In this book Raymond Gillespie sets out to use the story of St Nicholas’s collegiate church in Galway to chart ‘the complexities of religious change in early modern Ireland’ (p. 9). However, he admits that ‘the evidence is fragmentary and the frame within which it sits is often poorly understood so conclusions drawn from it must be tentative’ (p. 29). Gillespie was one of the most eirenic of scholars to study religion in early modern Ireland. However, his well-intentioned approach to writing history sometimes obfuscated the bitter realities of life in Ireland for its indigenous peoples as they were subjected to a form of British imperialism that was fiercely Protestant as well as racialist in nature. Strikingly, there is no discussion in this book of the impact of the religious wars waged by the English/British state against the local population. In fact, in a very remarkable phrase Gillespie refers to Cromwell’s genocidal army arriving in Ireland simply ‘to secure law and order in the country’ (p. 99).

Gillespie opens his book by criticising ‘historians of Ireland’ for judging that the Reformation had failed in Ireland by the end of the sixteenth century. He claims that the ‘Reformation was not over by 1600 but only beginning. The processes of change initiated in the sixteenth century would continue to be played out into the eighteenth century without a clear end point of “success” or “failure”’ (p. 13). He reckons that other historians judged wrongly because they ‘investigated these changes from a national basis and from a confessional perspective that has usually been short term in its approach’ (pp. 12–13). However, the failure of the Reformation in Ireland is an inescapable fact of Irish history, one whose fundamental importance cannot be gainsaid. Its failure in Galway could not have been more complete, however much Gillespie’s prologue obfuscates that reality. He highlights the report of an Englishman to the effect that in 1587 the inhabitants of Galway were better at attending Protestant services than the people of any other town in Ireland – without mentioning the role of the garrison of English troops in the city and the use of heavy fines to force people to attend them. He fails to mention that at the end of the sixteenth century only ‘a handful of men, none of their chiefest’, attended Protestant services in Galway.

Gillespie states that there was ‘little demand or enthusiasm’ for Catholic liturgies in Galway (pp. 24–5). Yet he admits that the people of Galway continued to sponsor communities of Augustinian, Dominican and Franciscan friars in their city in the 1560s. He never mentions that Franciscan friars convened a general council in Galway on St Francis’s Day in 1572 with enthusiastic support from the populace – while the very few ‘godly’ felt obliged to maintain a very low profile. An Irish Jesuit reported in 1574 that there were only fifteen Protestants in Galway, a city of some 3,000 individuals. Though Gillespie strains hard to convey an impression of Protestant progress in Galway the failure of the Reformation was comprehensive in scale before the end of the sixteenth century, and that failure was replicated in cities and towns right across Ireland.

Nor was the failure of the Reformation in Galway reversed subsequently. Gillespie writes that forty Protestants can be traced in Galway in the early 1640s – made up of English soldiers and their dependants, English officials and clergymen, and an assortment of English craftsmen and their families. He suggests that those forty English Protestants may have represented a population of around 200–250 individuals – equivalent to between 3.3 percent and 4.1 per cent of Galway’s 6,000 inhabitants at that time – but he never explains the basis on which he extrapolated those inflated numbers. He claims twice, on the basis of a dubious comment by a stranger, that 33 per cent of the people in Galway – 2,000 individuals no less – were Protestants in 1673. However, that wildly anomalous guesstimate was contradicted by the local Protestant bishop who in 1680 referred to the ‘few’ Protestants there (p. 109). A little later one of Galway’s Protestant vicars reported that Protestants comprised 6.25 per cent of the city’s population. In the 1740s Protestants were reckoned to have comprised between 2.44 per cent and 3.23 per cent of the population, while a census conducted in 1834 reckoned the Protestant population at 2 per cent. Those statistics contradict Gillespie’s claim that ‘the long Reformation” had some measure of success in urban Galway’ (p. 183). The small minority who constituted ‘Protestant Galway’ in the early modern period was comprised almost exclusively of immigrants who came from England in the seventeenth century. As Gillespie acknowledges, ‘there were very few [Irish] converts’ (p. 175), and those who did ‘convert’ had a habit of reverting to Rome (pp. 61–2).

The exaggerated emphasis on Protestant progress in Galway has as its corollary the less than satisfactory discussion of the religion of the overwhelming majority of Galwegians. Gillespie posits a false dichotomy between ‘the austere demands of the Council of Trent, imported by clergy trained in the Irish colleges of continental Europe’ and ‘traditional beliefs and practices … such as pilgrimages to nearby holy wells and veneration of local saints, some of whom were of doubtful historicity’ (p. 12). Historians have long highlighted the very strong continuities that characterised early modern Catholicism across Europe. Pilgrimages and the veneration of local saints were key instruments of the Counter-Reformation, even in Bohemia and the Palatinate. The establishment of St Nicholas’s as a collegiate church in 1484 was but one manifestation of Catholic reform in Ireland before the Reformation – alongside its many chantry chapels, the popularity of confraternities and the extraordinary burgeoning of the mendicant orders. The three orders of friars in Galway ensured that the populace was au fait with the latest trends in continental Catholicism. In fact, the prior responsible for founding the Augustinian friary in Galway in 1508 became one of the very first Irish clergymen known to have been inspired by Luther, a fellow Augustinian.

One of the two best parts of this book is Gillespie’s consideration of the Catholic restoration in Galway under the auspices of the Catholic confederation which governed most of Ireland during the ‘War of the three kingdoms’. It is both detailed and convincing, based as it is on a large volume of evidence generated by local participants in that heady but ultimately transient episode in the city’s religious history. The other highlights the detailed dissection of the Protestant community in Galway after the Williamite revolution. Gillespie exhibits a very definite bias in favour of the Anglicans, with their ‘measured, if rather introverted spirituality’ (p. 12). On the other hand, he writes that ‘The dissident threat [posed by Protestant non-conformists] … continued to lurk in the background’ (p. 134). And Catholics, he wrote, posed ‘equal dangers lurking outside’ (p. 135). Such comments reflect the risks of historians adopting the viewpoints of the authors whose writings they draw upon. All in all, this is an interesting book but it must be read with caution.