This book explores a new way of looking at the reformation in Ireland. Traditionally Irish historians have described early modern religious change on a national basis, from a confessional perspective and have been concerned with short term ' success' or ' failure' . Using St Nicholas's collegiate church in Galway as a paradigm this book approaches the problem from a local perspective, encompassing both the Protestant and Catholic reformations as they were played out in that church. In doing so it reveals religious change not as a something to be measured in the short term but as something that slowly evolved over two centuries, changing not only buildings but hearts and minds also. This is a recreation of the social history of both a building and the communities that used it from the medieval world to the recognisably modern one.