The comparison between the reformations in Scotland and Ireland has often been made, but less frequently studied. This book is welcome because it takes the common theme of the enforcement of the reformation in the two countries and sets a range of different experiences alongside each other. As happens in most edited collections emerging from conferences, whilst common points and differences can be noted, these volumes cannot provide full-scale comparisons. However, in the final chapter Greaves does encompass both countries in his discussion of the period from the Restoration to 1685. The umbrella of ‘enforcement’ covers a great diversity of topics with Gillespie managing the intriguing juxtaposition of ‘enforcing peace’ when discussing the struggle for coexistence and a measure of social harmony in seventeenth-century Ireland. Based on the other side of the North Channel, that man of peaceful instincts, Robert Leighton, who witnessed the end of a Scottish Presbyterian consensus, is revealed in a fascinating cameo by Gribben. The assumption that there had been such a consensus and the very term ‘Scottish Puritanism’ are dissected with considerable skill by Coffey in his essay on the first part of the seventeenth century. A more conventional understanding of ‘enforcement’ dominates the examinations of the policies of coercion in early Stuart Ireland; the ‘godly rule’ of the Scottish Covenanters and the post-Restoration Irish regime by Ford, Young and Barnard with Boran showing how Dublin print culture demonstrated some of the tactics employed to counter heresy. In the only essay firmly located within the sixteenth century, Brady and Murray offer an illuminating study of the way in which Lord Deputy Sidney attacked the Irish ecclesiastical hierarchy in order to gain a Protestant victory, an interesting twist to the tactic of using force to bring reformation. Taken as a whole, these individual studies do help to unravel the complexities of confessionalisation and they make some important points on the perennial tension and debate between conformity, which is relatively easy to measure, and conversion, which is not. One of the self-defeating consequences of enforcement in early modern Ireland was the help that it gave to the creation of that which it sought to repress, i.e. Catholic recusancy. This volume nicely underlines the complexities of policy-making and implementation for the early modern State and Church and is a good and fitting tribute to Professor Richard L Greaves whose scholarship ranged widely over the British Isles and the entire period under survey.