Categorising churchmen in the early seventeenth century is often problematic: the sharp dichotomies which historians usually adopt – Calvinist/Arminian, Puritan/Anglican – often prove decidedly unhelpful when reading the works of many early-modern divines, who drift irritatingly from one camp to the other. Jack Cunningham, in his study of James Ussher and John Bramhall, those two redoubtable Irish bishops and theologians, sets out to avoid such crudeness by proposing ‘a more nuanced approach … in which individuals are not forced into sometimes artificially constructed boxes, but rather they are seen as more or less attracted to two distinct theological poles’ (p. ix). He then defines these poles in terms of the two meanings of yir'ath Yahweh, or ‘the fear of the Lord’, fear as in terror at one's own sinfulness, and fear as awe and the sense of the numinous. Cunningham argues that Ussher, with his Calvinist pessimistic emphasis upon sin and justice, represents the development of the former trend, whilst Bramhall, with his more optimistic ‘Arminian’ awe at the numinous, embodies the latter. Though this represents a bold attempt to escape from the existing polarities of early-modern historiography, it is subject to one of two obvious criticisms: either it substitutes one crude dualism for another; or, if, as he hints in the introduction, theologians tend not to fit exclusively into one camp or the other, its explanatory usefulness is limited.

Leaving typology for the moment, consideration side-by-side of the careers and ideas of these two theologians is in itself a useful exercise, given their obvious significance for Irish history and their tangential but significant contribution to intellectual debate on the other side of the Irish Sea. The main body of the book, which begins with sensible summaries of the careers of Ussher and Bramhall, is followed by twin analyses of their dogmatic and sacramental theologies, their approach to ecclesiastical history, secular and ecclesiastical politics, and concludes with an examination of their ‘practical policies’. Perhaps the most useful contribution is Cunningham's discussion of Bramhall and Ussher's political theories, where he shows how their commitment to absolute monarchy and rejection of mixed government supports Johann Sommerville's arguments in favour of an English absolutist tradition. With regard to Ussher's approach to ecclesiastical government in the early 1640s, he is less sure-footed. He assumes that Ussher remained an ally of Hall and the divine-right episcopalians, rather than seeing his advocacy of reduced episcopacy as signalling a significant shift to the centre ground. The problem here may spring from accepting Abbott's contention that Ussher's Reduction was never circulated in 1641, something contradicted by contemporary accounts, and his swallowing of Bernard's post-Restoration attempt to distance Ussher from the proposal. Hence he assumes that the Ignatian references to episcopacy in the early Church support the High Church view of bishops, whereas Ignatius' stress on co-operation could just as easily be used to support a stripped down, primitive episcopacy based on sharing power between bishops and presbyters, as in Ussher's Reduction. By seeing Ussher simply as a believer in jure divino bishops he naturally narrows the distance between him and Bramhall. Again, in relation to anti-Catholicism, Cunningham seeks to play down Ussher's extremism, pointing curiously to his courting of Francis Barnaby, one of the few Catholic priests willing to take the oath of allegiance, as evidence of his pragmatism. On the other hand, Cunningham gets the relationship between Ussher, Wentworth, Bramhall and Laud spot on, rightly dismissing speculation that relations between Ussher and Laud were ‘permanently poisoned’ (p. 189), or that Ussher retained an animus against Wentworth into the early 1640s.

Overall, there is sometimes a tendency to rely upon later secondary writers, when examination of the primary sources would have greatly illuminated the discussion: thus his interpretation of the Irish Articles of 1615 is based upon the dated work of R. B. Knox, which tended to minimise the differences between the Irish and English confessions, rather than on a detailed comparison of their texts; similarly, his discussion of the events in convocation in 1634 would have benefited from exploiting the full correspondence between Wentworth and Laud in the Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments in Sheffield; and the discussion of Ussher's supposed deathbed conversion to Arminianism needs to go back to the original claims of Thomas Pierce, and why he made them. Finally, a few minor slips need to be noted: ‘Robert Lincoln’, the ‘publisher’ (p. 113) of Ussher's Power of the prince (p. 113) is of course Robert Sanderson, bishop of Lincoln; Ussher's nomination to the see of Meath is misdated (p. 159); Henry Leslie is mistaken for John Leslie (p. 173); a quotation from Henry Leslie is attributed to Ussher (p. 174). In the end, as Cunningham recognises, the twin poles of biblical justice and the numinous, just like Arminianism and Calvinism, clearly pull in opposite directions. How, then, could such sharply differing theological visions cohere within the same Church? Here his conclusion is convincing, suggesting that the key element was Ussher and Bramhall's instinctive and absolute respect for the monarch as supreme governor in civil and ecclesiastical affairs, which, particularly in times of crisis such as the 1640s, drew these unlikely partners together. Then, if not now, the royal supremacy provided the essential glue which held the disparate wings of Anglicanism together.