Rome does not immediately spring to mind when one thinks about the Irish diaspora. It was not a terminal destination for the millions who left Ireland's shores in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But, as this book shows, there was a small but influential migration of Irish to Rome in the early modern period, part of a wider exodus from Ireland to Continental Europe that has been overshadowed by the mass population movements of later centuries. This book's primary concern is to show the influence that Rome, as the nerve center of worldwide Catholicism, played in the creation of a national Irish culture among an exile community. It covers the years 1609–1783: a languid blink of an eye in the history of the Eternal City, but a pivotal time in Ireland's history. For it was then that the remnants of an anciently conceived form of Irishness was largely destroyed as Ireland was integrated into the British state. Yet while Ireland and its inhabitants were, in many respects, becoming more like England and the English, a new version of Irishness—European in outlook and deeply attached to the Catholic faith—also emerged. And central to the development of this incarnation of Irishness were those Irish who settled in Rome. Here, beyond English political control and influence, these exiles created a national identity shaped by their new home and their interactions with the institutions of the Catholic Church.

The author has elected to explore this community's cultural identity episodically over eight chapters. The first four chapters offer case studies of how Irish exiles translated “Irish culture into Roman forms” (18). In chapter 1, Tadhg Ó Cianáin's early seventeenth-century Irish-language memoir of Hugh O'Neill's journey to Europe is read for the influence that Rome exerted on the writer's formulation of an “incipient national consciousness” (49). Similarly, in chapter 2, Father Luke Wadding's landmark history of the Franciscan order, Annales Minorum (1625–54), is interpreted as the deliberate effort by Ireland's most influential cleric in Rome to weave Irish history into the quintessentially Roman genre of sacred history. The frescoes of the Aula Maxima at Saint Isidore's Irish Franciscan College—the first Irish seminary in Rome founded (in 1625) by Wadding—are the subject of chapter 3. Completed in 1672, these vivid images of seventeenth-century Irish Franciscans—“the first fresco cycle of Irish Catholic subjects ever” (99)—are presented as visual testimony of the existence of an émigré community growing in confidence. Of the thirty illustrations in the text, all but two appear here, allowing the author to bring the reader along in her analysis of the “visual program” in the Aula, further evidence of Irish adoption of the dominant culture. At the same time, however, the printing in Rome, in 1677, of the first Latin-Irish grammar, the work of the Irish-speaking Franciscan, Francis O'Molloy, is seen, in chapter 4, as representative of an effort from within the exile community to preserve cultural memory and linguistic links to Ireland.

The book's second-half focus shifts away from exilic “cultural productions” in Rome to discussions of the reality that Ireland existed under English rule and thus was officially a Protestant country. Chapter 5 considers the controversial return to Ireland of Oliver Plunkett, archbishop of Armagh, after two decades spent in Rome. Plunkett, as is well known, was martyred in 1681 and later became Ireland's first early modern saint; but his actions reveal a man committed to Roman practice and badly out of step with the people and politics of the land of his birth. Chapter 6 recalls the lesser-known phenomenon of Irish Protestants traveling to Rome for conversion at the Ospizo dei Convertendi. Most of these Protestants had themselves converted from Catholicism or came from families who had converted at an earlier stage to secure a future in an anglicized Ireland. The penultimate chapter, an analysis of the eighteenth-century writings of the peripatetic Irish-born Jacobite Charles Wogan, is only tenuously linked to the transformative influence of Rome and so sits somewhat uncomfortably with the rest of the book. However, his exilic writing about the state of Ireland and his struggles with his own sense of identity exude a demoralization that is presented as a counterpoint to the more confident expressions of cultural identity of the previous century. Ironically, as the final chapter shows, the Irish identity created in Rome, safe from English influence, was in 1783 threatened by the Catholic Church itself, as it sought to assert Roman rule of the Irish College and to pressure Irish Catholics to follow its lead in reaching an accommodation with Britain.

This book goes some way toward explaining an aspect of Irishness that is too often taken for granted, and it is a welcome addition to the recent wave of research on Ireland in an early modern European context.