This fascinating and innovative study explores the lives of people living in early modern Ireland through the books and printed ephemera which they bought, borrowed or stole from others. While the importance of books and printing in influencing the outlook of early modern people is well known, recent years have seen significant changes in our understanding of how writing and print shaped lives, and was in turn shaped by those who appropriated the written word.
This book draws on this literature to shed light on the changes that took place in this unusual European society. The author finds that there, almost uniquely in Europe, a set of revolutions took place which transformed the lives of the Irish in unexpected ways, and that the rise of writing and the spread of print were central to an understanding of those changes which have previously only been understood to have been the result of conquest and colonisation.
This is a book which will be read not only by those interested in the Irish past but by all those who are concerned with the impact of communications media on social change.

Preface
Note on text
Abbreviations
1. The social meaning of print
Part one
2. The context of print: the growth of a written culture
3. The coming of the book, 1500-1650
4. The triumph of print, 1650-1700
Part two
5. Seading for salvation
6. Reading for power
7. Reading for profit and pleasure
Appendix

Raymond Gillespie is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at National University of Ireland, Maynooth