William Molyneux's The Case of Ireland’s Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated
Patrick Hyde Kelly, editor
'Molyneux's Case of Ireland (1698) is not only a fundamental text for Irish history, but also cast its influence upon the founders of the United States ...Patrick Hyde Kelly is a consummate textual editor ... Now he has produced the first critical edition of The Case, collating the extant versions ... the pages are clear and attractive. Kelly has been blessed with a skilled typesetter and a tolerant publisher ... The edition comes with a checklist of later editions; an index of statutes cited; a list of pamphlets in the woollen export controversy; and the text of Issac Newton's unpublished reflections on The Case', Mark Goldie, Irish Legal History Society (2018).
'William Molyneux's The Case of Ireland's Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated (Dublin, 1698) is one of the best-known pamphlets produced in Ireland during the long eighteenth century. While very familiar to students of Irish constitutional, legal and parliamentary history and to those interested in Lockean ideas of sovereignty and legislative independence within a wider British Atlantic world con-text, it has long lacked a comprehensive scholarly edition. Patrick Kelly's much-anticipated new edition more than fills this lacuna, providing both an extremely valuable, readily access-ible and authoritative edition of Molyneux's text as well as what will likely be the definitive scholarly study of the pamphlet ... preserving the integrity of an original seventeenth-century text both in terms of pagination and marginalia in a modern edition presents particular challenges but these have been brilliantly risen to by both the author and especially his publishers at Four Courts Press who have done an exemplary job in laying out the text so as to preserve the look of the 1698 edition while still allowing modern textual footnotes ... The inclusion of appendices containing amongst other things a list of the other pamphlets written during the Irish woollens controversy, once again emphasising the essential context of The case, is likewise to be commended, while there is also a very valuable index of the statues mentioned in the text alongside a comprehensive bibliography and general index. This volume deserves a wide readership both because of the strength of the critical apparatus and the contextual introduction, and the quality of the critical text of a crucial contribution to Irish political and constitutional thought.' Patrick Walsh, Irish Historical Studies, vol 43 (2019).
'William Molyneux's The Case of Ireland's Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated (Dublin, 1698) has strong reasons to be regarded as the most important political pamphlet published in Ireland before the Ac of Union between England and Ireland of 1801 ... [this volume] represents a new critical edition with corrections (and notation) of any errors in the 1698 text, and designed not only for specialists interested in the evolution of the work but also for general readers ... [Patrick Kelly] is particularly well qualified to produce this splendid edition, on which he has laboured for some decades ... It is a spectacular achievement, and it is hard to imagine that any future edition could surpass it.' Jacqueline Hill, The Cambridge Law Journal, vol 78 (2019).
