Perhaps the most surprising thing about Charles O’Conor of Ballinagare from the perspective of the present day is that we still lack a good modern biography. Of course any biographer would have to possess formidable scholarly talents – in Gaelic literature, in the history of early Ireland, in the complexities of Irish politics and society in the eighteenth century, in the untypical experiences of those few Catholic families who managed to hold on to some of their ancestral land – and these are not easy to find. Yet O’Conor’s importance as a rare connection between traditional Gaelic society and its culture, on the one hand, and the anglicised world of the ascendancy renders him at once a fascinating figure and prime material for study and explication.

The volume under review constitutes something of a ground-clearing exercise for any future biographer. Its introduction and the twelve essays that follow make a real and important contribution to our understanding of O’Conor and upon the way in which his life and work touched on so many aspects of eighteenth-century Ireland, even if the long delay in their publication (several have already appeared in truncated form elsewhere) is a matter of regret.

O’Conor was himself a man of such multifarious talents and interests that this volume – almost necessarily – lacks a single and consistently coherent focus, though all of the essays have interesting things to say. Perhaps furthest from any engagement with O’Conor’s career is that on ‘Ballingare Castle’ by Kieran O’Conor and Jeremy Williams which has rather more to do with the history of the smaller country house than with O’Conor as such. Some of the other essays also sometimes wander rather far from their ostensible subject though nearly always in useful and rewarding ways. Thus Olga Tsapina on the writing of the first (and as yet only) biography by O’Conor’s grandson tells us rather more about the latter’s undoubtedly colourful career – clerical student in Rome, parish priest in Roscommon, librarian at Stowe, the English stately home of the duke of Buckingham – than about the grandfather.

Those essays particularly concerned with O’Conor’s Gaelic scholarship – something which interested him far more than the demotic aspects of the contemporary language – include studies of his part in the famous controversy concerning Macpherson’s publication of the supposed writings of the ancient Scottish bard Ossian (Mícheál Mac Craith), his own and other Irish manuscripts (Nollaig Ó Muraíle), his contribution to Irish-language scholarship in general (Lesa Ní Mhunghaile), and his involvement with the establishment of the text of the Annals of the Four Masters (Maura O’Gara-O’Riordan), all of them of the greatest value with regard to particular aspects of O’Conor’s learning and intellectual concerns. The same is true of Diarmaid Ó Catháin’s piece on O’Conor and literacy in the Irish language of his own time. Luke Gibbons’s study of O’Conor, print culture and the counter-public sphere makes a point relevant to the project in general, namely, that ‘one of the most original aspects of O’Conor’s work as a whole lay in his concern to square the “backward look” of antiquarianism and romantic nostalgia – the staples of the emergent cultural nationalism – with the distinctively modern discourses of agrarian improvement and economic progress’. And O’Conor’s wider European resonances are examined by John Wrynn and especially by Hilary Larkin whose ‘Writing in an enlightened age? Charles O’Conor and the philosophes’ sheds valuable light on the interactions between a scholar situated in the far west (and who never left Ireland) and a variety of continental thinkers, most notably Montesquieu.

The two essays which make particularly successful attempts to place O’Conor within the wider intellectual ambience of the Ireland of his own and the immediately subsequent period are Clare O’Halloran’s ‘“A revolution in our moral and civil affairs”: Charles O’Conor and the creation of a community of scholars in late eighteenth-century Ireland’ and Joep Leerssen’s ‘“Why sleeps O’Conor”? Charles O’Conor and the Irish nationalization of native historical consciousness’. Both build on and extend important books: O’Halloran’s Golden ages and barbarous nations (2004) and Leerssen’s Remembrance and imagination (1996). O’Halloran rightly insists that antiquarians were not immune from changes in public opinion and that ‘the type of writing which they produced, mirrored fairly closely the fluctuations in the prevailing political climate’ and that, while Ireland to some extent shared the antiquarian concerns of Scotland and England, yet its case was unique in that the political context ‘was characterized by a recent and abrasive policy of land confiscation and settlement and by the still ongoing process of anglicization’. She also makes the useful point that few contemporary Catholics enjoyed the leisure which O’Conor’s landownership provided, one of the rare exceptions being those engaged in the medical profession, of whom John Curry, Sylvester O’Halloran, and John Fergus are notable examples. For his part Leerssen shows how much the cultural landscape was to change between 1760 and 1840, a process almost unique in Europe, with the Fennicisation of cultural awareness in Finland, whose elite was originally Swedish in outlook, providing a distinctly rare parallel. O’Conor, he concludes in the final essay of a valuable though still preliminary set of studies on one of ‘modern’ Ireland’s most interesting and ambidextrous figures, ‘occupies a crucial, nodal position bringing a number of traditions together that otherwise existed in mutual isolation, or even antagonism’.