Boran, Elizabethanne, and Gribben, Crawford, Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550-1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 272 Pp., £55, ISBN 0 754,65582 2

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Boran, Elizabethanne, and Gribben, Crawford, Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550-1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 272 pp., £55, ISBN 0 754,65582 2.

Studies of the Reformation in the British Isles have moved away over recent years from the political and structural processes of religious change to become more focussed on the extent to which religious change was meaningful at a societal level and on the manner in which authorities, both secular and religious, sought to make state religions genuinely national. In this wide-ranging collection of essays, various issues are explored and case studies examine the extent to which the authorities in early modern Scotland and Ireland succeeded in their efforts to promote religious conformity, or indeed the extent to which those authorities sought religious conformity at all. The title is a little misleading as the situations in Scotland and Ireland were profoundly different from a very early stage. Notions of the ‘success’ of the Reformation in Scotland or its ‘failure’ in Ireland are not addressed directly, indeed there is an implicit rejection of their meaningfulness in the introduction. However, to understand the states’ policies towards religious nonconformity in the two kingdoms, the widespread acceptance of Protestantism in Scotland and its widespread rejection in Ireland must be acknowledged. There are various reasons for this, foremost of which is the fact that the Irish Reformation was a colonial import, perceived by many as part of an ongoing effort at conquest, while that in Scotland was an indigenous movement intertwined, in its genesis, with anti-colonial sentiment as the Scottish Reformation threw off incipient French rule as much as it rejected the Roman Church. Thus the essays on Scotland focus on the enforcement of conformity to particular forms of Protestantism, while those on Ireland tend to address ongoing attitudes towards estab- lishing Protestantism among the vast majority of the Irish population. The first essay, by Ciaran Brady and James Murray, explores the problems of enforcing the Reformation in mid-sixteenth-century Ireland. Prominent among these was the fact that, under Catholicism, the English Irish clergy had seen themselves as part of the engine of civilisation through the enforcement of proper (English) Catholicism. The vacuum of personnel left by their rejection of the Henrician and Elizabethan settlements presented the Reformation with an uphill struggle from the

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outset. Sir Henry Sidney sought to promote a moderate version of the English Reformation but, it is argued, although his policies were theo- retically sound, vested interests prevented their implementation and hopes of creating a unified Irish Protestant church were dashed. For this, and for numerous other reasons, Ireland remained predominantly Catholic and the authorities became resigned to this, as is borne out in Eliza- bethanne Boran’s chapter which demonstrates that Protestant printing in Ireland exhibited a ‘siege mentality’ with works increasingly preach- ing to the converted. Alan Ford glosses this with an examination of religious coercion between 1603 and 1633 which suggests a divergence of view between London and Dublin, with the former increasingly favour- ing de facto toleration, while the authorities in Ireland were more enthu- siastic about enforcement of penal laws, some to raise revenue through fines, others for genuinely confessional reasons. Religious coercion in Scotland took a different form. John Coffey’s fascinating essay on ‘Scottish Puritanism’, as well as reflecting on recent writings on the subject, explores how dissent within Scottish Protestantism emerged after litur- gical reforms in 1618, leading to ‘bitter polarization’ as a result of attempts to enforce conformity. By the 1640s, however, the boot was on the other foot. John Young shows how the reign of the Covenanters saw the passage of a range of ‘godly’ legislation in Scotland’s revolu- tionary parliament, culminating in the brief rule of the radical ‘Kirk Party’ in 1648-50 which sought to enforce biblical truth through statute. Crawford Gribben’s chapter on the teaching of theology in Scotland and the breakdown of a ‘presbyterian consensus’ does not seem to fit with the book’s title so easily. However, its focus on the failure of the post-Covenanting Scottish church to achieve unity points towards the difficulties of maintaining a Reformation. It also seems to endorse David Mullan’s view that the transference of covenant theology from the idea of an individual covenant with God to a national and even multi-national covenant which sought a monolothic church was divisive because it was antithetical to the Calvinist theology whence it came. The chapters by Raymond Gillespie and Toby Barnard return us to Ireland, presenting what can only be called a story of Protestant failure. Barnard shows how the turbulence of the mid-century wars caused Irish Protestantism to become irrevocably fragmented. The Church of Ireland could not even aspire to winning over the mass of the populace and the authorities were as focused on Protestant dissent as Catholicism. As a result, Protestant solidarity did not develop. Gillespie’s examination of how things operated at a local level before 1641 at least, suggests that sectarian