Patrick Little (ed.)
The Church of Ireland under the Stuarts
(Four Courts Press, 2025)
‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ This phrase, with which Charles Dickens famously began his novel A Tale of Two Cities, cannot be applied to the Church of Ireland under the Stuarts. At first blush, the latter — worst of times — seems only fitting.
It is now well understood — and frequently taken for granted — that the period in the Church’s history known as the long seventeenth century was one of deep crisis and eventual recovery. Efforts at ecclesiastical reform, and the endurance of violent political upheaval, marked this time as fraught. Yet, despite the era’s historical significance, surprisingly little of the existing literature has looked beyond a narrow focus on prominent individuals and already well-trodden narratives. In particular, attention has remained disproportionately centred on Dublin and its senior clergy, often at the expense of other provincial contexts and the lived experiences of ordinary clerics. The result has been a somewhat patchy and uneven institutional history — one that too readily lends itself to simplified interpretations of decline.
This tendency is well summed up by the quotation with which Patrick Little begins his introduction to the volume: Mary II’s damning assessment, delivered with scant first-hand knowledge, that the Church of Ireland was ‘the worst in Christendom.’ Her judgement reflects a familiar emphasis on the visible decay of church buildings, persistent underfunding, clerical absenteeism, and an overall sense of dysfunction.
What this superb volume offers is a more nuanced and carefully contextualised picture. Rather than simply confirming a narrative of failure, the contributors collectively complicate it — revealing not a monolithic and crumbling institution, but a more varied landscape of decline and resilience, and even (at times) flourishing. Even where material and structural weaknesses abounded, the Church adapted. Protestant communities — sometimes underground, sometimes semi-formal — persisted, and scholarly life continued, albeit unevenly..
A key strength of this volume lies in its deliberate effort to correct historiographical imbalances. It moves beyond the overfocus on Dublin and explores lesser-studied areas, whilst foregrounding the experiences of provincial clergy and lay actors. In doing so, it lays important groundwork for broader studies that might one day offer a more cohesive view of the Church’s development across the island.
The essays confront the Church’s institutional frailty head-on, whilst also tracing how it reconstituted itself in the face of profound crisis. This shift is explored not only through the lens of political and theological events, but also through case studies of overlooked regions and figures.
The volume is structured in four parts — three chronological and one thematic — and flows surprisingly well across these divisions. Early chapters focus on the pre-1641 Stuart Church, with Trinity College Dublin emerging as a pivotal institution for clerical formation and Protestant evangelisation.
The period of crisis and collapse between 1641 and 1660 — beginning with the Catholic Rebellion and extending through the Cromwellian conquest — brought devastation to the Church of Ireland, which is explored in the following sections. Notably, even during the period of intense suppression, Protestant practices survived underground, sustained in no small part by committed lay people. This continuity enabled a relatively smooth restoration of the Church in 1660 — an outcome that may surprise those who assume an absolute break during the interregnum.
These chapters illustrate how the Church sought to re-establish itself. Bishops regained their former status, and revenues gradually increased. Yet this restoration also marked a transformation in the Church’s self-conception: from a reforming and evangelising institution to one more concerned with self-identity and internal discipline..
The final section of the volume turns to thematic studies that span the entire Stuart period. Essays on the role of bishops in the Irish House of Lords, which demonstrate their influence on legislation, ecclesiastical governance, and material culture, including church silver and cathedral music, are insightful. These essays are particularly effective in illuminating the rich, if unevenly documented, cultural life of the Church, especially within urban contexts such as Dublin. Here again, the volume acknowledges the limitations of the historical record, especially in more rural dioceses, without allowing those limitations to foreclose meaningful inquiry.
What emerges from this volume is, as Little concedes, still something of a ‘patchwork.’ Yet it is a patchwork of increasing clarity and depth. The essays offer fresh perspectives on clerical experience and the institutional life of the Church of Ireland beyond its better-known figures and urban strongholds. They are concise but nuanced, and collectively they serve as valuable curtain-raisers for future scholarship. They convince the reader that the long seventeenth century was, if not quite the best of times, certainly more than simply the worst. I commend it to you heartily.