The later Middle Ages occupy a space often overlooked in the history of Ireland, sitting as they do between two distinct historiographies and two seminal events. On the one side, medieval historians work in and around the twelfth-century English conquest of Ireland and the transformative cultural, social, and political changes wrought by it. Typically, narratives of late medieval Ireland peter out by about 1400 with the English colony in decline and the Irish polity on the rise. On the other, early modernists plot the course of the so-called Tudor conquest of Ireland, which ultimately won the island for England; these historians sometimes contemplate its origins, which they usually locate sometime in Henry VIII's reign (1509–47). To explore the years between these two conquests is to explore a period characterized broadly by stasis: with English colonists marking time until the king intervened to break the stalemate and restore the colony to its former glory; with dozens of Irish clans consolidating their hold on large parts of the country but unable ever to coalesce to overwhelm their English enemies. Historians have fruitfully applied the framework of frontiers to explain this situation, but this framework lacks the naturally unfolding historical narrative to win for this period a wider audience.

The book under review takes frontiers as its jumping-off point, but purports to show that late medieval Ireland, while marked by political inertia, witnessed movements which were cultural in nature. This is a shrewd strategy: it deemphasizes the period's aimless chronology by concentrating instead on “cultural exchange” and the “tensions between assimilation and the preservation of distinct ethnic identities.” It also places the book in the broad realm of cultural history, which has become more fashionable than the study of political history. Its concern for the related concept of identity, moreover, is something that very much interests modern people in general. Having taught this period of history to students I can attest to the lively discussions which questions of ethnicity and race can provoke (a rare thing when discussing pre-modern Irish history).

The book focuses on the experience of cultural exchange in the “four obedient shires,” which the author rightly understands to be the administrative and cultural core of the English colony in Ireland, but misidentifies as an area larger than the region officially delineated in 1495 as “the English Pale”—the two terms “four obedient shires” and “Pale” were, in fact, interchangeable and described the same territory (28). The author's use of the term “English of Ireland” to describe the colonial community in a work whose argument is that cultural exchange “went both ways” is telling. It is an effort to carve out a middle ground in a field marked by a sometimes heated historical debate over this community's identity. For decades, scholars disagreed over whether these English in Ireland should be thought of, or referred to, as English at all. There was a good deal at stake. For some, these people—the Anglo-Irish as they termed them—had more in common with the native Irish, with whom they would later create the modern Irish state and our modern sense of Irishness, than with the country their ancestors had left centuries before. For others, this community was self-consciously and recognizably English, for whom loyalty to the Crown and hostility to the Irish went hand in hand; this community's self-identification as the English of Ireland offered further proof for some that Irishness was a modern invention.

Following a chapter defining the character and geographic limits of the four shires, cultural exchange and identity are then explored thematically over five chapters. Much of the evidence assembled will be familiar to historians with knowledge of the period, but the author adroitly employs the material to produce several new insights. One which stands out (Chapter 3) is the extent to which the church, from the pope in Rome to bishops on the ground in Ireland, ignored the political, legal, and cultural differences separating English from Irish in their efforts to govern the spiritual lives of what they clearly viewed as a single Christian population. Indeed, the broad picture presented here is of an Ireland which, though theoretically divided into two nations, was in fact characterized by the interaction, integration, and cultural borrowing of peoples who, after all, lived together on a small island. This picture is not inaccurate. However, unlike the historian, who can see the four shires as “politically English,” but “moulded culturally by the same assimilative pressures at work in other parts of the colony,” the population of late medieval Ireland could not have it both ways (253). The resurgence of royal authority would soon show that one's inclusion in the English political and institutional apparatus counted for everything.