Siege was the defining experience of the grindingly brutal and consequential Irish Wars of Religion (1641- 53). Civilians were more likely to encounter siege warfare as participants and as victims than any other kind of military action. P? draig Lenihan, an acknowledged expert on the period, conveys this experience by examining survivor testimony contained in the 1641 Depositions, the largest and most diverse body of direct and vivid accounts of the civilian exposure to war in the early modern period. Giving equal weight to the ' sharp end' of warfare and to ' war and society' issues such as recruitment, logistics and strategy, the author borrows and adapts methodologies from social and cultural history in order to understand how societies experience conflict and give meaning to it. These were religious wars and if all sides thought they glimpsed Heaven in the sky above them, they' d all spent time in Hell.