This volume celebrates the work of William O'Sullivan, the first keeper of manuscripts at Trinity College, Dublin, who preserved, made more accessible and elucidated the documents in his care. The manuscripts throw new light on the society of Ireland, the place of the learned and literate in that world, and its relations with Britain, Europe and America. Some of these essays clarify technical problems in the making of famous manuscripts, and bring out for the first time their indebtedness to or influence over other manuscripts. Others provide unexpected new information about the reigns of Edward I and James I, Irish provincial society, the process and progress of religious change and the links between settlements in Ireland and North American colonization.

The value of inventories in charting how houses were arranged, furnished and used is now widely appreciated. Typically, the listings and valuations were occasioned by the death of an owner and the consequent need to deal with testamentary dispositions. That was not always so. The inventory for Castlecomer House, Co. Kilkenny, for example, was drawn up to make a claim following the house's devastation in the 1798 uprising. Mostly hitherto unpublished, the inventories chosen give new-found insights into the lifestyle and taste of some of the foremost families of the day. Above stairs, the inventories show the evolving collecting habits and tastes of eighteenth-century patrons across Ireland and how the interiors of great town and country houses were arranged or responded to new materials and new ideas. The meticulous recording of the contents of the kitchen and scullery likewise sheds light on life below stairs. Itemized equipment required for the brewhouse, dairy, stables, garden and farmyard reflects the at times significant scale of the communities the houses supported and the remarkable degree of self-sufficiency at some of the demesnes. A comprehensive index facilitates access to the myriad items forming the inventories, while the books listed at three of the houses are tentatively identified in separate appendices. A foreword together with short preambles to the inventories set the households in their historical context. Illustrated with contemporary engravings of the houses and with portraits of the owners of the time, the inventories will appeal to country-house visitors, historians of interiors, patronage, collecting and material culture as well as to scholars, curators, collectors, creative designers, film directors, bibliographers, lexicographers and novelists. The eighteenth century is the period onto which the Knight of Glin directed his penetrating gaze as art historian. The book is dedicated to his memory.

In this pioneering study of the material culture of Stuart and Hanoverian Ireland, Toby Barnard reveals a hitherto unsuspected richness and diversity of lifestyle, habitat and mentality. Like its much-praised predecessor, 'A New Anatomy of Ireland', it abounds with quirky people and vivid scenes, and amounts to a striking reappraisal of Ireland under the Protestant Ascendancy. The compass of the book is impressively wide, from the governing elite of Dublin Castle to the varied metropolis of Dublin itself, and to provincial towns and the countryside beyond. Looking yet further, it follows the Irish overseas to Britain and to the continent of Europe. What emerges is a world more crowded with stylish buildings, gardens, pictures and belongings than has often been imagined. Through such everyday articles as linen shirts, wigs, silver teaspoons, pottery plates and engravings, Barnard evokes an amazing variety of lives and attitudes. Possessions, he shows, even horses and dogs, highlighted and widened divisions, not only between rich and poor, women and men, but also between Irish Catholics and the Protestant settlers.Displaying fresh evidence and unexpected perspectives, the book throws important new light on Ireland during a formative period. Its discoveries, set within the context of the 'consumer revolution' gripping Europe and North America, allow Ireland for the first time to be integrated into discussions of the pleasures and pains of consumerism. Toby Barnard is a fellow and tutor in history at Hertford College, Oxford. He is an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy. His companion volume, 'A New Anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants, 1649-1770' is also available from Yale University Press.

In recent years, archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists and specialists in design, architecture and art have developed techniques that are now being exploited by historians. Dr Barnard provides a guide to some of the theories and their implications. The materials available to the historian include surviving buildings, artefacts and human interventions in the landscape itself; others, no longer visible, can be reconstructed from apparently unpromising documents like bills, advertisements, tax records and account books.