The editors of this volume are to be commended for compiling a collection of so many essays that are erudite and engaging. The greater part of the volume deals with English and Scottish Presbyterians in Britain and in Ireland, the lesser comprises a few essays on Catholics. Reflecting that duality, the first chapter is divided into separate sections offering overviews of the very different experiences of Catholics and of those Christians who identified with a Presbyterian ‘tendency’ or ‘tradition’ though they may not have held to all, or at all firmly to, tenets of what later came to be seen as conventional Presbyterianism (p. 2).

Polly Ha uses a recently discovered cache of manuscripts from the leading Elizabethan Presbyterian ideologue, Walter Travers, to show how he tried to adapt to English conditions by playing down comparisons with other Reformed Churches in reaction to his countrymen's xenophobia, and by being willing to conceive of a pro-monarchical Presbyterianism, with Presbyterian bishops, to assuage James i's concerns about the royal supremacy. Laura Stewart breaks new ground in her exploration of how the Scottish National Covenant of 1638 was received and interpreted by ‘the people in the parishes’. She argues cogently for a move away from thinking in terms of a ‘series of binaries’ towards an appreciation of ‘a more subtle and ambiguous range of responses’ (p. 102). Chad Van Dixhoorn uses the surviving documents of the Westminster Assembly of 1643–6 to show how the determination of English Presbyterians to promote a system of church discipline that was effectively independent of secular control was thwarted by politicians who had no wish to subject England to a new variety of ‘clerical tyranny’. Ann Hughes discusses the relationships between the English and Scottish Presbyterians in the 1640s and 1650s, showing that they were often quite close at first but grew more complex even before the English military occupation of Scotland from 1648. Robert Armstrong presents a highly sophisticated essay on Scottish and English Presbyterianism in seventeenth-century Ireland, arguably the best essay in the collection. It warns against ‘over-easy’ identifications of English, Irish and Scots with Anglican, Catholic and Presbyterian respectively, though the Scots in Ireland proved more susceptible to Presbyterianism than were the English, partly because English immigrants were disproportionately concentrated in urban centres, where the established Church was well-organised, while Presbyterianism in Ulster was much more rural in location. In Dublin, though, and in a few southern urban centres, there were varieties of Protestantism that included Presbyterianism, and Armstrong shows how some Ulster presbyteries tried to exercise some influence over their southern, mainly English, coreligionists, though the English Presbyterians ‘ultimately lacked the staying power of their Scottish counterparts’ (p. 207). John Coffey's chapter completes the volume with a suitably upbeat account of the ‘twists and turns’ and ‘divergent local trajectories’ (p. 267) by which most eighteenth-century Presbyterians across the English-speaking world came to embrace the concept of religious liberty.

The discussion of Catholicism would have been enhanced by the inclusion of a chapter that reflected the progress made over recent years in the study of the Reformation in Elizabethan Ireland. Clodagh Tait misleadingly declares that after the established Church's efforts at evangelisation and enforcing conformity ‘stalled’ by the end of the 1580s there was a ‘crucial hiatus that came to be filled by the agents of the Counter-Reformation’ (p. 68). She seems unaware of the most recent monograph on the subject, which is surprising. In fact, Elizabeth's Reformation was not like a plane that inexplicably ‘stalled’ in mid-air – it never left the ground, though it taxied fitfully along the runway. John Long, Elizabethan archbishop of Armagh and primate of all Ireland, reckoned that there were hardly forty Irish-born Protestants in 1585.

In looking at protests by Irish Catholics Tait queries the ‘extent to which religion was really at the core of such events’ (p. 69), and she argues that ‘almost universally’ they were ‘triggered and shaped to a large degree by rather more prosaic causes’ (p. 70), such as disputes about ‘cess’, food shortages or problems with English soldiers (pp. 75–6). However, her apparently random selection of five incidents over fifty-two years does not support her contentions. The rescue of the two priests in 1577 and the rescue of the friars in 1629 were triggered by their arrest: there is no evidence presented to show that the rescuers had ulterior motives as is suggested here. There is no tangible evidence presented to show that the unease of the local officials taking part in the execution of three local men for treason in 1591, nor the praying of people at the gallows, were motivated by grievances about ‘cess’ (p. 75). Again, the ‘frenzy of relic-hunting’ following the execution of Bishop Cornelius O'Devany in Dublin in 1612, and the masses and other Catholic ceremonies celebrated in his honour, do not support Tait's argument that other factors and concerns ‘contributed as much if not more to incidents of riot and protest as did religion’ (p. 83). Regarding the recusants' revolt in several Irish cities and town in 1603, recent work has shown that religious liberty was the only demand made by the citizens of all but one of them. Perhaps different incidents might have made Tait's thesis more convincing, but Natalie Zemon Davis's caution against the ‘tendency to identify the “real” elements in the disturbance as the social ones’ (cited on p. 70) seems especially apt in cases like those presented here, where there is no explicit evidence to show that a religious demonstration was inspired primarily by non-religious motives.

David Finnegan's chapter teases out the thorny question of the influence of the Irish Catholic clergy in shaping the political allegiances of Irish Catholics between 1603 and 1641, and confirms that the Irish Catholic hierarchy endorsed a motif of ‘conditional loyalty’ predicated on the British crown's toleration of Catholicism in Ireland (p. 122). Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin's chapter complements his very fine publications on the 1640s. Here he traces the evolution of the Irish Catholic hierarchy between 1600 and 1649 and adds chronological depth to his earlier work. He situates his study in the context of developments in the wider Catholic Church and thereby he not only throws new light on his subject, but reflects its significance internationally. Of the remaining essays in the book I would single out Anthony Milton's consideration of the subject of religious liberty in royalist thought in the 1640s, which shows how even the most irenic of men struggled with the idea at that time. All in all, this is a most stimulating book.