Reading Ireland: Print, Reading and Social Change in Early Modern Ireland (review)

The history of the book was traditionally more a part of library studies than of mainstream history, focusing on the mechanics of production and distribution. Then, with the growing interest in literacy and culture in the 1960s and 1970s it became more integrated into historical scholarship, as historians sought to place the book in the hands and minds of readers. For example, important cultural historians like Robert Darnton and John Brewer have recognised that the way books were produced and presented is most important to their reception and understanding, while issues of distribution are critical if we are to assess the market for books and thus their readership. The history of the book is now assimilated into social, economic and cultural history, as scholars appreciate the material dimensions of cultural structures and change. Scotland has participated in the renaissance of the history of the book, with individuals like Alistair Mann and collective enterprises like the Centre for the History of the Book at Edinburgh University producing work of good quality that tells us about printing and publishing, but also about its social, economic and institutional context. It is into this renaissance that Gillespie's book fits, though it owes as much to traditional as to modern ways of looking at the culture of print, coming out of an ethnographic or even antiquarian tradition of Irish history. Gillespie's aim is to set print and reading in the political, religious and social landscape of early modern Ireland, but he struggles to move away from the institutional history of government and the church and from normative sources. This is most obvious in the disappointing chapter 'Reading for power: institutions and print', which, other than briefly (pp. 120-2), is about state centralisation and church evangelism through print and writing. Even the cited pages are not really about reception, but about counter-use. In fact Gillespie seems most at ease in chapters 6 and 7, which go over ground he has covered elsewhere and which allow him to recycle some of his prolific output into the volume. There is a short tabular appendix on Irish book production in the seventeenth century. Books were surely integral to the social fabric, but except in a generalised way they are imperfectly located in the context of quotidian social relationships or individual mentalities. Words like 'meaning' and 'strategy', which have specific nuances in the recent literature on this subject, are deployed here to mean little more than 'uses'. Putting 'print' and 'society' together is not enough to explicate 'the social meaning of print' (the title of chapter 1). Some sort of conceptual framework is needed, yet without an introduction or a conclusion, the book does not engage explicitly with either theory or historiographical debates. One can occasionally sense influences and one can generally hear the right noises, but not a full-scale dialogue with the important figures invoked in the preface. This reviewer found chapter 2 the most interesting, despite the teleology in its title: 'The prelude to print: the rise of writing'. Rich in detail and offering some fascinating examples about orality and writing, this was the most engaging and thought provoking part of the book. Issues such as scribes and scribal production and the role of memory are regrettably mentioned only briefly (pp. 36-7, 44-5) and (to cite another chapter heading) 'the triumph of print' is exemplified and asserted more than it is ana-lysed and proven. The discussion of Gaelic and English literacies is particularly interesting, but comparisons with Scotland (or anywhere else) are few and the work of Durkacz, Withers and others is not cited. Some of the better work on England is to be found in the bibliography, including that by Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf (albeit misspelled 'Woolfe' – and Charles Tilly becomes 'Tilley' on pp. 124, 212), but the frame of reference is almost exclusively Irish. Important authorities on European language, literacy...