This collection of essays was commissioned to honour the historian Colm Lennon, and its thematic and chronological boundaries reflect the prolific scholarly output of its honorand. Appointed in 1978 as a lecturer in history at what would become the National University of Ireland Maynooth, Colm Lennon taught and wrote there for over thirty years before retiring in 2010. During this time he established a reputation as one of early modern Ireland's most important and well-respected interpreters, and his research ranges across such themes as the development of urban centres, Catholic recusancy and Counter-Reformation, and the changing self-identity of Old English elites in response to the Tudor conquest. Lennon's scholarly output is well-documented by a lengthy ‘select list’ of publications which supplements the present volume and includes more than a dozen monographs and edited collections, almost one hundred articles and shorter pieces, and a text which many regard as ‘the standard survey of Ireland in the sixteenth century’ (p. 18). In addition to this bibliographic record, the present collection also contains three introductory tributes to Lennon, including a helpful and sure-handed assessment of his historiographical significance by Steven G. Ellis.

This prefatory material establishes a context within which one may better appreciate what is, in the main, a lively and informative set of twelve essays that both celebrate and further Lennon's scholarly legacy. For example, Lennon's keen interest in the intersection of religious identity and urban history and his willingness to ‘pionee[r] effective methodologies … for dealing with the scattered information available on his subjects’ (p. 11) are all clearly seen in Henry Jefferies's study of religious identity among urban elites in sixteenth-century Cork. Wrestling with an ‘incredibly depleted’ primary source base (p. 51), Jefferies works creatively with maps, wills and archaeological evidence to reconstruct the town's responses to Tudor reformations.

Other essays are equally resourceful. Bernadette Cunningham's study of ‘Nuns and their networks in early modern Galway’ synthesises a diverse range of sources to elucidate how the understudied experiences of Galway's several convents intersect with the wider currents of confessional conflict shaping the town's development. As one would expect, such confessional conflict is a recurring theme among these essays. Mary Ann Lyons, for instance, considers how the varied professional fortunes of the physician Thomas Arthur reflected changing religious and political conditions in Dublin and Limerick. By reconstructing how ‘Arthur successfully tested and negotiated the bounds of Old English liberty’, Lyons demonstrates both the possibilities and limitations for Catholic professionals during the turbulent seventeenth century (p. 88). The relationship between professional practice and religious identity features again in Nessa Malone's chapter, a study of two Irish-born lawyers who challenged Elizabethan policy that ran counter to Old English interests. Like other essays in this collection, Malone's research echoes that of Colm Lennon both thematically and methodologically; in response to scant archival evidence, Malone employs ‘the prosopographical methods so effectively used by’ Lennon in his own study of early modern Dublin (p. 90).

One of the volume's most fascinating inclusions is a new critical edition of manuscript material that details a June 1600 debate between an Irish Jesuit, Henry Fitzsimon, and a nineteen-year-old James Ussher, then studying at Trinity College, Dublin. Introduced and set in both historical and historiographical context by Alan Ford, the specific content of the debate – a dispute over whether the pope might actually be the AntiChrist – is rather less relevant than the fact that it happened at all; for this debate was the first of its kind to take place on Irish soil, and the manuscripts transcribed here offer ‘a rare verbatim record of what took place in disputation’ (p. 119).

While most of the essays follow Ford in focusing on Catholic-Protestant tension, Raymond Gillespie explores the rather different religious and political dynamics playing out in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Belfast. Unlike far older medieval towns like Dublin, Kilkenny and Cork, Ulster settlements were often the result of early seventeenth-century plantation schemes. As a result, confessional conflict within these jurisdictions was dominated by clashes among Protestant groups. Taking Belfast as its case study, Gillespie's essay examines such intra-Protestant conflict between Presbyterians and the established Church of Ireland, a clash which was, Gillespie argues, at least in some ways ‘as complex as the tensions resulting from Catholic-Protestant cohabitation on which most historians have focused’ (p. 173).

In the collection's final essay, Ciaran Bradley offers a finely drawn portrait of John Gilbert, a man who, in Bradley's estimate, preceded Colm Lennon as the acknowledged ‘doyen of the historians of early modern Dublin’ (p. 249). By including this study of the nineteenth-century Gilbert (1829–98), the editors have, as they acknowledge in the preface, strayed well beyond the promised date range of 1500–1750. This chronological flexibility appears again in Mary Esther Clark and Gael Chenard's study of the Dublin religious guild of St George Martyr, a piece that is arguably more late medieval than early modern. Also, given that the collection intends to examine ‘urban Ireland’, some readers may be surprised to discover that Rory Masterson's essay considers monasteries in ‘the western liberty of Meath’, and Thomas O'Connor's examination of Dublin migrants is set almost entirely in eighteenth-century Spain. Though the thematic, geographical, and chronological diversity on offer here understandably and intentionally reflects the wide-ranging interests of the volume's honorand, readers expecting a more tightly focused collection should be forewarned. But, none the less, by assembling essays that are both broadly conceived and deeply researched, Religion and politics in urban Ireland makes a welcome contribution to our understanding of early modern Ireland and a fitting tribute to one of the field's leading voices.