Over the last twenty years, a number of scholars have explored Spanish-Irish relations in the early modern period, particularly the Spanish monarchy's efforts to defend the Catholic faith in Ireland in the face of English oppression. Christina Bravo Lozano builds on that scholarship (and especially on the work of Enrique García Hernán) in this new volume, Spain and the Irish Mission, 1609–1707. She argues that royal support of Irish clergy played a “crucial role in the implementation of a religious program directed from Madrid and aimed to preserve Catholicism in Ireland” (4). In addition, she suggests that Spanish monarchs had practical and political reasons for funding missionary work in Ireland: it burnished their pious image and helped counteract English Protestant power. Bravo Lozano successfully demonstrates the scale of this endeavor; over the course of the long seventeenth century, the Spanish government sponsored over a thousand missionaries. However, she also admits that the Irish mission had no institutional framework and often suffered from royal neglect. She portrays this lack of structure in terms of the Irish mission's “adaptability,” but in the end it is not clear to what degree it formally existed, beyond a vague set of promises that were only fulfilled intermittently.

Bravo Lozano's work is based on archival research in Spain, the United Kingdom, and Rome; she also makes extensive use of an important database created by García Hernán, which contains all of the primary sources related to the Spanish monarchy's financial support of the Irish mission. In the first three chapters, Bravo Lozano describes the origins of the Irish mission in the early 1600s. King Philip III of Spain made peace with England in 1604, but still wanted to aid the cause of Catholics in Ireland, as well as the many Irish exiles in Spain. Enter David Kearney, archbishop of Cashel (d. 1624), who visited Madrid in 1610 seeking financial and moral support after being rebuffed in Rome. Philip granted limited funds, which were placed in a pension; this set a precedent, and by 1621 official Spanish court documents referred to money spent on the Misión de Irlanda. By 1630 a semiformal list of rules and procedures had been created, so that Irish clerics in Spanish Habsburg territories who wished to return to Ireland could apply for a viaticum, a grant from the Irish mission pension fund meant to cover travel expenses. Most of the documents Bravo Lozano refers to in this book tell the story of various individuals who applied for, and sometimes received, these grants. Unfortunately, the paper trail seems to be severely limited; we often do not learn what happened to the grant recipients, or if they even arrived in Ireland.

In the later chapters of the book, Bravo Lozano traces the fortunes of the Irish mission as it weathered the volatile politics of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, including numerous regime changes in both England and Spain. As might be expected, the number of missionaries who applied for and/or received the viaticum varied according to the state of Spanish finances, and the situation on the ground in Ireland. Bravo Lozano's analysis, however, contains some odd contradictions. For example, she notes that in the period 1665–73, during the regency of Mariana of Austria, no grants were given (109), but later she suggests that the regency “brought no major changes to the missionary structure” (124). Similarly, she states that starting in 1685, the perceived pro-Catholic tendencies of James II encouraged more people to apply for the viatica (156), but then she asserts that during James's reign “the workings and foundations of the Mission remained unaltered” and there was “no significant increase in the number of viatica applications” (159). Perhaps better editing would have corrected such problems.

Ultimately, while Bravo Lozano presents a number of intriguing individual stories, the book does not deliver a coherent overall argument, or prove that the Irish mission itself really existed in a meaningful way. This probably reflects the fragmentary nature of the primary sources she uses. Bravo Lozano is aware of the problem and tries to turn it into a positive. For example, at one point she suggests that the Irish mission was “in a constant state of construction,” that there was a “polycentric decision-making structure,” and that rather than being ruled by fixed norms, it had “application and consolidation of consuetudinary guidelines endorsed by praxis” (78). In other words, throughout this period, the officials involved with the Irish mission were making things up as they went.