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 volume explores the multiple forms and functions of reading and writing in nineteenth-century Ireland. It traces how understandings of literacy and language shaped national and transnational discourses of cultural identity, and the different reading communities produced by questions of language, religion, status, education and audience.

Examination of literacy and reading habits in nineteenth-century Ireland and implications for an emerging cultural nationalism.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1862.