Scholars have long recognized the significant role that confraternities, or lay brotherhoods, played in the religious life of medieval and early modern Catholicism. Taking a broad chronological and geographical approach, this collection of essays addresses the varied and fluid nature of confraternities and their relationship to wider society.

A fascinating investigation the lives of four priest hunters – Sean na Sagart, Edward Tyrrell, Barry Lowe and John Garzia. Ireland in the aftermath of Cromwell – during this period Catholicism and Irish nationalism became inexorably linked and priests were outlawed. The Priest Hunters shines a light on these men who hunted them. Sean naSagart was Irishman who was been condemned to death for horse stealing but was reprieved on condition he become a priest hunter. Edward Tyrrell was an English mercenary driven solely by greed. Barry Lowe indulged in such acts as tying a priest behind his horse and dragging him through the brush. John Garzia, who had fled the Spanish Inquisition, arrived in Ireland and evidently sought revenge hunting down priests. An incredible account of some of the most hated men in Ireland.

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A provocative new biography of the man who forged America's alliance with the Iroquois William Johnson was scarcely more than a boy when he left Ireland and his Gaelic, Catholic family to become a Protestant in the service of Britain's North American empire. In New York by 1738, Johnson moved to the frontiers along the Mohawk River, where he established himself as a fur trader and eventually became a landowner with vast estates; served as principal British intermediary with the Iroquois Confederacy; command British, colonial, and Iroquois forces that defeated the French in the battle of Lake George in 1755; and created the first groups of "rangers," who fought like Indians and led the way to the Patriots' victories in the Revolution. As Fintan O'Toole's superbly researched, colorfully dramatic narrative makes clear, the key to Johnson's signal effectiveness was the style in which he lived as a "white savage." Johnson had two wives, one European, one Mohawk; became fluent in Mohawk; and pioneered the use of Indians as active partners in the making of a new America. O'Toole's masterful use of the extraordinary (often hilariously misspelled) documents written by Irish, Dutch, German, French, and Native American participants in Johnson's drama enlivens the account of this heroic figure's legendary career; it also suggests why Johnson's early multiculturalism unraveled, and why the contradictions of his enterprise created a historical dead end.

When John Cantwell assumed the bishopric of Meath in 1830, he inherited grave political, social, theological, and ecclesiastical problems caused by an English State and an Irish Church. In the 1840s he also had to endure the loss of 114,000 of the faithful in the Irish Famine and the resulting chaos. How Cantwell, a pragmatist but also a skilled tactician, managed to lead his flock for those thirty- six years shows that the Church and State in Ireland were anything but temperate, cooperative or monolithic. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).