This large, copiously annotated edition of Richard Stanihurst’s complex history of Ireland, in particular its conquest by the English in the late twelfth century, De rebus in Hibernia gestis (1584), is a landmark in early modern Irish studies. It includes the first full translation into English of the work ever published. It therefore continues the international focus and accessibility of the work that Stanihurst had intended for it in the first place when it was published by Plantin’s press in Leiden. The editors, a senior historian (Morgan) and senior classicist (Barry), worked on it slowly as part of a Neo-Latin reading group in Cork concentrating on works pertaining to Ireland. Long in gestation, the book is a solid contribution to the burgeoning interest in medieval, historiographical, Latin, humanist, and Renaissance studies in Ireland in the academy today.

De rebus is divided into a dedicatory preface (to Stanihurst’s brother-in-law in the Pale, Patrick Plunkett), four books, appendix, index, errata, and privilegia, all dutifully translated here in a lively and readable style that skillfully varies (as does Stanihurst) according to occasion. The first book provides a topographical account of Ireland based on Stanihurst’s own previous work in English, but presented here “for an international rather than Anglophone audience” (14). Part of its novelty lies in defending the Irishness of Irish saints against hagiographical predations by the Scots. The next three books closely but not exclusively follow Giraldus Cambrensis’s late twelfth-century history of the Anglo-Norman conquest, the Expugnatio Hibernica. The appendix to De rebus selectively translates and comments upon another work by Cambrensis, the weirdly wonderful Topographia Hibernica; Stanihurst criticizes or omits many of Cambrensis’s damning and/or erroneous episodes concerning the supposed barbarism of the Irish, however. He may do so out of a growing sense of patriotism and common cause with native Irish culture.

Giraldus was a relative and partisan of the conquerors and Stanihurst one of their general descendants, being a staunchly Catholic member of the so-called Old English community centered in the Dublin Pale and coastal towns. Stanihurst effectively edits and puts into print Cambrensis for the first time. Like Cambrensis, Stanihurst is deeply partisan in favor of the English-Welsh and Crown conquest of the country. He too reminds audiences of the great deeds of military strongmen Fitzgerald, de Clare, de Cogan, et al., while not airbrushing their faults. The stakes were high in Stanihurst’s time: a large wave of English administrators, settlers, and belligerents, primarily Protestant, the so-called New English, had progressively reformed and reconquered the country in the sixteenth century and were crafting their own self-justificatory epics and historical narratives to emphasize their deeds (including a fresh translation of Giraldus by Richard Hooker, published in 1586). This edition’s seventy-two page introduction and forty-nine pages of densely set notes alternate between analysis of Stanihurst’s varied (and very able) Latin style, and — more so— its political and historical context, including valuable attention to the historiographical controversies it engaged in and, in turn, ignited. The strongest reaction came from the native Irish historian Geoffrey Keating, who blamed Stanihurst for too closely following the mendacious Cambrensis. Stanihurst was therefore uncomfortably situated between New English and native Irish historians.

Educated in Kilkenny and Oxford, Stanihurst was a formidable rhetorician who befriended Justus Lipsius and worked as an alchemist at the court of Philip II of Spain and plotted an invasion of Ireland while there. He eventually became the Jesuit chaplain for the archduke of the Netherlands. He wrote De rebus soon after exiling himself to the Continent on a permanent basis. At that point, he took up Latin as his primary authorial voice and turned increasingly to Counter-Reformation concerns. He had already written a history of Ireland in English (included in Holinshed’s Chronicles) and translated the first four books of Virgil’s Aeneid into boisterous English quantitative verse. De rebus therefore represents a transition point, looking back at Ireland’s history once again, but instilled with a new and arguably heroic purpose, born as it is from the ashes of a painful process of reform back home led by the New English. For this reason, arguably, and not as a set-piece “sermon on the uncertainty of human fortunes” (495n), does Stanihurst end book 4 with stories of the exiled soldier-conqueror John de Courcy itching to prove himself in superhuman deeds of strength to his corrupt sovereign (an episode not related in Cambrensis). Is Stanihurst inviting new would-be conquerors, at home and abroad, to pick up de Courcy’s gauntlet? By the same measure, is not the echo of Virgil’s arma virosque in de Courcy’s decision to “take refuge with his army” (“ad arma virosque confugere”), when losing ground to royal forces in Ulster (348–49), a hopeful, not “unfortunate” (494n) one? Even more questionable is the editors’ decision to translate the title of the work so as to sound less “irksome to the historical sensibilities of the Gaelic Irish” (26; cited as page 22 at 459n). As the editors perceptively note, the original title echoes both the Res gestae of Augustus and Cambrensis’s autobiography, De rebus a se gestis. The unabashed Stanihurst is writing an imperial defense and apology; he is the new Cambrensis for the Old English everywhere.

Caveats aside, this is a splendid book. Its plentiful historical contextualization, study of sources (including classical), and attention to detail are admirable. Even the index is enjoyable to read, with its quirky original entries on subjects like “Breakfast” and “Gloomy weather in Ireland.” While the proofreading is occasionally lax in the endnotes in particular, the editors and Cork University Press are to be warmly congratulated for producing such an attractive, erudite, and substantial volume.