“Hylton offers new insights into Ireland’s Huguenot settlements, providing in many cases new data on Irish Huguenot families and their function within Irish society.”  —Eighteenth-Century Ireland journal

“Hylton highlights the key issues that hindered the development of a cohesive Huguenot community in Ireland…. He renders a valuable service by situating Ireland’s Huguenot refugees within a wider context. The text elegantly summarizes the period in Huguenot history before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and traces how conflicts between politique and zealot Huguenots had far-reaching consequences for the refugees in Ireland…. He also provides helpful miniature biographies of many of the key ecclesiastical and political actors within the French community and those within the Irish establishment who rendered them aid. Hylton’s care in recounting these incidents along with his detailing of the Huguenot role in the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland ensure that both specialist and nonspecialist readers can glean important insight from the text. Hylton’s work also demonstrates that genealogical interests can coexist with the concerns of professional historians.”  —Journal of British Studies

“Hylton’s study has two distinct merits. First, he has combed through archival sources, identifying individuals, tracing their trades, social status, and family affiliations, and attempting to assess their contribution to Irish social and economic history. Second, he correctly argues that the three successive waves of Huguenot immigration into Ireland were distinct. The incentives offered in 1662 by the ‘act for encouraging protestant-strangers and others, to inhabit and plant in the kingdom of Ireland’ attracted some two hundred French Protestants to Ireland; but they, like the Flemish weavers who also came at this time, were economic migrants rather than refugees… Hylton deserves credit for debunking many of the myths that surround the Huguenot presence in Ireland.”  —International History Review

“The Huguenot communities in Ireland have long attracted interest. In particular, three investigators—Grace Lawless Lee, Albert Carré and T. P. Le Fanu—laid sturdy foundations of evidence and interpretation. Raymond Hylton’s study, while generous in its acknowledgement of the pioneers, goes far beyond them. So far as the sources are concerned, it is unlikely that much will come to light to modify his authoritative account of the successive stages of the settlements in Ireland. Possibly the archives of particular families of Huguenot origin will yield new information. Dr. Hylton’s account, originating in a doctoral dissertation, will now achieve the wider circulation that it deserves. The author shows an impressive mastery of the detail and the contexts in his painstaking treatment. . . . This is the fullest and most judicious account of the refuge in Ireland.”  —Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland journal