Richard Ledrede, bishop of the diocese of Ossory in the English colony of Ireland, is the overarching antihero of The Templars, the Witch, and the Wild Irish: Vengeance and Heresy in Medieval Ireland, Maeve Callan's exploration of heresy in Ireland during the first half of the fourteenth century. Ledrede's obsessive pursuit of his enemies with charges of excommunication and heresy, as well as with actual violence, dominates the records of his long episcopate. While using violence or even excommunication was not unusual among medieval ecclesiastics in Ireland, Ledrede's choice of heresy as a weapon is more unusual. Heresy and witchcraft trials were uncommon in medieval Ireland, and indeed the only ones that occurred were in the first half of the fourteenth century. The obvious question is why—given that Ireland, while geographically isolated, was well connected through trade, politics, and ecclesiastical networks with the rest of Christian Europe. Callan sets out to answer this overarching question.

Callan explores her topic through close, almost forensic, examination of key episodes between 1310 and 1353 in which heresy was evoked: the trial of the Templars, the witchcraft trial of Alice Kytler and her associates, and the heresy accusations against Gaelic Irishmen Adducc Dubh O'Toole in 1328 and two MacConmara men in 1353 respectively. The thread tying these events together is the way that these accusations of heresy were manipulated for political ends by a group of people, most of whom had connections to Ledrede. If Callan sometimes strains the capacity of her sources to provide answers, her willingness to ask complex questions is to be admired.

She focuses the bulk of the book, three long chapters, on Richard Ledrede himself, who pursued prominent Kilkenny businesswoman Alice Kytler and her associates, including the unfortunate Petronella de Mide, with heresy and sorcery charges over a period of nearly ten years—from 1320 to his own exile from Ireland in 1329. Of those charged, only Petronella was executed for her involvement, with Kytler disappearing from both Ireland and the historical record in 1324. The Kytler trial has long fascinated scholars, as well as visitors to Kilkenny, for many years. It is an unusually well-documented trial, with a detailed account of the accusations and the trial, which is also mentioned in several annals and various state papers. The trial's conflicting evidence has been explored in depth previously by Anne Neary and Bernadette Williams, as well as by the editors of the documents themselves, most recently by L. S. Davidson and John O. Ward in the early 1990s. Callan has gone through all the events in detail, putting the trial into a wider context of the increasing interest in defining heresy and demonic possession during early fourteenth century and especially during the pontificate of John XXII. She extends the analysis of the Kytler trial by examining the actions of Ledrede throughout his time in Ireland, especially his long and vindictive pursuit of Arnold le Poer, a key supporter of Kytler. His feud with Arnold le Poer is a connection to the shadowy conspiracy swirling around Maurice fitz Desmond in 1326. Indeed, Ledrede emerges from Callan's analysis as an obsessive man who bent both ecclesiastical and secular laws to pursue his own agendas.

Callan bookends her analysis of Ledrede with assessments of the trials of the Templars in Ireland, between 1308 and 1312, and then with the heresy trials of O'Toole and the MacConmara brothers, ending in the 1350s. Again her analysis extends previous detailed scholarship, for the most part by connecting the individual cases with each other. The individual Templars in Ireland seem to have escaped relatively lightly from the catastrophe that engulfed their order—or at least there are fewer records of the fate of the personnel than there are for the order's extensive property portfolio. The later heresy cases against the Irish men Adducc O'Toole and the MacConmara brothers on which Callan ends her analysis are very poorly documented. As she points out, the paucity of documentation means that it is not possible to be definitive. Callan addresses this by putting the specific heretical accusations into context of heterodox beliefs known to have circulated in Ireland from the early Christian period and with the colonial wars of the fourteenth century. In this effort she is on less secure ground than she is in her analysis of Ledrede and the Kytler trials. Establishing the connections between Irish Christianity in the early period and the poorly documented accusations of the fourteenth century is probably stretched a bit hard, as is putting the blame for the executions directly on the fact that O'Toole and the MacConmaras were native Irish.

Callan does well to blend analysis based on solid evidence with more speculative reasoning and alternatives throughout the book. Well-informed speculation like this adds to the range of plausible historical possibilities in productive ways. The downside of this method of analysis is that the details, often repeated in different ways, can become burdensome for the reader and difficult to track. This is partly alleviated by a detailed time line in the beginning of the book, however for nonspecialists the plethora of names and dates that crisscross the narrative may prove daunting. Specialists are likely to find the broad background sections on history of the church and of wars between colonists and colonized limited in their engagement with recent historiography. However, these two tensions in writing detailed analysis are never easy to reconcile, and Callan has rightly prioritized detail.

Overall, The Templars, the Witch, and the Wild Irish is a welcome addition to medieval Irish scholarship, and one hopes that it will provoke further discussion and research into the perplexing questions of the roles of religion and ethnicity in medieval Ireland.