2007 was an annus mirabilis for the publication of studies of the seventeenth-century Church of Ireland. Alan Ford produced his important volume on Archbishop Ussher; Jack Cunningham a book on the theology and politics of Ussher and John Bramhall; and John McCafferty the present work on Bramhall and the Laudian reconstruction of the Irish Church. McCafferty's text is the most closely-focused of the three chronologically, and represents the full documentation of arguments for the importance of the Church of Ireland in the 1630s that he has advanced in print during the last decade. Its central theme is that the structural and ecclesiological changes that John Bramhall, bishop of Derry from 1634, sought to introduce into the Church of Ireland, were not only backed by his patron Archbishop Laud, but were a laboratory for the similar reforms that Laud wished to initiate in the English Church. The reform of the Church of Ireland was intended to produce ‘an English Reformation’. This was not only intended to erase differences between the established Church in the two kingdoms, it was designed to test the possibilities offered by deep political collaboration between Church and State in an environment less constrained by powerful opposition than that of England. Without the committed support of the earl of Strafford as Lord Deputy Bramhall's work would have been impossible. With it, he was able to initiate a relatively impressive resumption campaign, tackling the fundamental poverty of the Church of Ireland by seeking to retrieve its property from lay hands. He also contributed to the Irish canons of 1635: these largely brought Ireland into line with the English canons of 1604, but they included support for aspects of Laudian policy, on the eucharist, on altars and on confession. Above all they provided a firm basis for episcopal action that Laud himself lacked in England in the absence of convocation. The years immediately after 1635 showed Bramhall and his colleagues implementing the canons with enthusiasm and some success. But in the end all this was blown away by the crisis of the three kingdoms: Bramhall's patrons were executed; he himself was imprisoned and fortunate to escape death. McCafferty's analysis of the Irish Reformation is compelling, and the research underpinning it is impressive especially given the deficient state of the Irish ecclesiastical archives. Does he prove his argument that Ireland was Laud's laboratory? He certainly shows that there was a desire by Strafford and Laud to make it so: to see this as the beginning of a fundamental change for the Church in all three kingdoms. But in Bramhall's daily struggles to improve the fortunes of a minority Church, it was Ireland that always appeared at the heart of his concerns.