This reviewer must confess from the outset that his views on the early history of the Jesuits in Ireland were largely refracted through the lens of Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire (ca. 1560–1629). A member of a Gaelic hereditary learned family, Ó Maolchonaire abandoned his profession around 1590 to study for the priesthood in Spain. Entering the Irish College in Salamanca, Ó Maolchonaire fell foul of the college's rector, Thomas White, SJ. Convinced that the rector discriminated in favor of students of Old English background at the expense of Gaelic-speaking students from Connacht and Ulster, Ó Maolchonaire subsequently left the college and joined the Franciscans. His antagonism toward the Jesuits persisted throughout his career. In a memorial presented to Philip III in 1602, he once more accused White of ethnic bias and denounced the Jesuits for convincing the Old English not to support Hugh O'Neill during the Nine Years’ War. In 1604 he claimed the Irish Jesuits’ pastoral strategy was a disaster because of their lack of competence and interest in Irish. Given Ó Maolchonaire's trenchant judgments, it was most interesting to discover very different viewpoints expressed in the correspondence of the Irish Jesuit mission, as local superiors asked Rome again and again to send only Jesuits who were fluent in Irish on the mission. Furthermore, between 1609 and 1617, the Jesuit curia in Rome urged David Galway, SJ, to send Irish Jesuits to aid the Scottish mission, precisely because of the similarities between Irish and Scottish Gaelic.

This is only one of the very many interesting features to be gleaned from a perusal of Vera Moyne's calendar of correspondence, which contains 2,644 items. The vast majority of these are copy letters from Rome to the superiors of the Irish mission, comprising 2,095 items. Given the troubled nature of the times and the hostility of the government, the letters written from Rome did not survive in Ireland, but scholars are indebted to the decision taken in 1605 to ensure that copies were made of outgoing correspondence from Rome. The surviving correspondence in the opposite direction is much less voluminous, however. We must remember that these letters were written during the Nine Years’ War and its aftermath, the Ulster Rising of 1641 and the subsequent Cromwellian regime, not to mention the era of the Penal Laws. It seems, for example, that only ten letters reached Rome from Ireland during the 1650s, compared with forty-nine during the previous decade. It took about three months for a letter to arrive from Ireland to Rome and then only if carried by a trustworthy middleman. There was always the danger of loss, not to mention interception and arrest of the bearer.

The history of the Jesuits in Ireland before the suppression can be divided into three periods. The abortive mission of 1542, lasting less than two months, was more a reconnaissance exercise than anything else. Though he spent five years in prison, David Wolfe led the mission between 1561 and 1573, and it led to the placement of at least seven young men in Continental seminaries and to shrewd recommendations by Wolfe for episcopal appointments. While the superior general decided to send no more men to Ireland in 1578, because of the dangerous conditions, his successor, Claudio Acquaviva, inaugurated the third mission in 1598, one that endured until the Suppression in 1773. Compared with the other orders, the Irish Jesuits were few in number, dipping from a peak of sixty-seven men in 1649 to a mere six in 1690, and leveling off at seventeen at the time of the Suppression.

Despite the fraught situation in Ireland, letters from Rome insisted on maintaining standards. One such from 1649 called on Jesuits to don the society's dress where public exercise of the Catholic religion was possible. Unmarried women were forbidden in Jesuit residences. Watches (horologia rotata) were against the vow of poverty. Men were to be mixed from all provinces as local patriotism was harmful to the society. The habit of greeting ladies of one's acquaintance with a kiss was to cease.

Vera Moynes is to be congratulated on the painstaking and meticulous work entailed in compiling this calendar. We eagerly await her forthcoming edition of the twenty-five extant annual letters for Ireland.