas were in England. Phil Withington in his work on The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (2005) has made reference to Lennon’s work on Dublin, but the disjuncture between English, Irish, Protestant and Catholic languages of citizenship remains an underexplored avenue of comparison.

The other set of essays take up the theme of religious identity in Ireland, which quite naturally was embedded in the political culture of the island. Working in the vein of social and cultural history Bernadette Cunningham points to the ambiguous position of nuns in early modern Galway, where female piety could remain an active site of an indigenous Catholicism. In looking to the eighteenth century, Thomas O’Connor provides an interesting window onto the question of conversion by examining the experience of those Irish weavers brought to Spain in order to build the industry there, whilst Toby Barnard turns to the development of a later Counter-Reformation culture in Ireland and through the example of Father John Murphy illustrates the limitations the Irish context placed upon the development of models of saints’ lives in line with European Catholicism, like that of John of Nepomuk. On the other hand, Alan Ford contributes an incisive vignette on the exchange between Ussher and Fitzsimon, which nicely illustrates how confessional division quickly collapsed the scholarly rules governing such discussions. Other essays are more antiquarian in character with Mary Esther Clark & Gael Chenard providing an account of the religious guild of St George Martyr in Dublin, whilst Rory Masterson presents detailed evidence of the problem of impropriate benefices, after the dissolution of the Irish monasteries, which continued to be in lay hands.

Henry A. Jefferies also contributes a piece on the Tudor Reformation in Cork which marks the failure of the Reformation there to have been assured by the 1580s. Here Jefferies deploys a now stock phrase in his recent publications in drawing a direct connection between the health of the pre-Reformation church and the failure of the Irish Reformation, adding the caveat that this did not ‘make the failure of the reformations inevitable’ (p. 56). What exactly this means still remains unclear. It is noteworthy, given the direction of this volume, which engages with the languages and cultures which shaped Ireland’s civic communities, that Jefferies assumes that the Counter-Reformation succeeded simply by its presence without the need to consider the interaction of civic culture and medieval religious practice. The model of analysis provided by James Murray’s Enforcing the English Reformation in Ireland: Clerical Resistance and Political Conflict in the Diocese of Dublin, 1534–1590 (2009), in exploring the way in which the political values of the Old English community were mutually conditioned by a cultural commitment to uphold medieval English Catholicism, would have provided a model of explanation more in keeping with the subtlety of the rest of the volume.

Nevertheless, this is an apt testimony to Colm Lennon’s scholarship, which will continue to shape our discussions of English culture in both Ireland and England.