James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, was a towering figure among European intellectuals in his own time, so that it is appropriate that this modern edition of his extensive correspondence, which stretches over more than half a century, has been published on a monumental scale. These three handsome volumes are the work of many years of patient scholarship and oversight by the editor, Elizabethanne Boran, aided by a team of translators. She has earned our respect and gratitude and the status of this work as the definitive edition of Ussher's correspondence is assured. The volumes are prefaced by a brief eighteen-page introduction which sets out the scope and editorial methods, but offers no real analysis of the content. There then follow 680 letters, both in-coming and outgoing, with translations of all letters and phrases in foreign languages, chiefly Latin, but also inter alia Arabic, Greek and Hebrew and German. Volume iii has four appendices, notably one on undated and fragmentary letters and another with biographical notes on seventeen of Ussher's principal correspondents. Volume i lists all 680 letters in chronological order, while volumes ii and iii list the correspondence which falls within each; there is also continuous pagination across all three volumes (1,189 pages, with the indices paginated separately). Very usefully, the complete index is reproduced in each volume, arranged under the four headings of person, place, subject and published works. Although this is the first scholarly and annotated edition, much of Ussher's correspondence has long been in print. 267 letters, edited by Richard Parr, Ussher's chaplain, in 1686, were reprinted with additional letters by Charles Elrington in volumes xv–xvi of Ussher's Works (1847–64), to which Boran has added another 213 letters. Many of these are from Ussher himself, which goes some way to balance the dominance of in-coming correspondence in Elrington's edition. Parr, unfortunately, destroyed the letters that he had gathered once they were committed to print, and his dating of letters is often suspect. Boran corrects several (nos 372, 375, 448); two more are no. 119, dated 16 April 1622, but must be a year later since it refers to ‘the Prince's entertainment in Spain’ and no. 131, which talks of parliamentary business including the impeachment of Lord Treasurer Cranfield, so its date should be April 1624 not April 1623. Whenever possible, the editor has checked the originals against Elrington, and noted in the footnotes any discrepancies and deletions, though just occasionally, Elrington's errors in transcription and dating have slipped through the net. A letter of 14 August 1624 (no. 150) states darkly that ‘Gondemar is placed twice a day in the bank side’, and ‘what the end of this place is … I knowe not’. This should read ‘plaied’ and ‘plaie’ (Bodleian Library, Oxford, Rawlinson Letters 89, fo. 42r). This makes all plain, and a footnote might have explained that this referred to the sensation of the season, the anti-Spanish satire A game at chess by Thomas Middleton, performed at the Globe on an unprecedented nine-day run until its suppression after complaints from Gondemar's successor as Spanish ambassador. Letter no. 439, assigned by Elrington to December 1637, should be redated to December 1639, since it refers to the decision to call the Short Parliament. The footnotes are invaluable in identifying people, books and manuscripts, although the immense scale of the enterprise meant that the commentary, perforce, has had to be selective. This can come at a cost: to give just two examples, not all readers will pick up the reference in a letter of March 1622 (p. 244) to Archbishop Abbot's ‘mischance’ (namely, his killing of a gamekeeper the previous year), nor may recognise the news from Cambridge in about 1651 that ‘we expect every day, the setting up of the Lambeth Books in the Schools’ (p. 1018), namely, Lambeth Palace Library, shipped off to the university by Parliament in (rough) accordance with the will of its founder, Archbishop Bancroft, and not returned until after 1663. Inevitably, in a work of this magnitude, there are some slips and misidentifications: no. 407, dated here as ‘c.1635’ is actually the draft of no. 315, Charles i’s instructions to Ussher of 1630; the author of ‘the coal from the Altar’ mentioned in 1637 (p. 725) is Peter Heylyn not Samuel Ward; and a letter of 1640 from Laud refers not to the ‘duke’ but to the ‘dean’ (namely John Williams) of Westminster (p. 825). The letters themselves are dominated by Ussher the scholar, his search for books, the pursuit of manuscript references, debates over points of theology and biblical scholarship, and the circulation of his own publications, all the while as Ussher prized his active membership of the republic of letters in which he became increasingly known and revered. Initially, Ussher's correspondents were primarily British and Irish, and it was not until the 1630s that he acquired a circle of European correspondents, at Leiden, Basel, Geneva, Paris, Copenhagen, Saumur and elsewhere, which continued to expand until his death. There is much less here on his role as Lord Primate of Ireland after 1625, although it is clear that the arrival of Laud as Charles i’s principal adviser over the British Churches goaded Ussher, like many others, into more vigorous oversight of the Church. From the early 1640s, with the collapse of the Church of England, Ussher devoted himself, with few interruptions, to his scholarship. More than a hundred letters survive for the last decade of his life, that hitherto obscure period that even his most recent biographer, Alan Ford, has passed over quickly. It is regrettable that we learn little from the letters about Ussher the family man: there is just one familial letter (no. 638) to his daughter Elizabeth, and none to his wife, Phoebe Challoner (1584–1654), who remains firmly in the shadows. Correspondents sometimes closed with their ‘love and service’ (p. 262) to Mrs Ussher; one went further, mentioning her ‘inward vertues’ (p. 263n.), and another sent her an enclosure, now lost (p. 968). The only real glimpse of Phoebe is Ussher's remark in a letter of 1636 that a recent illness had forced him to retire to his private rooms and leave his wife ‘to keepe the publick Table, and to entertayne strangers’ at their residence at Drogheda (p. 682, omitted from the index). Throughout, the letters contain unexpected gems: for example, Ussher's request in October 1611 for a Bible of the new translation (p. 77) is probably the earliest references we have to the publication of the King James Bible, although it had yet to appear in the octavo format that Ussher desired. In short, this is an edition of heroic proportions and is to be warmly welcomed.