Irish Provincial Cultures in the Long Eighteenth Century: Making the Middle Sort ed. by Raymond Gillespie and R. F. Foster (review)

The essays in this collection mark Toby Barnard's retirement from teaching; they examine the material and social contexts of farming, drinking, musical performance, interior decoration, and print culture as they shed light on life in eighteenth-century provincial Ireland. Though the subject matter of the collection ranges widely, its focus on material culture is a testament to Barnard's ingenious use of such ephemera as inventories, decorative objects, and tradesmen's bills to fill in the gaps where the state papers are silent or where no official records exist. As co-editor Roy Foster notes in his introductory remarks, Barnard's work "has reconstructed and redefined a broad swathe of Irish history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, drawing our attention to tracts of social, cultural and material history previously obscured or ignored." Indeed, the best of these essays reflect this legacy by not only giving detailed accounts of material artifacts and the people who owned them, but also by taking on what Barnard once referred to as "the knotty riddles of interpretation."

James Kelly, for instance, examines the dissemination of medical texts in the eighteenth century, discovering that the distribution networks of Ireland's "busy medical marketplace" grew in close parallel to similar networks for the print industry. Profitable commodities in their own right, medical texts written for a popular audience facilitated the sale of patent medicines and proprietary cures, thereby serving as an important conduit for provincial trade. By the 1770s, the sale of popular medical texts was supplemented by the importation of more reputable and specialized works, largely through the efforts of the Edinburgh publisher Charles Elliot. Through a careful examination of a wide range of printed texts, in addition to the letters and papers of various booksellers and printers, Kelly demonstrates some of the ways that the medical and print trades in the eighteenth century shaped the lives of ordinary people in provincial Ireland. At the same time, Kelly's analysis indicates that Ireland, and especially Dublin, was part of a wider, archipelagic network encompassing printers and booksellers ranging from Edinburgh to London and the continent.

John Bergin considers the life of Richard Lahy (c. 1695-1773), an Irish law agent working in eighteenth-century London for the Protestant earls of Thomond. The example of Lahy, who married into a wealthy English Catholic family, shows that ambitious Irish Catholics were able to navigate a complex social landscape where confessional loyalties often competed with ties of kinship and the need for patronage and employment. Irish-born lawyers like Lahy existed at the intersection of multiple social worlds, dividing their time between England and Ireland, while working on behalf of Irish peers and gentry, such as the earls of Fingall and the viscounts Kenmare. "Lahy's Anglo-Irish professional and social milieu was quite typical," Bergin notes, and thus, "the boundaries between Irish-born and English-born, Catholic and Protestant, were highly permeable." Although Bergin's essay focuses on the practice of law, his findings suggest similar circumstances for Irishmen working in other professions such as finance and foreign trade.

The rise of new, professional elites is also a theme of Bernadette Cunningham's essay on the eighteenth-century Irish manuscript known as the "Book of O'Loghlen." Compiled by the poet and scribe Aindrias Mac Cruitín, the 280-page manuscript is a traditional family poem-book thought to have been presented to Brian O'Loghlen, a Clare physician, on the occasion of his wedding in 1728. Patrons were usually identified in such manuscripts solely in terms of genealogy, but Mac Cruitín's dedication refers to him as " Brian Mac [Loghlen], doctúir leighis" (Brian Mac [Loghlen], medical doctor). The manuscript also includes a short Irish grammar and a list explaining the various contractions used by Irish-language scribes. In Cunningham's...