This book is a product of a symposium on sectarianism in early modern Ireland, held in University College Dublin in April 1998. Organising such an event is dependent upon two things: gaining sufficient financial support to gather everyone together; and securing participants who can contribute creatively both in formal presentations and the informal discussions which are such an essential part of these meetings. We have been fortunate in both respects. We are grateful for the support provided by the Arts Faculty and the School of History in University College Dublin, without which neither the symposium nor the book would have been possible. But we would also like to thank our contributors, who, in the course of the two days, worked significantly towards expanding and, in our cases, revising, the way in which we envisioned sectarianism.

The process of transforming these insights into a book was, inevitably, a longer one than we had perhaps originally envisaged. But the final product has been considerably enriched by the advice and encouragement of Bill Davies and Michael Watson at Cambridge University Press, and of Professor John Morrill, that universal factotum of early modern British and Irish history.