Over the past decade or so, research into and the teaching of the history of Ireland in the sixteenth century has been inestimably aided by the appearance of a large trench of primary materials in transcribed, critically edited, and readily accessible forms. Principal among these recent contributions has been the grand project of the Irish Manuscripts Commission to produce a new and extensive calendar of the entire (English) State Paper collection of materials concerning Ireland from 1515 to 1575, of which only one volume has yet to appear. In addition, David Heffernan's collection of Reform Treatises on Tudor Ireland, 1537–1599, also published by the Irish Manuscripts Commission, has provided in extenso transcriptions of a large set of important memoranda concerning both macro and micro levels of policy development, supplemented by his own monograph commentary on the material (Heffernan, Debating Tudor Policy in Sixteenth-Century Ireland [2018]).

The present volume represents a further contribution to such welcome developments, and it does so in several distinctive ways. The book is, as its authors acknowledge, unusual in its structure. In part, it is a critical edition of a set of reform memoranda accompanied by close textual commentary; it is also an extended essay on the character and development of Tudor thought on the problems and opportunities of Tudor policy in Ireland. Unusually, but I think most helpfully, the editorial matter is presented before the broader interpretative discussion. Thus, readers are given the opportunity to make up their own minds about the true significance of the primary materials before assessing the interpretation supplied.

Eight documents of varying length, all dating from the first third of the sixteenth century, are presented: Patrick Finglas's “Breviate of the Getting of Ireland and the Decay of the Same,” the anonymous “Description of the powers of Irishmen,” a short list of the havens of Ireland, William Darcy's “Articles” for the reform of Ireland, the anonymous “Articles for the Reformation of Ireland,” a note on the revenues of Ireland, a pedigree of the Burkes of Connacht, and (the longest item) the anonymous “Ordinances and Provisions for Ireland.” All of the items have appeared in whole or in part in print, some of them on several occasions. But the editors have provided an invaluable service by supplying a critical comparative analysis of the various redactions of the documents and their printed versions. As listed, the collection may appear to be heterogeneous, if not random—discursive policy arguments resting side by side with mere lists and pedigrees. But the collection's coherence lies in the fact that, together, the documents constitute the entirety of the “Irish file” that is to be found among the papers of William Cecil, which Lord Burghley housed at Hatfield House (Cecil MSS, 144).

The very existence of this “Hatfield Compendium,” as the authors call it, on Irish matters raises several interesting questions, only some of which the authors address. The survival of these largely Henrician texts in Burghley's files testifies, as they suggest, to the continuing influence of early Tudor reform thought on Elizabethan policymaking for Ireland. Moreover, as the authors also indicate in a particularly valuable insight, the documents show that Elizabethan thinking on Ireland was still in the early stages, as was policy formulation (though the question as to why that should have been the case is one that they do not pursue). Other questions suggest themselves. None of the texts included in Heffernan's collection are included here: is this an archival accident or has it more significance?

Many more papers pertaining directly to Ireland, such as the Rowland White manuscripts, also exist in the Cecil papers at Hatfield. What is the relation of this particular compendium to a very large, if scattered, body of mostly later evidence? Finally, the Hatfield compendium has parallel instances in the papers of Francis Walsingham, Robert Yelverton, and others, which contain all sorts of alternative texts. What does this suggest of the processes of English governmental thinking about how to act in Ireland? It is to the credit of this valuable book that it has further aided the exploration of these still-obscure but increasingly insistent questions.