Essentially the proceedings of a conference held to commemorate the centenary of Queen's University Belfast and its (unique) chair of scholastic theology this book also contains additional chapters written for the volume itself. Though slightly uneven in character it provides a useful survey of Irish scholasticism, beginning with Scottus Erugina and stretching to the twentieth century. Some of the contributions deal with an aspect of their subject's thought but most are of a more biographical/historical nature. There are notable chapters on Peter of Ireland, Richard FitzRalph and Peter Coffey. The last chapters discuss the definition and future of scholasticism and provide a set of brief biographies and a select bibliography of twentieth-century Irish scholastics. Attempts to found a medieval university in Ireland came to nothing and after the Reformation scholastic learning was excluded for other reasons. Consequently, as the individuals studied are widely dispersed across time and space and until the twentieth century did not usually flourish on Irish soil, they cannot be said, even on the broadest definition, to constitute a tradition let alone a school. A partial exception is those early modern Irish Scotists, largely Franciscans, inspired by the abandoned myth of Scotus' Irish origin. The problem of certainty of origin and the ambiguity of the term ‘Scotus’ also arises elsewhere. The various chapters will consequently appeal primarily to the reader with an interest in their subjects taken singly. The extreme modesty in the definition and prognosis given in the final chapters suggests that the outlook for Irish scholasticism is gloomy. One receives the impression that the official Thomism promoted by the Holy See in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries may have given more coherence to the work of twentieth-century Irish scholastics but their treatment in the volume is taxonomic rather than extensive. Accordingly, the reader is left wondering whether Irish neo-scholasticism ever presented any of the characteristics of a school. The tasters given in these last chapters make one wish that a few more of these figures had received individual treatment. Perhaps the recently departed Cardinal Daly (who wrote the foreword) would have made an appearance had the conference or the book appeared after his death. Nevertheless, the volume may be said to provide a useful cross section of general scholastic history and an indispensable starting point for anyone seeking to orient themselves in this area of Insular intellectual history.