Ireland Encastellated, AD 950-1550: insular castle-building in its European context

Ireland has been very well served in recent years by modern scholarship on her medieval castellated landscape. This book by O’Keeffe takes this research much further, especially in the way he rightly sets the castles within their greater European context. Not only does he support this hypothesis generally with both archaeological and documentary evidence, but he does this in such a logical manner that it is hard to counter his views. In many ways the most revolutionary ideas by O’Keeffe are to be found in Chapter 5, where he logically analyses this wider European context for Irish castles in the later Middle Ages. Then, at the end of his book, he very usefully suggests where castle s