It is a fascinating argument, but it provokes an immediate question. If political dependency and economic depression make for Enlightenment, why was there no Irish Enlightenment? For in respect of both politics and the economy, Ireland’s position at the end of the 17th and throughout the 18th century was much worse than Scotland’s, at least in the eyes of the Irish, as Swift’s anti-Union tract, The Story of the Injured Lady (1707), makes plain. Why had Enlightenment energies flourished so remarkably in Edinburgh and Naples, but not in Dublin?

Michael Brown’s lavish new survey of enlightened impulses and writings in Ireland between the the War of the Two Kings (1688-91) and the United Irish Rising (1798) does not respond explicitly to the vacancy mutely indicated by Robertson’s argument.  But he does engage head-on with the easy assumption that the Enlightenment somehow remained becalmed at Holyhead. Masterfully guided by Brown, whose comprehensive gaze embraces books both canonical and obscure, texts written in Gaelic as well as those written in English, works written by women and men, and writings emerging from all fractions of society, we are led to see traces of Enlightenment in the most unlikely places. This is exemplary history. It both reformulates an important problem, and draws swathes of new material into the scholarly conversation.

Brown’s argument falls into three broad chronological sections, each devoted to a different aspect of the Irish Enlightenment as he sees it. He begins by describing a “Religious Enlightenment”, in which he analyses how each of the three confessions between which the Irish population was divided — Catholic, Anglican, and Presbyterian — availed themselves of different intellectual resources created or galvanised by the Enlightenment. Each confession seems to have been drawn towards a particular mode of Enlightenment thinking. For the Presbyterians, rationalism allowed them to “rethink their condition in the early decades of the 18th century”: for them, the key problem was how to secure toleration within an Anglican state. For the dominant Anglicans of the Church of Ireland, empiricism seemed to offer the most direct route to their objective, which was to retain confessional supremacy by mounting an argument for the continuing vitality of the current church-state settlement. For the Catholics — by far the most numerous religious group, but still in large measure dispossessed of their ancient lands, and labouring under various forms of legal and political discrimination — the key problem was how to restate and restore their intellectual legitimacy in the wake of the dynastic failure of the Stuarts and the devastating defeats of the Boyne and Aughrim. They turned to a revived and refreshed Scholasticism to make a case for “the continuing pertinence of traditional doctrine and worship”.