Provincial Towns in Early Modern England and Ireland: Change, Convergence and Divergence (review)

The overarching thesis of the essays collected in this handsome volume is that the nature of the experience produced by an urban community was in large part a function of that community's size and complexity, a thesis that invites methodological diversity. The interdisciplinary quality of these essays is derived from a combination of geographical and historical perspectives. Despite the presence of a trained archaeologist among the contributors, the evidence and methodology throughout the collection are more typical of geography and (especially) history than they are of any other discipline. Nearly all of the essays are accompanied by helpful tables, figures, graphs, and maps. About one-third of the chapters focus on particular towns (Kilkenny, Kells, Warwick, and Chester) as case studies; the other chapters provide broader surveys of regions or themes (markets and fairs, small towns, urban culture, or urban-rural interaction). With the notable exception of the chapters contributed by the editors themselves, this collection is not particularly energetic in the engagement of methodological issues or the existing scholarship on urban history and historical geography (to which both editors are major contributors). But the collection is uniformly excellent in the provision of documented detail and clear exposition.

A stated aim of the editors is to expose points at which England and Ireland converged or diverged in the history of provincial urban experience and development during the early modern period. Taken as a whole, the essays achieve a breadth that permits such comparisons, but the individual chapters are largely confined either to England or to Ireland. This is not to say that references to factors associated with one place do not make appearances in discussions largely devoted to the other place. For example, John Bradley notes the importance of a New English presence in Kilkenny during the turbulent seventeenth century, emphasizing that the New English tended to settle in the fortified interior portions of that Irish city (43). An explicit comparison between English and Irish trends can be found in Proudfoot's chapter on Irish markets and fairs: "The survival into the mid-nineteenth century of a pattern of urban market provision which still betrayed its seventeenth-century origins was made more likely by the absence in Ireland of the sort of extensive, regionally diverse, non-renewable resources which formed the basis of Britain's industrialisation during the same period." (84)

The aims of individual essays point to fertile ground for interdisciplinary and comparative tilling. Jon Stobart, in his essay on the development of eighteenth-century Chester, urges us to "locate urban history firmly in geographical space" while comparing the complex "overlapping spatial contexts" in which towns lie (171). Readers may recall that the Spring 2002 issue of this journal was devoted to subject matter along these lines.¹ But, English-Irish comparisons appear to have been more a part of the editors' vision of the collection than a part of the analyses actually undertaken by the contributing authors. This observation in no way diminishes the usefulness of the essays as accounts of change and continuity in early modern provincial cities and towns. Moreover, it seems likely that this collection will encourage a most welcome expansion in the comparative study of English and Irish urban communities.