Hugh Curwen, archbishop of Dublin and lord chancellor of Ireland (1555-67), is one of the more obscure figures to have featured in Ireland's Reformation story. Unlike the other men who occupied the archbishopric after Henry VIII's break with Rome, Curwen's career is poorly documented in the sources through which the history of sixteenth-century Ireland is normally studied, in particular, the records of the English secretaries of state, which are held in the National Archives of the United Kingdom (formerly the Public Record Office). Thus there are no readily accessible insights into the character, motives and actions of a man who, in a tumultuous period in the late 1550s and early 1560s, presided over the successive restoration of Catholic and Protestant religious settlements in the heart of English Ireland.

Curwen's inconspicuousness in the historical record has had a negative effect on the way historians have treated him hitherto. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, when much of the historiography was infused with religious polemic, it led to a very crude concentration on the best-known fact about his career: his apparent willingness to accept whatever creed was promoted by the Tudor monarchs. In this connection, Curwen was perceived as something of an embarrassment by Catholic and Church of Ireland writers alike; a figure unworthy of approbation, yet one who could not be disowned entirely.