This fine and motley collection of nine essays (with Introduction by the editors) heralds an important occasion for early modern Irish and European studies: the arrival of the Centre for Neo–Latin Studies in University College Cork as a formidable force on the published academic scene. One edition reared in this industrious stable (Philip O’Sullivan Beare’s patriotic natural history, Zoilomastix, reviewed in these pages) has already been trotted out and others (such as Dermot O’Meara’s epic laud of the 10th Earl of Ormond, Ormonius) are chomping at the bit. As the editors note, sustained attention to the world of Irish neo– Latin letters is long overdue: From the advent of humanism and printed texts in Ireland in the sixteenth century until the beginnings of the decline of Latin literacy in the eighteenth, more than one thousand books were published in Latin by Irish authors. (p. 5) It is, moreover, a fact that up to [the year] 1680 most books exhibited at the Frankfurt Book Fair were in Latin; that of those published in Oxford from 1690 to 1710 more than half were in Latin; that 31 per cent of all the entries in Bibliotheque raisonnee des ouvrages des savants de l’Europe (1728–40) were in Latin; and that in many European states academic dissertations were written in Latin as a matter of course until the early nineteenth century (p. 3). Neglect of the Irish Latin scene in particular is not extraordinary, however, given the academy’s general disinterest in neo–Latin studies. The modern academy has been far too interested in its vernacular traditions—including authors Shakespeare, Petrarch, Ronsard and Cervantes, et al.—to properly taste much less digest the mountains of scholarly butter slowly melting before it. But as nationalist fires fade and scholarship on early modern Ireland becomes part of a new, internationalising trend, we can see here how the Irish are saving civilitas as well as the traces of so many civilizations left on their doorstep. One of the book’s central messages is a political one: Latin, the lingua franca of Europe’s scholars, diplomats, and many artists, politicans and lawyers, ‘continued to unify even as it provided the language of division’ in an Ireland sharply divided along sectarian and ethnic lines (p. 13). On the one hand, appeals to a Latinised civility (including renovated notions of imperium) puffed up the self–worth of a colonial ruling elite, mostly English Protestants, and justified their conquest against a supposedly ‘barbaric’ Irish–speaking native foe in the later–sixteenth century; but appeals to a classical notion of patria lent ammunition and linguistic unity to their well-educated and increasingly internationally minded opponents. These were supported by Spanish imperial ambition and fuelled on the heady vapours of the Counter Reformation, ‘a Tridentine religious agenda in a humanist linguistic register’ (p. 11). Simultaneously, Latin brought native and newcomer together in a range of common interests, from humanistic appreciation of classical genres and authors to antiquarian pursuits such as book collecting and biblical scholarship. With neo–Latinity comes ‘the Renaissance’, whose scope or mere existence in Ireland—a much-debated topic—is explored in the first chapter, ‘Some reflexes of Latin learning and of the Renaissance in Ireland c.1450–c.1600’, by Diarmaid Ó Cathain. Ó Cathain’s richly informed discussion of local patronage of learning by the native nobility, including abortive university schemes, claims of geneaological links to Italy and large private libraries, is invaluable, and it is hoped that his call for further studies of these great patrons, such as the Old English 8th Earl of Desmond and the earls of Kildare, will be heeded. In the spirit of spying cross-cultural trends, the second chapter, ‘Derricke and Stanihurst: a dialogue’, by John Barry, demonstrates in somewhat tenuous fashion the influence of John Derricke’s highly derogatory Protestant polemic, the Image of Irelande, on the works of historian, poet and translator Richard Stanihurst. The work of both authors, furthermore, attests to the highly varied patronage of Lord Deputy Sir Henry Sidney (pp. 46–7), a man of Caesarian ambitions and limited resources. Stanihurst’s later correspondence and fraternization with the intellectual giant of the Netherlands and Germany, Justus Lipsius, is explored in the third essay, ‘The Richard Stanihurst–Justus Lipsius friendship: scholarship and religion under Spanish Hapsburg patronage in the late sixteenth century’. Colm Lennon here explores the parameters of both men’s faith as they tended gradually and daringly towards Catholicism in an international context of learned exile and political intrigue. The essay makes a nice companion to that of Hiram Morgan, ‘“Making Ireland Spanish”: the political writings of Philip O’Sullivan Beare.’ This essay, the fifth in the collection, documents the travails and ambitions of another scholar and plotter in Spain, the exiled noble O’Sullivan Beare, who blames internal division and not only English oppression and ‘strategems’ for Ireland’s many woes (p. 102). Likewise, as described in detail by David Caulfield in the collection’s sixth essay, ‘The Scotic debate: Philip O’Sullivan Beare and his Tenebriomastix’, O’Sullivan Beare proved a true Irish patriot by writing vociferously and at length (but not in print) in Latin to refute the saintstealing efforts of Scotsmen Thomas Dempster and David Chambers. Defenders of Barack Obama’s birthright to the U.S. Presidency could learn useful rhetorical strategies from O’Sullivan Beare’s angry polemic. The book’s fourth essay, ‘“The Tipperary Hero”: Dermot O’Meara’s Ormonius (1615)’, by Keith Sidwell and David Edwards, offer a substantive preview of their upcoming edition of this muchneglected, stunted Virgilian epic with Irish poetic (caithrem and aisling) devices, written in Latin and hastily finished and published in London soon after the death of its celebrated subject, the tenth earl of Ormond. Ormond’s family apparently intended the work to appeal to the British monarch, James I, so as to demonstrate their family’s loyalty and past service (p. 67); but was the book also intended to intimidate Irish rivals at court, like the earls of Thomond and/or Clanrickard? Ormond spends much of his time not only defending English interests but capitalising on Irish (especially Ulster) weaknesses. Religion plays little part in the book (p. 85). The collection shifts technique towards denser literary analysis in Jason Harris’ chapter 7, ‘A case study in rhetorical composition: Stephen White’s two Apologiae for Ireland’. White, educated as a Jesuit in Spain, wrote in sophisticated ‘baroque’–style Latin (p. 146) full of ‘venom and bombast’ (p. 153) and Tridentine spirit, so as to refute insults to the nation promoted by the histories of both Stanihurst and Giraldus Cambrensis. Grainne McLaughlin’s Chapter 8, ‘Latin invective verse in the Commentarius Rinuccinianus,’, follows suit with an equally eloquent and erudite analysis of classical and Irish literary influence found in this anti-Cromwellian, anti-Ormond, pro-papal version of events of the tumultuous 1640s. The article makes new connections between the Commentarius and contemporary tracts and its second appendix translates a satiric funeral epitaph for the ‘devil’ (p. 165) Cromwell, the great dictator who ‘fostered ferment and stabbed Religion through the heart’ and (in a memorable Irish-ism) ‘chanced his arm often but filled his arms even more often’. (p. 174) The collection concludes on a more general note with Elizabethanne Boran’s wideranging and well-researched study, ‘Ussher and the collection of manuscripts in early modern Europe’, on the collecting habits of the great (and greatly polemical) Protestant Archbishop of Armagh. ‘Ussher was known not only as a collector but as a facilitator of the collection and publication of manuscripts’ and generously shared his knowledge of biblical and other subjects. This disparate collection of essays therefore fittingly concludes with an essay on assembling disparate collections. We are the wiser for it. If there is an agenda here, it is a timely one, serving to highlight the learned patronage of local magnates and to promote the neglected voice of the ‘native’ Irish writer (whatever his origins and destinations may have been), as he sings above the accompanying orchestration of the international Counter-Reformation. Only a few Protestant singers are let into the cathedral (colonial planters with Latin erudition, like Sir William Herbert, for example, get short shrift in the analysis). The editors are nonetheless sympathetic to an entire generation of writers raised in ‘brutal’ circumstances (p. 6) who adhered to classical notions of civility (and conquest).

this collection of essays is an important contribution to Neo-Latin studies, and has a full scholarly apparatus of notes and references – some 40 pages

Roughly 1000 printed works in Latin were written by over 300 Irish authors between 1500 and 1750, on top of a substantial number of manuscript texts, and this collection of groundbreaking essays gives us something of the rich flavour of this remarkable corpus of Irish neo-Latin works. As well as presenting new studies of better known writers such as Richard Stanihurst and Philip O'Sullivan Beare (who are the subjects of two chapters apiece), the value of this collection lies in its attention to previously unstudied writings, especially those in manuscript. Accessible to non-Latin readers, with an introduction that thoroughly contextualises Irish Neo-Latin writing, the collection showcases the unique Irish contribution to the republic of letters, and demonstrates the vibrancy of Irish neo-Latin culture through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The chapters are organised chronologically. In the first, Dairmaid Cathin reflects on the extent to which Gaelic Ireland was influenced by Renaissance ideas, and identifies figures such as Maghnas Domhnaill, Finghn Mathna, and Thomas, 8th Earl of Desmond, as exemplary. Emphasising the deep connections between Gaelic Ireland and Europe (especially Italy) in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, he illuminates the rich intellectual culture that surrounded these men. In the following chapter, John Barry turns to two of the most influential writers of sixteenth-century Ireland, Richard Stanihurst and John Derricke. Arguing that Derricke's Image of Irelande (1581) was inspired by Stanihurst's 'Description of Ireland' (1577), and that Stanihurst's De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis (1584) responded in turn to Derricke's poem and accompanying woodcuts, he asserts a Latin-English 'intertextuality which can deepen our perception of them all' (37). Continuing with Stanihurst, Colm Lennon contributes a fascinating discussion of the epistolary exchange between Stanihurst and Justus Lipsius, one of the leading humanists of late sixteenth-century Europe, in the spring of 1592. Likening their friendship to that of Thomas More and Erasmus, Lennon illustrates Stanihurst's influence on Lipsius and his participation in the debates of Christian humanism. Situating Stanihurst in 'an international humanist network that transcended the Irish community from which he came' (57), Lennon's paper sheds important new light on the intellectual milieu of Stanihurst and his fellow exiles. Moving into the seventeenth century, Keith Sidwell and David Edwards introduce Dermot O'Meara's neglected poem Ormonius (1615), a military epic celebrating the achievements of the great Irish nobleman 'Black' Thomas Butler, 10th Earl of Ormond. Advertising their forthcoming edition of the poem, they argue that as well as offering insight on the struggle of Old English Catholics during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, the poem is significant for its adaptation of classical Latin models to a specifically Gaelic literary form. The interaction between Latin and Gaelic literary culture is thus excitingly illustrated. Turning from an unfamiliar writer to a familiar name, Philip O'Sullivan Beare is the subject of the next two chapters. The first, by Hiram Morgan, focuses on O'Sullivan's political writings, attending in particular to his influential Compendium of the Catholic History (1621). With the book describing Ireland's 'golden age of Christianity being eclipsed as a result of savage and tyrannical persecution by English heretics' (87), Morgan shows that O'Sullivan highlights the injustices of English Protestant rule in Ireland, emphasises Irish reliance upon Spain, and argues for unified military action against England by Irish Catholics. Like Morgan, David Caulfield also showcases O'Sullivan's vivid polemical prose. Tenebriomastix (1636) was an impassioned response to David Chambers' On the Courage, Piety, and Learning of the Scots (1631), a book that attempted to claim Scotia (the ancient name for Ireland along with Hibernia) - and thus its rich cultural heritage - for the Scots. Discussing O'Sullivan's unique intervention in this 'paper war' between Scottish and Irish Catholic exiles, Caulfield underlines his 'unflagging devotion to his native land, and unstinting effort in the defence of Gaelic Ireland and its cultural and religious traditions' (125). Latin writing in manuscript is the subject of the last three essays in the collection. In the first of these, Jason Harris writes on the two manuscript Apologiae (Apologia pro Ibernia written around 1615, and Apologia pro innocentibus Ibernis written in the late 1630s) composed by the Irish Jesuit Stephen White in response to Giraldus's and Stanihurst's controversial writings on Ireland. Through meticulous examination and comparison of the texts, Harris presents an incisive analysis of the rhetorical dimensions of White's writing, proving that it is 'deeply revealing of the Latinity and intellectual fibre of early and mid-seventeenth-century Europe' (153). Staying in the mid-seventeenth century, Grinne McLaughlin looks at the Commentarius Rinuccinianus, 'one of the most important Counter-Reformation historical sources for Ireland in the seventeenth century, a source which is particularly important because it is Irish, Catholic, virulently anti-Ormond and anti-Cromwell' (155). Focusing on the wonderful Latin invective verse that illuminate the pages of the collection, her essay discusses the way in which the poems aggressively oppose the natives' learned Latin and Irish to the invaders' vulgar English. Alongside a schedule of poetry in the Commentarius, an anti-elegy on Cromwell is provided in full in an appendix. This remarkable poem is a significant addition to our growing collection of verse from early modern Ireland, and indicates the jewels that can be found in the Commentarius. Finally bringing the collection to a close, Elizabethanne Boran's fascinating essay on Archbishop James Ussher focuses on his role as collector of manuscripts. Situating him as part of a dynamic community of scholars working across Europe, she identifies him as 'facilitator' (178) of manuscript collection through Ireland, Britain and Europe. Using Ussher's voluminous Latin correspondence, her excellent account of the intellectual world of the scholar who was eulogized as a 'breathing library' (194) showcases his significant contribution to learning in Ireland and beyond. This collection of genuinely pioneering essays transforms our understanding of early modern Irish writing, especially Catholic writing. Demonstrating Irish participation in the republic of letters through manuscript circulation and print publication, it situates Irish Latinity within its European context, proving the distinctiveness and sophistication of Irish neo-Latin writing. My only criticism - but it is an important one - is that Making Ireland Roman entirely overlooks Irish women's engagement with Latin. The 'pirate queen' Grinne N Mhille, who famously conversed with Elizabeth I in Latin, and Eleanora Burnell, who composed a prefatory poem in Latin for the publication of her father Henry Burnell's play Landgartha (1641), are just two of the women who used Latin in early modern Ireland.1 Work on these and other women will add an important new dimension to Irish neo-Latin studies as it develops. Still, this book is an excellent advertisement for the groundbreaking research activities of the Centre for Neo-Latin Studies at Cork, as well as in other Irish universities (Trinity College Dublin and the University of Ulster in particular). It is an important and exciting book, which shows the significant potential of further work in this field.

This collection, emanating from the Centre for Neo-Latin Studies at University College Cork, is most welcome in bringing more of this group’s findings to a wider audience. Taking their title with reference to Nicholas Canny’s study, Making Ireland British 1580-1640 (2001), the editors have here gathered essays that demonstrate recourse to a competing source of authority and identity in Ireland’s early modern period: Romanitas. As Jason Harris and Keith Sidwell note in their introduction, Romanitas “carried a rich sense of endowment for both Protestant writers participating in the notion of British imperial Romanitas and Catholic writers engaging with the historical and spiritual universalism of the Roman Church” (p. 11). The sources explored by the collection’s contributors, however, reveal “ambivalence in the concept of Romanitas,” and therein resides the depth and wealth of the collection (p. 11). Spanning the period of intensified English domination over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the subjects of these essays trace the evolving and sometimes conflicting definition and employment of Romanitas, in both its Catholic and classical guises, by Gaelic and Old English writers alike as a counter to Rome as model for British colonialism. In addition to the use of Latin and classical rhetoric, a number of other themes, such as collection practices, are carried through the essays, supplying a cohesiveness not always evident in essay collections. Several essays consider the same authors, notably Richard Stanihurst and Philip O’Sullivan Beare, providing even greater contextualization for the individuals, texts, and issues under consideration. While the collection should certainly be essential reading for historians and literary scholars of early modern Ireland, it will also be of considerable importance to scholars of early modern Europe more broadly. It offers novel studies and perspectives that affirm not only that Ireland was influenced substantially by such European developments as Renaissance humanism, but also that Ireland in turn has much to offer studies of this period. This is demonstrated admirably in the first two essays considered below. Elizabethanne Boran considers Archbishop James Ussher’s collection activities as he participated in a “network of scholarship in the Republic of letters,” grounding him within European-wide practices and contacts that straddled confessional networks (p. 183). Boran works closely with Ussher’s correspondence to emphasize that attention to the relationships that developed between collectors is important in delineating the role that “religious fault lines” could also play as works were shared (p. 183). Diarmaid Ó Catháin’s essay provides an excellent complement to Boran’s, similarly considering collection activities and continental contacts and experience essential to the exchange of manuscripts, but here from the perspective of the Gaelic community. Muiris Ó Ficheallaigh is but one of the individuals Ó Catháin considers whose careers reflect extensive travel and increasingly influential positions. Ó Ficheallaigh, for instance, began as student at Oxford before attaining respect as a scholar in Padua and Venice, after which he returned to Ireland as archbishop of Tuam in 1506 (pp. 19-20). Ó Catháin’s essay is also welcome for its detailed consideration of the heretofore little studied but often-remarked upon library list for the 8th and 9th Earls of Kildare, rare as one of the very few extant library lists from this period in Ireland. The Kildare library rivaled many in its reflection of Renaissance texts, including Juvenal, Vergil, and Boccaccio, among others. Ó Catháin adroitly employs this information to emphasize that Renaissance tastes, as well as Florentine ancestry and contacts, were as important to Kildare identity as their powerful connections in the English and Gaelic worlds. Another powerful Old English noble, Thomas Butler, 10th Earl of Ormond, serves as the focus of Sidwell and David Edwards’ essay on Dermot O’Meara’s 1615 poem Ormonius. Ormond’s age and failing health compounded the subsequent threat to his family’s traditional position as new policies came into play following Elizabeth’s death and the end of the Nine Years’ War. To “arrest the Butlers’ declining reputation and to help restore the family to its rightful glory as Ireland’s premier noble dynasty,” Ormond commissioned O’Meara’s composition of the Ormonius (p. 66). Writing in Latin, and applying classical references and models to Gaelic literary forms, O’Meara utilized the medium of published poetry to secure Ormond’s legacy. The threatened status of the Old English community runs throughout several essays, encapsulated in the person of Stanihurst. Stanihurst exemplifies the declining position that confronted many of the Old English as well as the competing purposes to which classical learning could be put. Following his self-imposed exile from Ireland in 1581, Stanihurst spent time in the Low Countries before making his way to Spain in late 1591. His time at the University of Leiden brought him into contact with the Dutchman Justus Lipsius, one of Europe’s leading humanists. Colm Lennon’s essay explores their exchange of letters written in 1592 at a “critical juncture” in both men’s careers (p. 57). As Lennon demonstrates, the friendship that developed between them was fundamental to the professional and spiritual development of each. Stanihurst is also addressed in John Barry’s essay which offers a comparative reading of passages in two of Stanihurst’s works--his “Description of Ireland” (1577), incorporated into Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, and his later De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis (1584)--with both the text and images in John Derricke’s Image of Irelande (1581). Arguing that Stanihurst’s “Description” influenced Derricke’s Image and that Derricke’s Image in turn influenced Stanihurst’s De Rebus, Barry demonstrates an engagement between the authors that accounts specifically for the nature of episodes they chose to consider. Among many other examples, Barry notes that Stanihurst’s description of horseboys in De Rebus “reads almost like an explication of” the image of horseboys in the first plate that accompanied Derricke’s work, and suggests further that Stanihurst had The Image of Irelande in front of him as he wrote (p. 41). Stanihurst figures prominently yet again in an accomplished essay by Harris. Here Stanihurst represents the deployment of classical learning in the service of colonialism as countered by Stephen White, a seventeenth-century Old English Jesuit representative of an element within the Old English now labeled nua Gaedhil, or New Irish. Harris considers White’s Apologiae (the first composed ca. 1611-13, the second likely in the 1630s) in which White attacks both Stanihurst and Giraldus Cambrensis, staple sources for English denigrations of the Irish, with an eloquent and an exceptionally advanced display of classical learning and rhetoric. White was not alone in deploying classical training to challenge the legitimacy of English colonial claims and behavior, as the essays by Gráinne McLaughlin, David Caulfield, and Hiram Morgan demonstrate. As McLaughlin notes in her essay, the Commentarius Rinuccinianus (composed 1661-66, published 1932-49) turned the table on the colonial rhetoric of cultural superiority. It was in fact the “civilized” who “speak Latin and Irish,” demonstrated by a close reading of invective verse from the Commentarius that drew on Vergil and Ovid among others (p. 155). O’Sullivan Beare similarly utilized classical learning to challenge English domination, notably in the Zoilomastix (composed ca. 1626) where, like White above, he refuted both Giraldus and Stanihurst. Two of O’Sullivan’s other works, Tenebriomastix (composed ca. 1636) and the Compendium of the Catholic History (1621),are explored in essays by Caulfield and Morgan. The Tenebriomastix represents O’Sullivan’s contribution to the Scotic debate, in which Scottish writers asserted that Scotia referred to Scotland, not Ireland, thus “robbing” Ireland of its history (p. 111). As Caulfield shows, classical learning was fundamental to O’Sullivan’s restoration of Ireland’s “ownership of the past,” key to its identity and his defense of Gaelic Ireland’s cultural and religious traditions (p. 125). In a carefully constructed essay, Morgan builds on his extensive work on Hugh O’Neill and the Nine Years’ War as well as earlier work on the Compendium, to consider O’Sullivan’s presentation of the Tudor conquest of Ireland. Morgan stresses the importance of O’Sullivan’s decision to include the decision of the dons and divines of Salamanca and Valladolid on the legitimacy of O’Neill’s war against England. Their decision drew fundamentally on Spanish natural law theory, and its use by O’Sullivan, as Morgan details, underscored O’Sullivan’s principal concerns: “English Protestant tyranny, Irish divisions and Irish reliance on Spain” (p. 88). This collection will prove most useful to scholars and graduate students, though advanced undergraduate students will find it a beneficial complement to survey studies. Historical background on early modern Ireland is presented in the introduction, and translations are provided for all primary source excerpts in Latin and Irish