This work is the first extended study of witchcraft in Ireland since the publication in 1913 of St. John D. Seymour’s Irish Witchcraft and Demonology. The latter was pioneering for its time and is still considered of value given the author’s use of primary materials that subsequently perished when the Public Record Office in Dublin was destroyed in 1922. Andrew Sneddon builds on Seymour’s research while seeking to locate evidence of Irish witchcraft across the ages in the context of recent and contemporary research on witchcraft in Britain and the Continent that has been informed by anthropological insights and greater attention to regional variation. Given the destruction of the bulk of Irish legal records relating to the criminal courts of quarter sessions, assizes, and court of King’s Bench for the period up to the mid-eighteenth century and a parallel loss of probate material and administrative records of the established church, Sneddon marshals a diverse range of sources to reconstruct evidence of and attitudes to witchcraft from the early medieval period. As a consequence of what he terms a “lack of sources,” Sneddon argues that the academic history of witchcraft in early modern and modern Ireland has been distinctly underresearched by comparison to England and the greater part of Continental Europe.

Drawing on primary material encompassing sources such as church records, private correspondence, printed ephemera, and ballads, Sneddon provides an overview of the manifestation of demonic and malefic beliefs in Ireland. The bulk of the analysis is concerned with the early modern period and chapters deal with questions of belief in witches, witchcraft legislation, cunning-folk, witchcraft accusations, trials, and demonic possession in a chronological context that reaches well into the eighteenth century. Sneddon is particularly convincing when he argues that settlers from England and Scotland brought with them to Ireland their witch beliefs. The replication of English concerns with witchcraft finds essentially colonial expression, for instance, in the enactment of the 1586 Irish Witchcraft Act, which was effectively identical to the legislation implemented in England thirteen years previously. However, given that there appears to have been limited indigenous belief in witchcraft before the influx of Protestant settlers in the seventeenth century, Sneddon argues that the 1586 legislation formed part of a larger state-sponsored program to modernize Ireland’s legislative framework within a broader political context of the consolidation of the Crown’s writ.

Sneddon is persuasive in his analysis of witchcraft among Protestants in Ireland. In this respect, for example, he examines the case of Florence Newton of Youghal, who was convicted of murder by witchcraft at the Cork Assizes in 1661 and subsequently executed. This is the first reasonably well-documented trial in Ireland for witchcraft entailing possession, and Sneddon argues that the accusations against Newton may have derived from religious and political tension in Restoration Youghal. Consequently, the supposed presence of a witch in this English Protestant community may have formed part of a larger communal reaction to uncertainty and upheaval. Likewise, Sneddon suggests a similar pattern of causation in relation to the women who were prosecuted and convicted at Carrickfergus Assizes in 1711 for the possession of a young woman called Mary Dunbar. In this instance, Presbyterian Ulster emerged as a locale for belief in witches at a time when dissenters in the province were subject to pressure from the perceived threat of Catholic Jacobite insurgency and state-sanctioned discrimination on the part of the Anglican establishment.

However, Sneddon is less assured in his treatment of the apparent absence of any widespread belief in classic European witchcraft on the part of the island’s majority Catholic and Gaelic population. On the one hand, he suggests that witchcraft prosecution remained low because of Irish Catholic alienation from a colonial Protestant administration, and on the other hand, he admits that Gaelic Irish culture seems fundamentally to have lacked belief in malefic and demonic witchcraft. Given the absence of a word in the Irish language for a European-style witch, the more interesting question is why Gaelic Ireland and Scotland appear to have remained indifferent to contemporary European preoccupations with witchcraft. If Gaelic beliefs and customs remain elusive in his study, Sneddon has admirably recounted the story of witchcraft in colonial Ireland.