Any scholar who seeks to explore the workings of the law in seventeenth-century Ireland confronts a particularly onerous challenge: judicial sources that have been lost or destroyed make for a necessarily impartial record, particularly when it comes to borough or manorial courts, or personnel not belonging to the upper reaches of the law. Judicial decisions and precedents that applied to the law in Ireland were not comprehensively collected until the eighteenth century, while new entrants and recruits to the profession are still incompletely known. On the other hand, biographies of legal practitioners yield more information, and have been effectively mined by scholars such as F. E. Ball, Toby Barnard and Coleman Dennehy. Hopefully the excavations undertaken by the Beyond 2022 Project/Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury will yield more bounty, even if they do not entirely return us to an Eden of historical sources lost to us. It is therefore no small achievement that the essays contained in Law and revolution in seventeenth-century Ireland uncover so much, and provide us with a new legal prism through which to understand the momentous developments of that turbulent age.

A short review cannot do justice to each of the contributions, nor to Coleman Dennehy's stewardship as editor in cohering them as a collection that began as a conference sponsored by the Irish Legal History Society. Many commonalities appear throughout the essays, however, as they utilise law as a category of analysis in approaching key events of the century. Legal procedures and the structures in which they were embedded is one theme, treated by Bríd McGrath in her thorough discussion of electoral law, procedure, implementation and remedy, and Colum Kenny's outstanding exploration of King's Inns under Cromwell. Biography looms large as well, and is used to illuminate broader issues around land claims in the early years of the Restoration. Particularly noteworthy is Philip Walsh's micro-history of the Galway merchant Martin Blake, including his serpentine attempts to recover his lost landed fortunes through the Court of Claims and petitions; equally interesting is Walsh's discussion of Blake's (partial) recovery through mortgages and purchases of land from Catholics and Protestants.

The Court of Claims also reappears in Neil Johnston's definitive essay, which focuses on Sir Heneage Finch and Sir William Domvile, Ireland's solicitor general and attorney general respectively, and the means by which they served the king in addressing the many tangled interests that emerged in the post-Cromwellian land settlement. Meanwhile, Dennehy's own essay incorporates and moves beyond biography to present a masterful prosopographical treatment of the early Restoration judiciary, including senior judges’ education, religion, and patronage networks. Approaching his subject from a biographical perspective as well, John Cunningham brilliantly examines William Parsons's tract entitled Examen Hiberniae, which reflected Parsons's view of the law as ‘the glue that held society together’ (p. 100). The law, of course, could take many forms, with Stephen Carroll and Aran McArdle offering a much-needed discussion of martial law in the first half of the seventeenth century, with McArdle convincingly arguing that it contributed in great part to the 1641 rebellion. Jennifer Wells examines in turn the (actually well-trodden) issue of contemporary war crimes in a legal context. The collection is enriched as well by Nessa Malone's legal-literary analysis of Henry Burnell's Landgartha as a document ‘celebrating Old English Constitutionalism’ (p. 88), and the fascinating contribution of Andrew Carpenter on the political uses of scurrilous, satirical verse by lawyers against Catholics in the Court of Claims.

Scholars will finally and perhaps above all be indebted to Colum Kenny for his lengthy annotated transcription of the Black Book of King's Inns, extending from the execution of Charles I through the Commonwealth and the Restoration of his son; while the records are incomplete, entries here extend to nearly one hundred pages and include proceedings, lists of attendances, admissions to membership and annual accounts, all of which will prove invaluable to future researchers. For one cannot understand the seventeenth century – arguably the most important century in modern Ireland's history – without understanding the law as it played out in that country's courts; and one cannot understand the law without knowing the institutional structures and personalities that shaped it in turn. Law and revolution in seventeenth-century Ireland is therefore an indispensable contribution that not only illuminates previously-neglected subjects, but offers an exciting and interdisciplinary lens through which to view that time in entirely new ways.