For several generations, Irish historians have both excused and justified their inability to answer fundamental questions appertaining to medieval and early modern Irish history by citing the destruction of so much of the country's manuscript record in the conflagration that consumed the Public Record Office in 1922. Such a response is comprehensible given the volume of testamentary matter, deeds, patents, customs and taxation papers, church and civil court, local assize, parliamentary and administrative records that were lost on that fateful occasion. However, it also places an onus on historians to identify alternative sources, and in this respect the National Library has played an important role.
Since the 1950s, the Library has been active in identifying and microfilming manuscript material of Irish relevance in foreign archives, as well as in private possession, and the mammoth guide to manuscript sources compiled under the direction of Richard Hayes is testimony to its sterling endeavour as well as to the large volume of manuscripts that have been preserved outside Ireland.
For all that, it has also been apparent for some time that the National Library's guide to manuscripts in foreign archives is by no means complete. It is significant, for example, that some of the finest scholarship on 18th-century Ireland published over the past twenty years draws on collections unknown to the National Library in the safe-keeping of regional archives in Britain and, to a lesser extent, in America. Given this fact, the production of guides to Irish manuscript material in such regional archives is a matter of some importance. This is particularly necessary with respect to the United Kingdom, where the proliferation of county and university repositories in the past half century has resulted in the wide dispersal of archival material.
Arising out of this, David Edwards and Brian C. Donovan have chosen, quite properly, to exclude the better-known major and better-catalogued national archives - the British Library, the Public Record Office, the Scottish Record Office, the National Library of Scotland and the National Library of Wales - from their survey, British Sources for Irish History 1485-1641: A Guide to Manuscripts in Local, Regional and Specialised Repositories in England, Scotland and Wales (Irish Manuscripts Commission, £25).
Stimulated to begin the investigation which has culminated in this valuable volume by their own research needs, Donovan and Edwards have produced a substantial, impressive and timely work that will become an essential reference work for all scholars of early modern Ireland. Listing material from one hundred and eleven repositories, fifty-five of which they visited, it represents the most comprehensive guide of its kind for any era in Irish history.
It is true in a number of instances that the brief paragraph of description that is provided bears closer resemblance to a commentary than an inventory, but these are few and far between. Most accounts offer a sufficiently detailed list of the holdings of Irish material to allow a firm judgment to made about its value and pertinence.
As this suggests, the individual manuscripts and manuscript collections described range greatly in size and content. As a result, so-called "loose items" are given disproportionate space compared with such large and important collections as the Cranfield (Kent Archives Office), Barrett Lennard (Essex Record Office), Talbot of Malahide (Bodleian Library, Oxford) and Fitzwilliam papers (Northamptonshire Record Of fice). This is unavoidable, and it does not detract from the usefulness or value of the work. One can only endorse the editors' suggestion that it should stimulate others to embark on similar undertakings for different jurisdictions as well as for different time periods.
James Kelly is the author of the recently published Henry Flood: Patriots and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Ireland