Peter Lake and Michael Questier, All Hail to the Archpriest: Confessional Conflict, Toleration, and the Politics of Publicity in Post-Reformation England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. xx + 312, £35.00, ISBN: 9780198840343

Abstract

have granted a deeper insight into the social, political, and economic repercussions of his conversion. Piers himself refers suggestively to the ‘troubles crosses or damadges wch I have sustained since I came into this land [i.e. Ireland]’ (p. 216), but Mac Cuarta offers only a brief allusion as to what these difficulties might have been. Further reflection upon Piers’s possible motivations for writing the ‘Discourse’ within the fraught religio-political situation in early seventeenthcentury Ireland, and especially the extent to which this context may have shaped his narrative, might also have been helpful. Nevertheless, Brian Mac Quarta has provided a brilliantly edited resource for early modernists with considerable potential to enhance our understanding of a range of different topics.