Customer Reviews

A New History of Ireland, Volume I: Prehistoric and Early Ireland

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OUP's New history of Ireland is a very good series and the publication of Volume 1 is to be welcomed. However this particular volume was plagued by extremely long delays. This means that some of the articles were written decades before this volume was published, for example Kathleen Hughes wrote her contributions in 1974! Hughes was a great scholar and the chapters do merit publication, but the field of the Church in pre-Norman Ireland has undergone a lot of development in the last 35 years. At the very least the older articles should have been given a postscript, but it would have been better to have commissioned new articles by those who are experts in the field today and to make the older articles available in some other form. Other articles such as those by Hilary Richardson, Nancy Edwards, Roger Stalley and Ann Buckley are very valuable (these deal with art, archaeology, architecture and, very interestingly, music) . But the problem remains that if the core articles in the narrative are so out of date then the modern student will have an incomplete narrative on which to "hang" the newer supplemental articles. The book is well worth consulting by anyone doing serious work in Pre-Norman Ireland, but one would do well to also consult other works, such as, Colmán Etchingham, Church Organisation in Ireland AD 650 to 1000 (Maynooth: Laigin Publications, 1999); Thomas M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Pauline Stafford, A Companion to the Early Middle Ages: Britain and Ireland c.500-1100. Blackwell Companions to British History (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).