This first volume in the new four-volume Cambridge History of Ireland might be described as “a curiosity of official scholarship” (in the words of the great nineteenth-century Celtic scholar, Whitley Stokes). It offers a panorama of Irish history (not quite) from the beginning down to (not quite) the end of the sixteenth century. However, the structure and content of this collection have all the hallmarks of a projected volume 2 in the series (with an original timeline of 1172–1550?) to which a number of filler chapters have been added as an afterthought.

As it stands, the opening date of the volume (600 CE) makes no sense, since almost all the formative developments that scholars see as crucial to the early medieval period (“early Christian” is inaccurate) had arguably taken place: stabilization of society and settlement patterns (after the Plague of Justinian), consolidation of (native) law and politics, establishment of Christianity and the emergence of supposedly distinctive Irish ways of organizing the church, first expansion of Irish Christianity to Britain and the Continent, emergence of vernacular and Hiberno-Latin literature, etc. The editor flatters this reviewer (who edited volume 1 of the rival Oxford New History of Ireland ) by explaining the absence of any discussion of political developments between 400 and 1170 on the grounds that “the chapters in that impressive volume . . . are particularly strong, and it seemed an inefficient use of limited space to cover the same ground again” (8). The same conviction perhaps lies behind the omission of all the themes just listed, and others, such as Ireland and the later Roman Empire and archaeology, but if so, the result is a curious phenomenon, more an anthology than a thematic collection.

The book is divided into three sections: part 1, “Christianity, Invasion and Conquest, 600–1200”; part 2, “English Lordship in Ireland, 1200–1550”; and part 3, “Religion, Economy and Culture, 1000–1550.” The contributions on “Communities and Landscapes” and “Learning, Imagination and Belief” offer little that is new, while the chapter on “Art and Society” is very dense. There is (unintended?) humor in the title of the chapter on “The Scandinavian Intervention” (better known to the world as the Viking invasions). The chapter on “Perception and Reality: Ireland c. 980–1229” is, in fact, a study of kingship as reflected in the native Irish literary sources of the period. That on “Conquest and Conquerors” provides an amusing contrast between the “fellowship of arms” exercised by the chivalric conquerors and the savagery of their native opponents: “So it transpired that when in May 1170 the English won their famous victory at Dún Domnaill (Baginbun, Co. Wexford), they eschewed their own military customs and slaughtered their captives” (162). This kind of special pleading is reminiscent of the bad old days of John Horace Round and his Irish disciple, Goddard Henry Orpen. Even worse, however, is the vista offered in the chapter on “Angevin Ireland” of the same benighted conquerors who “found themselves time-travellers to an Iron Age” society (205), one obviously crying out for the civilizing hand of the English (the term Anglo-Norman has been jettisoned). But how to explain “the murder, deposition and self-slaughter that characterises English elite politics in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries?” Their origins, we are told, “might better be traced to the Curragh of Kildare” (219) than to any innate disposition among the civilized elite.

But there are good things in the book: Brendan Smith, “Disaster and Opportunity, 1320–1450”; Katharine Simms, “The Political Recovery of Gaelic Ireland” and “Gaelic Culture and Society”; Peter Crooks, “The Structure of Politics in Theory and Practice, 1210–1541”; and Robin Frame, “Contexts, Divisions and Unities: Perspectives from the Later Middle Ages.” The chapter on “Material Culture” tries hard to refute the view of Françoise Henry that “in many ways the Norman invasion mark[ed] in Ireland the end of a world, and certainly the death of original artistic endeavour” (Irish Art in the Romanesque Period 1020–1170 A.D. [1970], 25). The absence of a chapter on Anglo-Norman literature in Ireland speaks for itself.