Maynooth's twin identities — medieval FitzGerald power base and Catholic seminary — point toward different shelves. The castle and the earls lead into the turbulent late medieval period; the college leads into the long 19th-century story of Irish Catholicism and its grip on the nation.
The Twilight Lords by Richard Berleth (1978) is the best popular account of the FitzGerald dynasty's fall — the treachery, the sieges, the executions. Berleth writes it as narrative history and it is compulsively readable. Maynooth Castle is at the centre of the story.
Goodbye to Catholic Ireland by Mary Kenny (1997) traces the rise and fall of Catholic Ireland from the seminary system's dominance through to the scandals of the 1990s. St Patrick's College Maynooth trained the priests who shaped Irish society for 200 years; Kenny's book is the best account of what that society actually looked like from the inside.
Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897) has a Maynooth connection that is indirect but real — Stoker's uncle was connected to the area, and the landscape of rural Kildare contributed to Stoker's gothic imagination. The novel repays re-reading against the background of the seminary's looming architecture.
The Year of the French by Thomas Flanagan (1979) is a novel set during the 1798 Rebellion, when French troops landed in Connacht and the county of Kildare rose in the same uprising. It captures the fractured, complicated Ireland of that period — the world in which Maynooth College was founded — better than any history book.