Barry Aron Vann . In Search of Ulster‐Scots Land: The Birth and Geotheological Imagings of a Transatlantic People, 1603–1703 . Columbia : University of South Carolina Press . 2008 . Pp. ix, 252. $39.95.

Abstract

What the Mediterranean Sea was for Fernand Braudel and the Atlantic Ocean has been for a host of contemporary scholars, the north Irish Sea is for Barry Aron Vann. In the early modern world, bodies of water provided the most effective means of moving people, ideas, and institutions throughout large areas and defining the cultural space of distinct and important regions. Vann's Ulster-Scots Land emerged in the seventeenth century as Scots Calvinists moved readily throughout southwestern Scotland and eastern Ulster. In the process, Puritan divines created among themselves and their congregants an imagined community of shared beliefs, rituals, and enemies. The plantation of Ulster in the early seventeenth century first engaged Scottish landlords and their dependents in colonizing Ireland for the interest of English security during a series of European struggles between Protestant and Catholic powers. But it was the politics of religious conflict in the 1630s, the English Civil Wars, and the Stuart Restoration that welded leaders of the Scottish Kirk into a community embracing the northern borders of the Irish Sea. Imbued with the fervor of Knoxian Calvinism, English Puritanism, the Scottish Confession of Faith, the National Covenant, an Old Testament sense of the Scots as God's chosen people, and a vision of Ireland as a New Canaan, Presbyterian ministers crossed and recrossed this sea in the service of salvation and sacred destiny. The result was not only the creation of an “Irish Sea culture area” (p. 11) but also the forging of the Ulster Scots as a providential people. Vann's familiarity with the sources for Presbyterian theology, the history of the Kirk, and the culture of Puritanism make for a strong argument about the historical integrity and regional coherence of an Ulster-Scots Land and an identity for Ulster Scots more closely associated with the “geotheological imagings” of this land than with any sense of Scottish, Irish, English, or British nationhood.