Lacking the ‘requisite documentation’ for an analysis à l'Anglaise (p. 15), James Murray presents an over-arching thesis: that Dublin's clerical élites were committed to a ‘Laudabiliter-inspired and intrinsically English version of Catholicism’ that was ‘decisive in shaping the overall response of the Englishry to the Tudors’ religious innovations during the sixteenth century' (pp. 48–9). Laudabiliter was the papal bull that granted Ireland to the English crown. According to Murray, Dublin's clerical élites opposed the reformations because the royal supremacy threatened their ‘historic role in Ireland: the reformation of Gaelic Irish society along conventional canonical lines’ (pp. 56, 80). Central to his thesis is an exaggerated dichotomy between the Church in the Pale and beyond. Murray writes of the ‘aberrant and uncanonical behaviour of the Irishry’, ‘a society where sexual expression was uninhibited’ and the clergy were ‘sexually active’ (pp. 35–6). Yet that characterisation is not based on evidence garnered from the extensive Irishry that made up two-thirds of the Dublin diocese (p. 27); there isn't any apparently. Murray is convincing when highlighting evidence of the colonial outlook of Dublin's clerical élites. However, despite much discussion, he does not present hard evidence to prove the existence of a Laudabiliter-inspired ‘reforming, canonical mission’ (pp. 57–8). No record exists with an explicit articulation of that sense of mission. The closest to such an enunciation presented is a phrase in a will of 1505 in which Dean Aleyn of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, restricted entry to his almshouse to ‘faithful Catholics … of the English nation’. It is a chimera. Repeated assertions about the English-Irish ‘canonical mission’ are no substitute for evidence, and without hard evidence Murray's thesis about the failure of the reformations is unconvincing. Murray sees the mid-Tudor period as crucial in that failure. He asserts that Archbishop Dowdall of Armagh was the architect of Catholic restoration in Dublin in Mary's reign (chapter vi). However, there is no hard evidence that demonstrates that Dowdall had a ‘programme’ for Dublin. There is no evidence that he instigated the papal bull that erected Ireland as a kingdom (indeed, one of Cardinal Pole's associates testified that it was at Mary's initiative), nor evidence to indicate that he instigated the restoration of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, nor that Mary appointed Hugh Curwen as the archbishop of Dublin with the ‘express purpose’ of implementing Dowdall's programme. Murray discusses a ‘genuine debate’ among the Pale clergy about how to react to the Elizabethan Reformation, but admits that there is no documentary record of such a debate (pp. 254–5). He asserts that Archbishop Curwen subverted the Elizabethan settlement ‘from day one’ (p. 257), but his evidence for Curwen's conservatism consists only of oblique references: to the ringing of the bells of Christ Church for the ‘mind’ of a former precentor and the erection of wayside crosses by a priest in Templogue (p. 258). He associates Curwen with two amendments to bills in the 1560 reformation parliament (one of which was not an amendment), while admitting that there is no evidence for doing so (p. 257). In fact, Curwen conformed fully to the Elizabethan Reformation, and was more than happy to be translated to Oxford as its bishop in 1567. Murray's final chapter, dealing with Archbishop Loftus, the most important prelate in the Elizabethan Church of Ireland, is the best in the book. It is soundly based on a rich vein of documentation, shows how he struggled to impose religious change and marks a major advance in knowledge and understanding of the Elizabethan Reformation in Ireland. There is much in this book to stimulate debate. The problem is that it is not always clear whether its assertions are sound deductions based on documentary evidence, or intuitive conjectures.