'Civilizing' Gaelic Leinster

The extension of Tudor rule in the O'Byrne and O'Toole lordships

Christopher Maginn

'A fascinating account of the impact of English policy on a critical Irish region at the back door of Dublin itself … The book is helpful as both excellent local history and a useful corrective to overstated emphases on the rampant employment of martial law … the book is a fine contribution to the emerging narrative of Tudor Ireland, showing that the “conquest” was a halting, compromised, incomplete, and hybrid outcome that was far short of the grand design envisioned by some of it’s chief governors and their apologists’, Jon G. Crawford, Sixteenth Century Journal.

‘In this book the author sets out to chart “the extension of Tudor government into the independent Gaelic lordships of the O’Byrne and O’Toole clans” … [T]he author is to be thanked for contributing to the increase of our knowledge of Gaelic Ireland during the sixteenth century and to be praised for producing a book that will doubtless stimulate further research into the O’Byrne and O’Toole lordships in particular and the wider Gaelic-Irish world in general’, Anthony M. McCormack, Studia Hibernica (October 2008).