I am cranking up my reading on sixteenth-century Ireland, and decided to go back to basics. This is essentially a narrative survey, based on exhaustive sampling of the surviving primary sources, of what happened politically in Ireland from the death of the seventh Earl of Kildare in 1513 to the Flight of the Earls in 1607. I am still getting my head around the various shifts in religious policy, particularly during the reign of Elizabeth I, but this gives a good skeleton on which to hang the meat of any future work I do.

I was less convinced by Dudley Edwards’ subtitle, “The Destruction of Hiberno-Norman Civilisation”. It is beyond dispute that in so far as there was such a thing, this period saw its destruction, but he doesn’t really illustrate why or what Hiberno-Norman civilisation actually was. It would be more accurate to describe the book as tracking the growth of colonialism as the active British policy in Ireland, which it does very well.