This book focuses, from a legal perspective, on a series of events which make up some of the principal episodes in the legal history of religion in Ireland: the anti-Catholic penal laws of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century; the shift towards the removal of disabilities from Catholics and dissenters; the dis-establishment of the Church of Ireland; and the place of religion, and the Catholic Church, under the Constitutions of 1922 and 1937.

This book frames British Romanticism as the artistic counterpart to a revolution in subjectivity occasioned by the rise of "The Rule of Law" and as a traumatic response to the challenges mounted against that ideal after the French Revolution. The bulk of this study focuses on Romantic literary replies to these events (primarily in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Blake), but its latter stages also explore how Romantic poetry's construction of the autonomous reading subject continues to influence legal and literary critical reactions to two modern crises in the rule of law: European Fascism and the continuing instability of legal interpretive strategy.