Among the many ephemeral publications printed in Dublin at the height of the Wood’s halfpence affair is the anonymously authored A Letter from the Grand Mistress of the Female Free-Masons to Mr Harding the Printer (Dublin: John Harding, 1724). This was one of many satires of the Freemasons published in the early 1720s. Its framing references to Wood’s halfpence locate it in relation to that affair, and its imaginative, if satirical, representation of a female society can be situated in relation to other accounts of fictional female clubs of the early century and to discussions of women’s exclusion from Freemasonry in particular and from club culture more generally. The pamphlet is known to survive in only one copy but despite this ephemerality, its participation in the dynamic world of relatively popular, cheap print in Dublin in the 1720s reveals much about the nature of print culture and ideas of gender in this period. The essay uses its readings and contextualizations of the pamphlet to argue that print hoaxes and gender play – common comic modes in early eighteenth-century print culture, and particularly in ephemeral pamphlets and broadsheets – permitted ideas about women’s roles and possibilities to be imaginatively explored. A transcription of the Dublin 1724 printing, with a brief discussion of the question of its authorship, follows as an appendix. *

L'exil est d'abord organisation de résistance active.' 10 Francis Taaffe followed his father, Theobald Taaffe (1603-77), to the Habsburg Empire in 1652.Theobald had fought for the Royalists against the parliamentarians in the context of the Wars of the three kingdoms (1639-53).In 1650, Charles II of England (1630-85) sent Theobald to Brussels to seek the military assistance of Charles IV of Lorraine (1604-75) on his behalf. 11Theobald was, therefore, the first of the Taaffe family to have close contacts with the Lorraine dynasty.The Stuart king described Theobald 'as good frinde where he applyes himselfe, as ever lived, which in this age, is no little virtue'. 12Taaffe's loyalty to the Stuarts enabled the family to ensure the restoration of their lands in 1661 when Charles II regained his throne and Theobald gained the title of 1st Earl of Carlingford at this time.Theobald was not the only Taaffe loyal to the Stuarts.His son, Nicholas Taaffe, 2nd Earl of Carlingford ( 1648

indication of the price of the book survives, all of these features suggest that it would have been a relatively expensive book, despite its small size.In gathering together poems by nine different authors, many of them still living, the collection can be identified as a poetry miscellany, one of more than 5,000 such