Crowley brings together, for the first time, Irish debates around language from the date of the first legislation against the Irish, the Statute of Kilkenny, 1366, to the constitution of the Free State in 1922. The book is divided into six historical sections, including: Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland, Brooke's Reliques of Irish Poetry, Hyde's The Necessity of De-Anglicising Ireland, Gaelic League Pamphlets and essays and letters by Yeats and Synge. Also included are some less familiar materials: the Preface to the New Testament in Irish (1602), Introductions to the first Irish-English and English-Irish Dictionaries, MacCruitin's Vindication of the Antiquity of Ireland, Vallencey's essay on the links between Irish and the language of the North American Algonquin and the attitudes towards Irish of Grattan, Flood, O'Connell and Pearse