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The Irish Dissenting Tradition, 1650-1750. Edited by Kevin Herlihy. Dublin: Four Courts, 1995.130 pp. $39.50 cloth.
The Religion of Irish Dissent, 1650-1800. Edited by Kevin Herlihy. Dublin: Four Courts, 1996. 128 pp. $30.00 cloth.
Historians of Irish religion have focused almost exclusively on Roman Catholicism with some attention directed toward the Church of Ireland during its period of greatest influence (for instance, Alan Ford's As by Law Established). Kevin Herlihy and his collaborators claim that other neglected groups, those encompassed under the head of religious dissent, including the Ulster Presbyterians but especially the most overlooked congregations-the Baptists, the Quakers, and the French Huguenots-also deserve serious study. The Society of Irish Dissent means to rectify this omission through a series of presentations of which these two volumes are the first of what promises to be further discussions of the role of dissent in Irish history. While not all of the essays have a strong interpretive bent, many of them do provide a much needed look at these splinter groups who have been largely lost from view.
Raymond Gillespie's introductory essay to the first volume is among the most useful since it provides an overview...