Through a series of innovative perspectives, this book examines how early modern Irish townspeople experienced the urban world through a range of family and associational ties.

Irish Townspeople explores how migrants, inducted through town citizenship and marriage, bonded more closely as sisters or brothers of confraternities and guilds, consolidating parish membership. Civic religion integrated with town politics and councils, while monastic charity of the friars’ hospitals preceded the era of modern municipal welfare.

In circumstances of the alienation of the long-settled Catholic townspeople from the states religious and political Reformation in the seventeenth century, they drew sustenance from the continuity of institutions such as colleges, fraternities, and hospitals, as well as forms of coexistence with Protestant fellow-citizens.