The Irish Reformation remains a troubled subject, and not from lack of recent scholarly attention. It has attracted an abundance of high-quality work, but its vexed nature as a topic is illuminated by a long, authoritative essay published in 1998 by Brendan Bradshaw, one of the foremost students of early-modern Irish history. The essay is entitled ‘The English Reformation and identity formation in Ireland and Wales’, as befits the volume in which it appeared: British consciousness and identity: the making of Britain, 1533–1707. But the pageheads of the sixty-nine-page article call it ‘The Reformation in Ireland’, and this is a much more accurate description of its contents, as even its author might agree.

Whether denominated ‘The Irish Reformation’ or ‘The Reformation in Ireland’, the event lacks the familiarity of historical chestnuts like the Congress of Vienna or The Thirty-Years War, well-worn, frequently-taught subjects (at least in the old canon of European history) about which there was a modicum of consensus, sufficient at least to allow them to be discussed. But in order for events to be debated, there needs to be agreement that they happened, and in that respect the Irish Reformation is something of a non-starter.

Karl Bottigheimer succeeds in consigning my study of the ‘English Reformation in Wales and Ireland’ to a genre of outmoded nationalist historiography by means of a distortingly reductionist account of it. In the first place, despite its title and large sections of the analysis, he assures the reader that its concern is simply the Reformation in Ireland. In fact it seeks to address a problem presented by the Reformation as a phase of what is variously called the ‘new British history’ or the ‘history of the Atlantic archipelago’, namely the contrasting outcome of the attempt to extend the state-sponsored reform of religion to the English crown's two Celtic borderland dominions, to Wales, where it succeeded, and to Ireland where it failed. Prima facie that outcome seems puzzling since it faced similar obstacles in both places, a deeply traditionalist society, remote from the intellectual currents that helped prepare the ground for the religious changes in England, and beyond the reach of effective government from the centre. Two questions arise therefore. How were these obstacles overcome in Wales, and since they proved surmountable there why not so in the case of Ireland?

Second, Bottigheimer makes my explanation for the Irish outcome seem naively idealistic by representing it as attributing the failure totally to the pastoral zeal with which the Franciscan Observants campaigned against the change, and to the devotion of the Irish to ‘faith and fatherland’.