This is a fine edition of a text used by many previous scholars but only available hitherto to those willing to visit the Gamble Library of Union Theological College. Belfast. Originally comprising 254 pages of manuscript, it has lost pp. 2–11 and 186–227 over time, and thus the minutes of 20 per cent of the meetings held between July 1654 and May 1658. It is the earliest Presbyterian record from Ireland and (as the admirable forty-three-page introduction makes clear) it is important as testimony to the pragmatism and energy of a disestablished Church in a profoundly difficult situation. Some of the material is familiar in kind to that in any sessions book of the Kirk – the dispiriting accounts of sexual incontinence and induced repentance, the more heartening accounts of the training and testing of ministers – and some of it is strikingly unusual, above all the strenuous efforts of the ministers of Antrim to prevent the enervating schisms within the Scottish Church (Remonstrants and Resolutioners) from infecting their struggle for gospel values – they had quite enough enemies without fighting one another. The edition is clean and clear with minimal footnoting but with the marginalia in the original reproduced here as marginalia. Sweetnam offers a digest of all previous work on this source, and adds his own persuasive gloss. It can be recommended.