This book is a splendid exposition of the nature of the early modern university in the era, highlighting the traditional role it is given in post-Renaissance, Reformation-era European society, producing graduates for both church and state. ‘The early modern university itself was a space reserved for elite formation’ (4). Traditionally, these elites across several jurisdictions were trained in a similar fashion and would duly act in accordance with their formation and largely push an agreed sense of service to the state and church. In Ireland, the university also sought to bolster the efforts at reformation, aid the process of state formation, and help ‘civilize the natives’, though by the early 1640s the term was taken by the Commons’ committee to mean anyone born in the kingdom (106). This was most likely to highlight the fact that so many of Laud’s appointees had arrived recently from England in an effort to consolidate his (and Wentworth’s) reforms and instil what his more puritan detractors might have termed Arminianism.

The fact that the University of Dublin fulfilled such a role in Ireland (both in the European sense and the colonial) is readily acknowledged, and this reflected in some ways the pre-revolutionary situation in Ireland more generally in the 1630s. Recent arrivals with a strong sense of reform and a covalent sense of the need to strengthen the state and church acted on such tendencies to bring both institutions into line with recent innovations in England. Naturally enough, reform will frequently irritate and sometimes infuriate those being reformed. In the case of the University of Dublin, Laud as chancellor and Chappell as provost played a role similar to Bramhall in the church and Wentworth in politics and the state more generally.

The attack on the so-called policies of thorough brought the attention of parliament to the university in March 1641. On receipt of many, frequently orchestrated complaints, Chappell was summoned to answer for his ‘evil Government and Practice’. By May, Chappell had been imprisoned as charges were drawn up, and whilst they were never brought to a conclusion, it was a sure sign that the university had been dragged into several decades of instability, along with those of Scotland and New England. As Cipriano points out, whilst Laud and Charles I may have been pushing for a form of uniformity across institutions to suit their religious and political agenda, so too the Cromwellians sought an equivalent uniformity to support their new regime and its ambitions (136). Although it was not an immediate impact, the Congregationalist Samuel Winter’s period at the helm of the University of Dublin created change, eventually appointing fellows with an outlook and ambition similar to his own. Joel Halcomb’s recent work on Winter’s notebook (TCD, MS 805), potentially revealing it to be that of Henry Jones (vice-chancellor of Trinity and later bishop of Meath) is as much a sign as any that mid-century university politics is as vibrant a corner of the past as any. If we accept this identification to be the case, it need not drastically change Cipriano’s central argument (published a year before Halcomb’s lecture at the Tudor Stuart Ireland conference in August 2025), but will potentially cause other scholars to continue to ponder these important concerns.

The focus of this book, taking in a relatively developed though destabilised educational sector in Scotland, along with relatively recently developed institutions in Ireland (1592) and Massachusetts (1636), works well. Despite the variances in origins and in identity, none of these institutions could avoid the storm brewing in the later 1630s that were to engulf the islands and their colonies in the following decades. As such then, this book is an Atlantic history of universities in the revolutionary period. It places the universities into the furnace of revolution and allows for a genuinely comparative study of these institutions that we might still (sometimes) usefully describe as being on the periphery of this seismic change in the north Atlantic. Whilst the trajectories of each region, its institutions and the vision of political masters were not always aligned, there is enough commonality to make the book work as such a study. The real value of this worthy study is not just that it describes how each institution navigated such choppy waters, but it understands them in the general context of the expectations those in power had for these formative and influential institutions.