on his journey through life: ‘...[a man] imagining the seas and wind to be the crosses and thwarts of this world, the Ship his body and the passenger his Soul, he would with more patience endure the miseries of this transitory life and not strive against the stream of God’s punishments ... many are the troubles of just men but God shall deliver them from all their afflictions’ (pp 214–15). Henry Piers would have been well aware that there was no possibility that his account of his journey to the centre of the Roman Catholic world could be published in Ireland. It can be presumed that he wrote his memoir for private circulation, in manuscript form, among a select circle of family and friends. He may have entertained the idea that others in his social circle might follow in his footsteps, literally as well as spiritually. He was certainly keen to convey practical information about the journey. He included an appendix, detailing distances travelled on each stage of the overland route from Ireland to Rome, that must have been designed as a useful guide to others planning a similar journey, or at least to provide an overview of the scale of the undertaking. There is scant mention of his wife and family and Henry Piers does not discuss what happened when he returned home. He evidently resumed his former married life with Mary Jones and the couple eventually had eight children in all. He persisted with his Catholicism and endured the stresses of his father-in-law’s insistence on rearing the children as members of the Church of Ireland. He put pen to paper about his journey to Rome within that context of family relationships strained by differences of religious allegiance. If the narrative was written with some of his immediate family circle in mind as readers, these would presumably have included his sister Mary, who had married the Catholic Thomas Jans in the late 1580s. Thomas Jans has been identified as one of those who helped set Henry on the path to Rome. Among those others who very probably read the account of his continental travels was Sir Richard Nugent (d.1642), of a neighbouring Catholic family in Westmeath. On his travels, Henry was excited when he passed a building called Castle Nugent north of Florence, simply because it reminded him of his friends in the Nugent family, and particularly of Sir Christopher Nugent (d.1602). Sir Christopher’s son, Richard, first earl of Westmeath, undertook a pilgrimage to Loreto towards the end of his life, and it seems plausible that Henry Piers’s account of that place could have shaped his desire to embark on Studies • volume 109 • number 435 356 Autumn 2020: Book Reviews such a journey. Another in his social circle who encountered the manuscript (and eventually owned it) was the antiquary Sir James Ware (d.1666), whose sister Martha was daughter-in-law to Henry Piers (p.46, note). Their common Yorkshire parentage may have created a bond between the Piers and Ware families. Brian Mac Cuarta’s exemplary edition of Henry Piers’s memoir includes a great deal of background biographical and other contextual detail. He has traced documentary sources concerning Henry’s parents, foster parents, wife and in-laws, sister and her husband, as well as some of his wider recusant networks in Ireland and England. The attention to detail in identifying people and places mentioned in the text is meticulous and must have required considerable research. In these days when crowd-sourcing of transcriptions of digitised historical documents is becoming academically acceptable in some archival and cultural institutions, it is a pleasure to have a reliable scholarly edition of an early modern text, in which the editorial apparatus adds significantly to the value of the text transcribed. The expertise of the editor of this volume allows the reader enter into that complex early modern world, gently guided by one who knows how to shine a light on the darker corners encountered along the way. Bernadette Cunningham’s latest book, Medieval Irish Pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela (Four Courts Press), was published in 2018. Martin Walsh, Richard Devane SJ. Social Commentator...