Gaelic Ulster in the middle ages: history, culture and society. By Katharine Simms. Pp 568. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2020. €65.

Abstract

This is a superb study of medieval Gaelic Ulster by the foremost living authority on the subject. The author, who has retired in recent years from Trinity College Dublin, mentions that the work began with her B.A. dissertation in 1969 on ‘The O’Neills in the later middle ages’ and that this was followed by her Ph.D. thesis (T.C.D., 1976) on ‘Gaelic lordships in Ulster in the later Middle Ages’. While the book under review may be seen as a development of the latter, it represents and incorporates the fruits of several decades of further work in the field, which has resulted in a number of books and dozens of high-quality articles. More than fifty titles are listed in the bibliography (the first appearing in 1974— in Irish Historical Studies — and the last described as ‘forthcoming’). The book distils material from an astonishingly wide range of sources. The aforementioned bibliography, running to more than forty pages, lists over a thousand separate items. This reflects just how widely and deeply the author has ranged through the body of relevant scholarship, citing works by almost five hundred authors — about three-quarters of whom have been active during her lifetime (quite a large cohort are, happily, still alive and active). The contributions of those authors are cited and suitably acknowledged in more than two thousand meticulously detailed footnotes. It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the work of Katharine Simms that the book is wonderfully readable, as well as being mercifully free from any kind of petty point-scoring. The work is laid out with admirable logic and clarity, being divided into two sections of almost equal length. The first (pp 21–229), entitled ‘Political history’, has a brief ‘Introduction’, followed by six chapters, while the second (pp 233–494), entitled ‘Culture and society’, has seven chapters, followed by a brief fourteenth chapter, the ‘Epilogue’. All but that final chapter are subdivided, with from two to eight sub-headed segments per chapter. Each chapter may be read as an essay in its own right, but all fit neatly together to give the work an admirable overall coherence. The introduction explains the reason why a ‘focus on Ulster’ is called for and then discusses aspects of the supposedly archaic nature of early Gaelic society, including the topics of kingship, law and the learned classes. Chapter 1 treats of early Ulster, from the Iron Age down to the high middle ages, covering the best part of a millennium in just over thirty pages, while chapter 2 covers the eleventh and twelfth centuries in about fourteen pages. This latter chapter’s title refers to ‘Ulster’s growing isolation’, echoing a statement (perhaps debatable) that ‘Ulster was becoming a backwater’ (p. 70) and a suggestion that ‘The expulsion of nascent Viking settlements in Ulster ... in the late ninth century may have been [a] factor contributing to Ulster’s growing isolation’ (p. 82). The author continues: