The success of the Irish Counter-Reformation was a crucial development in the history of the island and subsequently a vital component in the troubled relationship between Ireland and Britain. For centuries the politics of the archipelago have been affected by conflicts whose deepest roots are located in the religious changes of the seventeenth century. This book offers a scholarly and dramatic reappraisal of a central episode in the extension of Catholic reform to the island, the papal nunciature of GianBattista Rinuccini. Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin situates Rinuccini's mission in its wider European context, and provides an entirely new perspective, not only on the man at the heart of events during the turbulent 1640s, but also on the seventeenth-century penetration of Catholic reform into Ireland and on the Irish theatre of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.