Accounts of 'souperism' - the alleged use of food to induce Irish Catholics to convert to Protestantism - have long featured in the popular memory of the Great Famine (1845-50). Scholars have cast a more critical eye over the phenomenon and its origins in the 'Second Reformation' of the 1820s and the 'Bible War' that followed in the 1830s and 40s. In Converting Ireland , Karina Bénazech Wendling makes an important contribution to that literature through her focus on the first body against which the term 'souper' was popularised in 1841 - the Irish Society for Promoting the Education of the Native Irish through the Medium of their Own Language. Formed in Dublin in 1818, it remained an independent body in Ireland until its merger with the Irish Church Mission in 1853. The book makes a persuasive case that the Irish Society was a complex religious, cultural and political phenomenon that deserves to be re-evaluated rather than reductively dismissed as a tool of British cultural imperialism or sectarian anti-Catholicism. Beyond converting Ireland, its founders took a serious interest in the Irish language and the Irish Bible. And so did their pupils as many converted in the West. The volume explores the links between the campaigns of 'ostracism', the establishment of 'refuge-colonies' for converts, and the deployment of Catholic counter-missions with the support of nationalist leaders and of Paul Cullen.

Converting Ireland has much to offer the scholar not only of Ireland's fraught religious and educational history, but of the global history of missions and interdenominational relations.