Alan Ford, James Ussher: Theology, History and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 315, hb. £55.00, ISBN: 9780199274444James Ussher (1581-1656) was, as Alan Ford has shown, a man 'delicately poised', between Ireland and England, between loyalty to his king and defence of the godly cause, and between academic scholarship and public proselytizing. And Ussher was well cut out for such a role, for he was a moderate, tactful man, influential Archbishop, and world-class scholar. In this new study of Ussher, Ford explains how history, theology and politics interacted in the career and the thought of the Irish Primate, within the broader context of early seventeenth-century British history. It comes at a good time for students of early modern Ireland; it complements well John MacCafferty's recent The Reconstruction of the Church of Ireland (2007) on Bishop John Bramhall and the other side, as it were, of Irish church politics in the 1630s. Yet Ford's work is in no way limited to the Irish scene and sheds much light, not only on Ussher himself but on the Irish and English world in which the hero lived.Ford begins by sketching the state of Irish Protestantism in Ussher's youth, where the dominant theology was Calvinist. Like its theology, the personnel of the Church of Ireland were largely imported, with most of the Irish clergy migrating from England. With the foundation of Trinity College in 1591, it became possible for the Irish church to set about producing her own clergy and establishing her own intellectual foundations and identity, and to these causes Ussher would contribute with lasting effect. The most pressing need was to defend the Church against her greatest enemy, and Ussher's scholarly writings constitute a vigorous assertion of Protestantism against the Catholic Church. This was an enterprise common to Protestants across Europe but adapted by Ussher for his Irish readers and laced with strong doses of apocalypticism. Furthermore, Ussher's scholarship served to create and then to reinforce the independent identity of the Church of Ireland, not least by providing her with a serviceable history. Ussher spent much intellectual effort showing that the earliest Irish Christians kept their distance from Rome and from any doctrine of justification by works - a proposition which was highly significant for his contemporaries. Ussher did not, of course, only operate from the within the academy. He played a leading role in drafting the Irish Articles of 1615, articles which embodied the Calvinist consensus then prevailing in both England and protestant Ireland. Once he was appointed bishop of Meath and then archbishop of Armagh he sought to defend the kind of religious vision outlined in those articles, against the growing threats of Arminianism and Laudianism. Ford shows that Ussher particularly feared the divisions between Protestants which such a new religious stance would bring in its wake, and the diversion of effort from the crusade against Catholicism. …