As the title indicates, Reforming Galway considers the responses and changes in religious institutions, practices and power structures during a period of the fragmentation of Christian society, using St Nicholas’s collegiate church and its connection with an urban corporation as a case study. Previous scholarship on religious reform tended to be from a national perspective and too short-term to assess the impact of its successes or failures. Gillespie saw Eamon Duffy’s study, Voices of Morebath: Reformation and rebellion in an English village (2001), as a useful model to apply to an Irish context by focusing on one church or parish over time and space, to allow a more forensic analysis of religious ideas and practices of religious groups and their interactions from a local perspective. By adopting a local perspective, the book encourages historians to re-assess the debates about the Irish Reformation and its aftermath. The author strongly argues that there was not one ‘reformation or counter-reformation but a set of interlinked reformations’ (13). Gillespie contends that the Reformation continued well into the eighteenth century with no clear conclusion of success or failure.

The book is chronologically arranged into five chapters covering the period 1550–1750, commencing with a prologue offering the reader an overview of the origins of St Nicholas’s church before examining its evolution and its interconnectedness with the town’s inhabitants. An overview of the Reformation in Galway is provided in chapter 1, showing that traditional religion continued to be exercised at St Nicholas’s in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chapter 2 covers the period between 1642–90 which were the most tumultuous years faced by those attached to the church that witnessed two wars, a plague and the collapse of the local economy. Chapter 3 covers the years 1690–1750, which witnessed a golden period for the established church emerging from the political crisis of the 1680s with a sense of its role as social and religious reformers. Gillespie concludes his study showing that the nineteenth century brought profound changes for St Nicholas’s, culminating in its cessation as a collegiate church in 1870.

For St Nicholas’s to have survived and prospered, Gillespie highlights several key factors that contributed to its longevity. There is much overlap between the different treatments of St Nicholas’s, its architecture, clergymen, its economy, and forms of religious worship, which complement each other. Much of the book is concerned with how Catholic and Protestant communities negotiated boundaries, between public and private. The author sought to uncover and examine how adherents in early modern Galway managed to negotiate their differences: not always successfully. Only during periods of the real or imaginative threat of invasion did tensions arise. Indeed, Gillespie gives examples of confessional solidarity, particularly during times of crisis, citing several cases of Catholics assisting or protecting their Protestant neighbours during the 1641 Rebellion.

One of the central themes of the book is the confessional identity of Catholic and Protestant communities. Gillespie widens his approach to cast light on a wealth of perspectives on the spiritual practices of people across confessional divides in early modern Galway. In the past, Gillespie analysed many facets of early modern Irish society. One aspect he kept returning to was how early modern people encountered the supernatural world within the structures of organised religion. Gillespie provides interesting insights into the ways in which people constructed and contested communal forms of worship based around St Nicholas’s. Some older traditions, such as traditional prayers and fasting, continued to be exercised in the church, suggesting that confessional boundaries were not entrenched. As Gillespie notes, ‘in the face of rapid religious change in which ideas and identities were still being shaped, many may have felt themselves in a state of semi-separation within the Church of Ireland’ (26). The arrival of clergy trained in the new Tridentine tradition enabled the Catholic Church to establish a shadow wardenship that gave structure and coherence.

While politics and the management of patronage helped its durability, another factor was the survival of its congregation. The church maintained a respectable congregation that ensured that the Reformation did not fade away completely in Galway. One of the ways confessional identity could be formed was through a range of religious forms of worship among Protestants, including sermon-driven services, marriage and burial patterns, regular communion and a programme of moral discipline. The Book of Common Prayer was an essential glue that tied the Church of Ireland community together.

The real importance of the book is primarily on the dual histories of the established church and Catholicism. Overall, Gillespie provides an insightful and original analysis of the Protestant and Catholic reformations over the course of two centuries in a local setting, which challenges assumptions in key historiographical works on early modern religion. The book ensures that early modern historians will need to re-examine the reformations of the Protestant and Catholic Church from a local perspective. To say that this is an important book for ecclesiastical historians and students of early modern Ireland is an understatement, for it also an important study for social, local and architectural historians, and it presents a model for those who may attempt similar studies for urban or rural churches. This work is a fitting tribute to Professor Raymond Gillespie who has been one of the most prolific writers in the past four decades. This book, unfortunately, represents his final engagement in the world of early modern Ireland, having died in February 2024.