The Oxford History of the Irish Book: Volume Three: The Irish Book in Engish 1550–1800, ed. by Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield (review)

181 within art history of her culturally determined thesis, and other times, more wittily, when she introduces an image that undercuts her position: Gainsborough ’s pairing of the Lord and Lady Ligonier , for example, where the woman’s frame and composition is mirrored not in her husband’s figure, but in that of his horse, and where the gendered message is anything but prescriptive; or in the final two chapters in which she discusses, almost as an afterthought, how family history and present-day scandal could alter the reception of these images of gender conformity. Indeed, in the end, being right about the power of prescriptive literature proves less satisfying than finding those mirror images imperfectly refracted through the lens of a more mundane family dynamics. Cynthia Richards Wittenberg University The Oxford History of the Irish Book: Volume Three: The Irish Book in Engish 1550–1800, ed. Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield. Oxford: Oxford, 2006. 477 pp. $140. This volume, the first published in a projected series of five, is significant in the emerging history of the Irish book. It will stimulate discussion on the nature of Irish book history and its future. The blurb cheerfully offers readers ‘‘groundbreaking essays’’ which together provide a ‘‘standard guide,’’ but the book itself manifests the difficulty of providing a definitive account where—as is certainly the case here—ground is being broken. This difficulty is recognized in the tentative, judicious, and exploratory notes which sound in many of the essays . The partial and often adventitious survival of printed material is an important emphasis. In ‘‘Libraries and Collectors 1550–1700,’’ Elizabethanne Boran points out that only those collections subsumed into institutional libraries have survived. Toby Barnard, in his rich, reflective, contribution on ‘‘Print Culture, 1700–1800,’’ speaks of ‘‘a record with too many missing details and others barely legible’’; Máire Kennedy in ‘‘Reading Print, 1700–1800’’ remarks that we are still at the ‘‘initial stages’’ of a study of the reception of books in Ireland . Concluding ‘‘Sources for the History of the Early Modern Book in Ireland ,’’ Raymond Gillespie notes that ‘‘much remains to be discovered about the range and nature of the sources that can be pressed into service.’’ Taken together, the first three sections of the book—on ‘‘Print Culture,’’ ‘‘The Structure of Print,’’ and ‘‘Collecting and Reading Print’’—make up slightly less than half the volume. The remaining and most substantial section is called ‘‘The Impact of Print,’’ but it actually consists of essays describing genres of writing, for example, ‘‘Political Publishing ,’’ ‘‘Historical Writing,’’ and ‘‘Literature in Print,’’ rather than being concerned with the nebulous and controversial area of the impact those printed forms had. In fact, the shifts in nomenclature here indicate how significant scribal publication remained even after the arrival of print (especially in the area of historical writing) and so draws attention to the problematic nature of print’s ‘‘impact.’’ The first book printed in Ireland was The Book of Common Prayer (1551), produced by Humphrey Powell, the royal printer, who had been given a grant by the Privy Council toward establishing a press. In its first centuries, print in Ireland was sectarian (it was not until 182 1793 that Catholic printers could become full members of the printers’ guild), and, unlike England, where the monoply of the King’s printer was limited to privileged texts such as Bibles and almanacs, in Ireland the monopoly extended over the entire range of publications, making print even more thoroughly the object of state control. In two admirably crisp and lucid essays, Colm Lennon charts the ‘‘painfully slow evolution’’ of the Irish print trade in its first 250 years to its explosion into ‘‘great creativity’’ in the decades down to 1800. As a consequence of the particular conditions governing print in Ireland , a significant strand in the history of the Irish Catholic book is that of books published abroad, especially by Irish Catholic clergy in centers such as Louvain. The Continental aspect of the Irish book is treated both by Thomas O’Connor in ‘‘Religious Change, 1550– 1800’’ and by Mary Ann Lyons in ‘‘Foreign Language Books, 1550–1700.’’ In two essays on political publishing , ‘‘Political Publishing, 1550–1700’’ and...