A Matter of Life and Death: A Note on a Religious Book Club in Fethard, County Tipperary, in 1835

Evidence for the existence of book clubs in nineteenth-century Ireland (other than in Ulster) is rare, and even rarer is documentation of their members and the titles of the books they read. The discovery (made by Peter Hoare in the library of Hatfield House) of the rules and circulation list of the Fethard Book Society in County Tipperary is notable because it provides details of a religious book club run for Anglo-Irish Protestants who lived in what emerges as a dangerous area of a countryside dominated by Roman Catholic adversaries.