Book review: The Irish Presbyterian Mind: Conservative Theology, Evangelical Experience, and Modern Criticism, 1830–1930

Abstract

therefore, offers a welcome injection that will reinvigorate debates about Boyle. Fenlon’s account of Boyle splurging on new clothes and his subsequent obsessive fascination with his spending (pp. 158–9) offers another (entertaining) reminder of Boyle’s parsimoniousness and his desire to promote English ‘manners’ and ‘fashions’ in Ireland. Furthermore, the significance of Boyle’s life to other contexts has been highlighted. Horning’s and Edwards’s chapters on the wider colonial context offer nuanced discussions that will contribute to broader debates about colonialism in the seventeenth-century Atlantic World. As in any edited collection of essays, the quality across the chapters varies, as does the individual authors’ approach. Some chapters place greater emphasis on describing the evidence in Boyle’s archive (thereby revealing the potential of future research), while others attempt to engage more explicitly with the key debates. As a result, some of the chapters suggest that more work needs to be done, indicating the tentative nature of some of the conclusions. It is a pity that there is a lack of dedicated discussion of Boyle’s faith or his promotion of Protestantism. Nonetheless, this book highlights the richness of Boyle’s archive in the National Library of Ireland and Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. Thus, The Colonial World of Richard Boyle sets the agenda for, and suggests the potential spoils of, future research not just on Boyle but also on seventeenth-century Irish society and economy and its place in the wider Atlantic World.