Book Review - Toby Barnard, Brought to Book: Print in Ireland, 1680-1784

Abstract

Brought to Book is an account of what was written, printed, published, possessed, and read beginning in Restoration Ireland and ending in 1784, when a new law curtailed the presses. It magisterially achieves its ambition to retrieve the social, financial, and human contexts of print in Ireland in this period. The book does not have an overt overreaching argument, being more an anatomy of the print culture, but it draws out implications from the vast collection of materials surveyed. The arrangement of the book is partly chronological, geographical, and thematic. Chapters address the book trade, writers, and readers in the 1680s, in Dublin from 1690 to 1784, and in the North and South. There are chapters on education, and on how print reflected on the Irish past, the present, and the future. A chapter focuses on print and on various religious confessions. The chapters on the literary print culture, "Entertainments" and "Writers and Readers," will be of particular interest to readers of The Scriblerian. Each chapter is densely packed with information and the range of subjects covered is vast. Brought to Book is a work of extraordinary archival excavation and erudition. It draws on the quantitative possibilities enabled by the ESTC, but its detailed descriptions and rich assemblage of references derive from a scholarly lifetime in the archives and display its author's astonishing command and recall of primary sources in print and manuscript and of the extant scholarly literature.