This collection of essays results from a conference in honor of historian Aidan Clarke held in Trinity College, Dublin, in 2000. The collection is composed of fifteen essays, plus the editors’ introduction, contributed by Clarke's friends, former students, and colleagues.

Following the editors’ introduction, Ciaran Brady's contribution (chap. 2) focuses on a posthumous statute of attainder against Shane O’Neill passed by the Irish parliament of 1596. Brady suggests the bill was introduced as part of a number of measures that Sir Henry Sidney unsuccessfully tried to get passed in order “to establish a new foundation for English sovereignty and allegiance to the English crown in Ireland” (28–29). This analysis counters the idea that the attainting of O’Neill was motivated by vindictiveness against the dead rebel or was simply a ploy to confiscate his lands, and it highlights the difficulties with which the English colonialists were often faced in implementing their will in Ireland.

The collection's third chapter by Harold O’Sullivan employs a regional focus, as opposed to the national scale of much Irish history and the local focus of antiquarian and genealogical research. By focusing on the marchlands of southeast Ulster from the early fourteenth century to the 1641 rising, O’Sullivan hopes to give “particular attention to the ways in which the sequence and interaction of political events were not only influenced by, but themselves served to shape, the distinctive characteristics of a region” (50).

In chapter 4, Helga Robinson-Hammerstein attempts to demonstrate how four European universities established in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including Trinity College, were used to further the political aims of regulating the “common good” within the territories they served. This effort, according to Robinson-Hammerstein, is a corrective for a lack of attention to this purpose in university studies both in Ireland and Europe as a whole. Brian Jackson also discusses universities, again including Trinity College, in his contribution (chap. 5) as he outlines how the differing modes of argument utilized by Henry Fitzsimon and John Rider in a debate that raged for some four years in the early seventeenth century was reflective of a tradition of argument between Protestant and Catholic apologists. A final contributor to address the university is Alan Ford, who reviews the Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud's actions to reform Trinity College as chancellor of the institution in the 1630s (chap. 7).

Essays by R. J. Hunter (chap. 6) and Sarah Barber (chap. 13) highlight instances in which the colonialist intentions of the principle players are clear. As suggested by the collection's editors, “to be sure, the main outlines of the conventional narrative (that of conquest and colonization) must survive in any reinterpretation, if only because … so many of the New English themselves … were determined that it should be so” (23). Hunter details the fortunes of the Hatton family from when the Protestant Reverend Edward Hatton acquired an estate in County Fermanagh in the early 1600s until the Restoration. Barber's work compares Fray Jaime de Bleda's chronicle regarding the 1609 expulsion of Spaniards of Moorish descent, los Moriscos, and debates between Richard Lawrence and Vincent Gookin about a proposal to relocate many Irish to the west of the island, which were published in London in 1655.

Chapters 8, 9, and 10, by Jane Ohlmeyer, Bríd McGrath, and Micheál Ó Siochrú, respectively, all address Irish parliamentary politics in the 1640s. Ohlmeyer demonstrates the effective part played by peers of the Irish parliament in the actions taken against former Lord Deputy Thomas Wentworth and, yet, how ineffective the body was in the face of the 1641 uprising. McGrath outlines the steps taken by Wentworth to control the elections for and composition of the Irish Parliament of March 1640 and a resultant disinterest of people to hold seats in that body. By June of that year, however, in Wentworth's absence, an opportunity for resistance and advancement of goals was perceived, and a “coalition of interests” (205) began to emerge that allowed effective action on particular issues until the beginning of the uprising. And, Ó Siochrú focuses on peace negotiations between the earl of Ormond and the Catholic Confederates after the 1641 Rebellion. The independent Irish parliament addressed in these chapters has been, according to the collection's editors, “too often discounted in the narrative of conquest and rebellion” (24).

Robert Armstrong's chapter (chap. 11) on the Church of Ireland in the mid-1600s and Geoffrey Parker's contribution (chap. 12) looking at the Spanish and Stuart monarchies during that same period both look at external forces that affected these institutions during the period under investigation. Armstrong focuses on how the Catholicism of the Confederates, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and English Parliament impinged on the Church of Ireland in various ways. Parker begins by looking at how the weather, periods of heavy rain and drought, and a “Little Ice Age” (260) propagated a number of civil disturbances and goes on to list no less than seventeen common characteristics of seven separate rebellions.

Like the piece by Barber discussed above, Toby Barnard's contribution (chap. 14) addresses Richard Lawrence. In this work, Lawrence is the exclusive focus as Barnard outlines Lawrence's shift from a position of support for English interests in Ireland to one that indicts England and the English government for policies damaging to Ireland's interests.

In the penultimate chapter, Raymond Gillespie considers the various readings to which Sir John Temple's The Irish Rebellion had been put from its 1646 publication to the end of the seventeenth century. Patrick Kelly details the argument of William Molyneux's The Case of Ireland (1698) to evaluate the author's approach to the concepts of conquest and consent. In making his case, Kelly notes the ways in which Molyneux utilized the statute of attainder of O’Neill that was the focus of Ciaran Brady's contribution, bringing the collection full circle in a sense.

As outlined above, many of the contributions are correctives for biases and norms found in past historical research on their particular subject matters. However, few overtly claim to move “beyond the old framework of conquest and colonization” (27), which the editors claim to be the common principle underlying the collection. The varied subject matter of the contributions makes organization difficult. Though the editors do the work of drawing out connections between and resonances of a number of the works in their introduction, the only organization they offer in the end is a loose chronological order. This makes the book seem like a bit of a mishmash. By contrast, as a collection of stand-alone essays it has something to offer everyone with an interest in early modern Ireland. This characteristic of the collection makes it a wonderful tribute to an historian who, according to the dedication at the front of the book, prizes the widest dissemination and utilization of history.